Do you remember a guy that’s been, In such an early song?
We don’t like to appear repetitive, (04.15.2007 NEWS: LIFE ON MARS BACK IN THE UK SINGLES CHART & 05.18.2007 NEWS: LIFE ON MARS? ‘GREATEST SONG EVER WRITTEN’ & 06.10.2007 NEWS: RECOGNITION OF LIFE ON MARS?’ GENIUS CONTINUES) and I’m sure many of you have already seen this. But, if everybody else feels the need to mention the greatness of Life On Mars? with such frequency, then we’re duty-bound to report it.
This time it’s the turn of an all-star panel of zillions of songwriters/musicians in the October issue of Q magazine. The 1971 Hunky Dory epic has made it to number three in the list of The 10 Most Perfect Songs Ever. Here’s the full top 10…
01 Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley
02 Strawberry Fields Forever – Beatles
03 Life On Mars? – David Bowie
04 Sympathy For The Devil – Rolling Stones
05 Strange Fruit – Billie Holiday
06 Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve
07 Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen
08 God Only Knows – The Beach Boys
09 Blowin’ In The Wind – Bob Dylan
10 Perfect Day – Lou Reed
As you can tell from the number one slot, it’s not just about the songwriting, (Hallelujah was actually written by Leonard Cohen) but the voting also took performance and everything else that makes a great song into account.
Good to see that DB has had a hand in two of the songs in the top 10, and he liked another in the list so much that he released his own version on the Tonight album.
It’s a fairly wordy appreciation of Life On Mars?, as you can see from the scan above, with another endorsement of the song from The Enemy‘s Tom Clarke, following on from his piece in NME that we posted back in May. (05.18.2007 NEWS: LIFE ON MARS? ‘GREATEST SONG EVER WRITTEN’)
Here’s what he had to say this time…
So good to see the generation of musicians coming up frequently recognise such greatness. (09.05.2007 NEWS: EXCLUSIVE QUOTES AS MERCURY PRIZE WINNERS PRAISE BOWIE)
Of course, that’s not to say that the generation of music-makers now considered long-established, don’t continue to recognise Bowie’s brilliance across the years. REM‘s Michael Stipe (Rex Ray look-alike in the middle of the above trio) had this to say about the 1980 Scary Monsters classic Ashes To Ashes in
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Michael Stipe – Perfect song: Ashes To Ashes by David Bowie (1980)
“He jumped off such a cliff with that song. He was writing about a character he’d made popular twenty years before. It was the sequel to Space Oddity, where he’d produced perhaps the most famous song of his career. It’s so audacious as a piece of writing. You can go into any bar in the world and if they play that song, watch people around the room. Each will sing along to a separate part. There’s about seven parts people sing along to. It’s the audacity of not only writing about Major Tom, but then making it this flawless mess.”
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Who can blame Bowie fans for generally having a ‘holier than thou’ attitude when it comes to taste in music?