David Bowie died ten years ago this week (on 10-Jan 2016). He’s been one of those artists whom I’ve been listening to his music probably as long as I was able to appreciate music. My dad, naturally, was/is a fan, and it was probably Let’s Dance I heard first (I was nearly five when that was released in 1983), and over the years I’ve listened to pretty much anything new, and obviously much of his material going back further (although like most of you, I hope, I draw the line at The Laughing Gnome).

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But just writing about ten of his songs didn’t seem enough, and over thirty-one years of gig-going, and at least ten more years of music-consumption than that, I’ve heard a lot of Bowie covers. And about nine years ago, I actually asked for suggestions for (good) Bowie covers, in one of the earliest suggestion threads, but never used it. Like many, I was waiting for the right time to do so, and this anniversary is it.

The ever-useful Secondhand Songs records over 3,400 covers of Bowie songs, so I wasn’t short of choice, that’s for sure, and I added in a couple of more recent favourites to the mix. This is very much a selection of his songs that I love, where mostly artists I love have taken his remarkable songs into new and familiar places.

Certainly, too, his music will live on, and I’m sure in years to come the number of cover versions will swell yet further, whether we listen or not…

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Blixa Bargeld and Nikko Weidemann
/Lazarus
/Blixa Bargeld sings David Bowie

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We’re starting at the end, with a track from Bowie’s last album Blackstar, released on his birthday, just two days before his death, and recorded in secret in New York. That said, this song had featured on the musical of the same name opened in the city the year before. An enthralling meditation on life, death and how you live on in memory after death, it was perhaps the most obvious sign that the end was near.

Blixa Bargeld – who is now only a few years younger than Bowie was when he died – provides an emotional, thoughtful take on the song, stripped down to just voice and piano.

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/Turbonegro
/Suffragette City
/Apocalypse Dudes

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It’s amazing to think that the stomping glam rush of Suffragette City was originally only the B-side to Starman! A wrong that was eventually righted when it was a single to lead the best-of compilation Changesbowie a few years later, but to see how popular a song it was even then, just the electrifying live video with the crowd going nuts for it.

I think it’s fair to say that Norwegian cult-rockers Turbonegro are more than a bit influenced by Bowie’s glam period, and with their take on the song, they don’t do a great deal with it, but why fuck with perfection?

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/Nirvana
/The Man Who Sold The World
/MTV Unplugged in New York

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The oldest song I’m featuring this week comes from Bowie’s third album, released in 1970, and a song that went pretty much unremarked upon until Lulu had a hit with it in 1974, to these ears turning it into some ghastly cabaret-glam hybrid.

For me, though, the definitive version came from Nirvana, on their MTV Unplugged session. Kurt Cobain and the band decided to subvert the idea of playing just the hits, instead digging into obscure album tracks and a host of fascinating covers (including bringing members of Meat Puppets to play some of their songs), which rather felt like Cobain tipping the hat to his heroes.

In retrospect, covering The Man Who Sold The World feels like the key song. Cobain sings a devastating take on a song about facing up to the uncomfortable nature of fame and being in the public eye, not to mention a sense of disgust at what they’ve become. Sadly, less than six months after this was recorded, Cobain was dead.

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/Tackhead
/I’m Afraid of Americans
/For The Love of Money

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Bowie was, it turned out, much loved by various Industrial artists, and in the nineties had another career rebirth (probably his fourth or fifth already by that point), as he once again began to explore electronic and industrial music. He toured and recorded with Nine Inch Nails and the Pet Shop Boys (among others) around that time, and when asked if his work was influenced by NIN, he instead pointed those interested to the work of Swiss industrial band The Young Gods.

The searing power of the NIN rework of the track became the best-known version of it (there are quite a few, very varied, versions), and the nervous energy and outsider’s view of American hegemony has only become more prescient thirty years on.

Industrial/dub/hip-hop supergroup Tackhead (involving members once of Sugarhill Gang and Living Colour, as well as producer Adrian Sherwood) took on this song amid a wildly eclectic covers album released in 2014, and they pare the track back somewhat, leaving it float on a typically cavernous bass sound from Adrian Sherwood, that only makes it sound all the more paranoid.

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/God Lives Underwater
/Fame
/15 Minutes OST

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Bowie in the seventies was a remarkable period of reinvention and change, driven by changes in fashion and, in some cases, an enormous amount of cocaine. After the glam era came the slick R&B of Young Americans, and that album closed with the mighty, sneering middle-finger of Fame, written at least in part with John Lennon (opinions vary on how much he actually contributed…). A taut funk song that seethes at the downsides of his fame (in a different way to The Man Who Sold The World – after all, this was a different level of fame entirely just six years on), it has been re-released, reworked and covered endlessly.

Which brings me to the cover. Anyone else remember the film 15 Minutes? I certainly don’t, but this cracking cover of Fame deserves a better fate than the film: a fuzzy, industrial rock take on the track that doesn’t take too many liberties. It’s perhaps more mechanised, less funky, but has enough of a snarl to retain the original bitterness.

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/Melvins
/Station to Station
/Everybody Loves Sausages

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The much-celebrated albums by Bowie from the mid-to-late-seventies supply four of the ten original songs this week, and I make no apologies for that. Here’s another of them, as Bowie leaned into his Thin White Duke persona, and perhaps it was the drugs that resulted in the title track being a ten-minute, multi-part work that feels like about four songs cobbled together, but somehow works.

Melvins released their take on this song on their 2013 covers album – an album that also covered songs by bands as diverse as Lead Belly, Throbbing Gristle, Venom and Divine (!) – and like most of the rest of the songs, brought in a guest to help them out. Here, JG Thirlwell joined them on vocals, for a sludgy, heavy take that is respectful enough to fuck with the melodies, at least…

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/ACTORS & Bootblacks feat. LEATHERS
/Boys Keep Swinging

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For Bowie’s last album of the seventies, he was already looking forward. Boys Keep Swinging is a fantastic New Wave song that happens to incorporate a glammy stomp and is an irresistible earworm, while Bowie has fun with playing around with gender and identity in the lyrics – something that saw even the legendary madness of the SNL performance censored to avoid at least one of the lyrics that was seen as beyond the pale at the time.

Just a few years ago, in 2022, Artoffact labelmates ACTORS and Bootblacks (Shannon of LEATHERS is also in ACTORS) released a reverential but modern take on the song, the vocals shared by Jason and Shannon of ACTORS and Panther of Bootblacks, and the cover reminded just how much both bands owe to Bowie’s work. Doesn’t take anything away from the cover, mind…

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/Grant Lee Phillips and the Section Quartet
/Ashes to Ashes

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I was kind of a mind to avoid including two of my favourite Bowie songs (the other being Let’s Dance), but this is such a lovely cover that I made an exception. Ashes to Ashes was David Bowie crashing into the eighties, having updated and changed his sound again with remarkable results – but also looking back, as he picked up the threads from Space Oddity, and taking Major Tom’s story into dark places that perhaps reflected the drug issues Bowie himself had faced.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the 46 years since this was released on 01-August 1980, it has been covered a lot. Back in 2006, Grant-Lee Phillips teamed up with cover specialists The Section Quartet to recorded an elegant, stripped back take on a song that already drips with regret, and here sounds even more despairing.

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/Bauhaus
/Ziggy Stardust

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The video for Ashes to Ashes featured a number of the Blitz Kids, a tip of the hat to a new generation of fans and artists who were already worshipping at the altar of Bowie – and frankly many were cribbing elements of his sounds already. The adjacent goth scene wasn’t far behind, and Bauhaus decided to take on allegations that they were just ripping off Bowie (which in retrospect, is perhaps a little unfair) by releasing a cover of Ziggy Stardust as a single.

Amusingly, perhaps, it became the band’s biggest hit, got them on Top of the Pops (where they look impossibly cool) and thanks to the reverential take (they do nothing to change it, that’s for sure) probably meant that the Bowie comparisons stuck forever more.

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/Apocalyptica feat. Till Lindemann
/“Helden”
/Worlds Collide

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There could, really, be only one song that could close this post.

Among some competition, “Heroes” is probably Bowie’s most iconic, affecting song. Written in Berlin about two lovers yearning to be together but being divided by the Berlin Wall and the political forces that they cannot control, on a wider level it is a song that offers hope that love can transcend even the biggest obstacles, and perhaps it is that sentiment that makes it such a beloved song. Well, that and it is simply a fucking perfect song.

Finnish Cello overlords made their name covering Metallica songs, and while they swiftly moved into writing their own songs (and inviting guest vocalists to join them in some cases), the odd cover did continue to be released, and in 2007, they joined forces with Till Lindemann of Rammstein for a dramatic, powerful German-language take on the song.

Maybe Bowie can have the last word this week, too, as one part of “Heroes” seems appropriate in a world going to hell in a handcart:

“And the shame was on the other side
Oh, we can beat them forever and ever
Then we can be heroes, just for one day“