Bare nogle cool musikere der roser Bowie-sange

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JAMES MURPHY (LCD Soundsystem): Where I grew up, it was a small town. I always played music. I don’t remember not playing music or writing songs since I was four or five. My older brothers and sisters were 10 years older than me so I listened to a lot of classic rock. My first records were “Alone Again Naturally” by Gilbert O Sullivan and “Fame” by David Bowie.
People say that “New York I Love You” [from LCD’s Sound Of Silver album] sounds like Bowie’s production on Transformer. But are we really in a time where the problem is that there are too many bands that sound like Transformer? How is this a problem?! I WISH we had the kind of problem!
“The Bewley Brothers” is just so beautiful and sad. It really uses his voice. It’s one of those songs that would be a very hard cover. Maybe that’s why I like it most. His best songs are just so wonderfully coverable, because they’re such good songs. But “The Bewley Brothers”? So sad, and it really uses his voice in a really cheesy, borderline hack-Broadway kind of way. But it’s so good!

MARC ALMOND: There are so many Bowie songs of the late ’60s and early ’70s that represent so much to me, but I have to single out “Rock’N’Roll Suicide”. As a skinny, spotty 14-year-old, bloody from being bottled by thugs on the way to Liverpool Empire in 1972, I climbed over the orchestra pit at the front of the stage. And as Bowie sang “Give me your hand!”, he reached down and took my hand. I was a mess of blood, glitter and cheap, badly applied make-up, but in a state of near religious ecstasy. “Rock’N’Roll Suicide” is a wonderfully structured song. It’s Bowie at his theatrical, Jacques Brel-inspired best. Sometimes I still sing it live to bring back that moment.
I loved all his work throughout the ’70s. That’s an incredible body of work, brilliant and innovative. I can’t think of any other artist that’s made so much impact in a short period. A year ago, at an opera in New York, he sat opposite me. We smiled at each other, but I’m not even sure he knew who I was, though Bowie probably knows who everyone is. I quite like it that we’ve never really met, as I can still be a fan that admires him from a distance.

ALEX KAPRANOS (Franz Ferdinand): We were asked to cover a song from 1977 [for the Radio 1: Established 1967 LP] and when I looked down the list, “Sound And Vision” jumped out as my favourite song of that year. I love it because it does what my favourite pop songs do: it’s out there, it’s unpredictable and does things you’d never heard in music. Yet it’s immediate at the same time. Because it takes so long for the vocals to come in, the pattern of the melody is so unpredictable and takes so long to evolve, and the fact it fades out at a bizarre point, you immediately want to put it on again. You feel like the song is playing for eternity in some other universe. It’s like you caught a snippet of something that will always be playing. And that’s not really like a standard pop song. There’s no start, middle and finish.
I grew up listening to Bowie. It’s one of the few things you inherit from your parents, something with edge. I’ve met him a couple of times at our gigs, which is always a little disconcerting. I remember him looking at the setlist and saying, “Oh good, you’re doing ‘Evil And A Heathen’. I’m looking forward to that one.”

JOHNNY MARR (om "Jean Genie"): It’s one of those amazing bits of noise that existed as a commercial release. It’s got sex and subversion and artistry in it. But it’s not so obscure that it couldn’t get on the radio. It really is a superb advertisement for what was once called rock’n’roll . Of course Mick Ronson’s guitar-playing is fantastic, but it’s the atmosphere created by the vocal and the attitude of the singer: it’s remote and scary and… quite alluring. It’s all the things that attracted me to rock music in the first place. And that it’s all wrapped up in a 7-inch 45 format is just perfect. It’s also really funny! The actual words themselves are a great example of why you don’t need to be earnest in pop music. And a great example of a sort of nonsense. It’s all about imagery over message. It’s just… cool!

KEITH RICHARDS: Can’t remember. Who is he? Oh, he went to the same art school as me. “Changes”, maybe. That’s about it. Not a large fan, no. It’s all pose. It’s all fucking posing. It’s nothing to do with music. He knows it, too. I can’t think of anything else he’s done that would make my hair stand up.