![]() Bowie’s baritone saxophone moves the action along in the second verse, then takes over, upturning the top melody and spooling it out, following a lengthy sloping phrase with a sharply arcing one, ringing in the key change.ġ1. “All I have is my love of love, and love is not loving.” Love as infestation (sweeping over cross and baby), as a priest talking to the empty sky.ġ0. Hi-hat flourish, then rim-shots and kick drum, chased with handclaps and conga.ĩ. “Soul Love” again opens with Woodmansey alone, but he’s cheerier now. I thought of my brother and wrote ‘Five Years’.Ĩ. ![]() A band, sitting in a club long after hours, has gotten it together and can play all night, but few are there to hear them.ħ. A record plays somewhere deep in the building, reduced by walls and floors to muffled basslines, ghost voices, the occasional piercing guitar note. Tapes, transmissions, backstage stories (“boy could he play guitar”). “Busting up my brains for the words.” “I’m so wiped out with things as they are.” “I felt like an actor.” Much of it is heard second-hand. “My brain hurt like a warehouse.” Ziggy is a work of Bowie writing about work. There’s so much of it that seems to represent today, but it isn’t, in fact: it’s using references and feelings and emotions from a few years back.Ħ. It’s work generally in an atmosphere that’s five years behind. I was in shock because he was also hitting every note spot on.”ĥ. Dennis MacKay, engineer on Ziggy: “Bowie’s screaming and what you hear on that song, the emotion is for real. Five repeats in all, the rest of the song, which ends in screams, then fades away. The verses of “Five Years” seem like they will never end, until, after curling into a ball, they become a doomsday pub singalong refrain. ![]() Ronson’s electric guitar only appears on the refrain’s fourth go-round (cued by a “what a surprise!”). Bowie on 12-string acoustic guitar (“a girl my age”) shadowed by Mick Ronson-arranged strings (“went off her head”). Trevor Bolder on bass, making interjections between lines (e.g., the octave jump after the news guy tells us the bad news). Double-tracked autoharp and piano (ZING! “pushing through the market square”). It’s an acting troupe sketch, with scenario by Liverpudlian poet Roger McGough, place setting of the Market Square, Aylesbury, location of the Friars Club (we’re pushing through, not pushing ahead), and various mimes (“queer” vomiting, soldier with broken arm, cop kneeling to priest, girl drinking milkshake).Ĥ. “Five Years,” one of Bowie’s last Sixties songs, could have been sung at his Arts Lab in Beckenham–you can imagine his folk trio Feathers doing it. You become accepted and the impact has gone. That’s what’s missing in pop music now-entertainment….You can’t remain at the top for five years and still be outrageous. This is going to be something new…no one has ever seen anything like this before….it’s going to be entertainment. Woodmansey later describes it as putting “hopelessness into a drumbeat.”Ģ. The first sound that you hear, creeping in via Ken Scott’s faders, is Woody Woodmansey’s kick drum and closed hi-hat, in 3/4 time, with a snare hit (flutter) on the third beat, then (wham!) on the downbeat.
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