All the knives seem to lacerate your brain

David Bowie - 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide' (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars - 1972)

Across 1972-1974, on the Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane tours, David Bowie played ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ over 100 times as a (primary) set closer. None of them was as dramatic as the one that ended David Bowie’s gig at The Hammersmith Odeon on 3rd July 1973. It was the last day of the tour and, unbeknownst to even some band members¹. Bowie had this to say;

“Of all of the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest because not only is it–not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do. Thank you.”

Like that, Ziggy was dead.²

Just over a year before that fateful announcement, Bowie released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars³. As a final track, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ outlines the last curtain call of Ziggy, no longer the lightning in a bottle of the extraterrestrial rock god but a washed-up, finished, old dinosaur. The album takes us on his journey from the gentle drum splashes from Mick Woodmansey that open the album on ‘Five Years’ via the coruscating Mick Ronson guitar on ‘Moonage Daydream’ and Trevor Bolder’s wandering bass-line on the title track. By the time we get to the end of the album, we’ve seen on the penultimate track, ‘Suffragette City’, that something is going to break.

As a reference point, Bowie’s biographer David Buckley has talked about both the opener and closer as being more like show tunes than typical rock songs. As Chris O’Leary says on his blog Pushing Ahead Of The Dame, a superb sense of drama goes from Jacques Brel to Judy Garland.

It is worth stepping back from the album, Ziggy and even Bowie himself to look at the song in isolation - which I believe is an almost cautionary tale on watching someone you care about suffer from depression. Moving from weary cynicism and detached ennui, it runs the gauntlet through to despair and ultimate collapse as the intensity of both the lyrics and Bowie’s performance escalate.

Bowie has said the opening line, “Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth”, is plagiarised from Baudelaire⁴;

That was sort of plagiarised line from Baudelaire which was something to the effect of life is a cigarette, smoke it in a hurry or savour it.

We can also detect the pleading from Bowie to the song’s subject; I’ve had it rough, too - you don’t have to face this alone. It reminds me of Judy Garland’s version of Carousel’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ It is more famous to English ears due to Gerry & The Pacemakers’ hit and the adoption of it as a terrace anthem at Liverpool and other clubs. Bowie’s filter on it warps it like plastic kept too close to a radiator. With ‘Life On Mars’ written the previous year as a corrupted take on ‘My Way',⁵ you can see how Bowie went down this path.

For further inspiration, Bowie looked to Brel - his song ‘You’re Not Alone (Jef)’ supplies the “Oh no, you’re not alone” hook and Bowie had also performed Brel’s ‘My Death’ and ‘Amsterdam’ live for the BBC and toyed with finishing the album with the latter - a song that Scott Walker closed his first solo album with. Bowie has also referenced James Brown’s songs ‘Lost Someone’ and ‘Try Me’, which feature on his Live At The Apollo album.

We hear Bowie walk through his life as a rock singer, from star to washed-up idol and then ramp up the drama for the finale. He has said that this fall was hubristic on Ziggy’s part;

Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist on our world. And they tear him to pieces onstage during the song “Rock and Roll Suicide.” As soon as Ziggy dies onstage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible.

Bowie later said about the song:

At this point I had a passion for the idea of a rock star as meteor and the whole idea of The Who’s line “Hope I die before I get old.” At that youthful age you cannot believe that you’ll lose the ability to be this enthusiastic and all-knowing about the world, life and experience. You think you’ve probably discovered all the secrets to life. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” was a declaration of the end of the effect of being young.

I also get the sense that the death and suicide in the song shouldn’t be taken too literally - it conceivable is the end of an idea or ideal - possibly the realisation that youth doesn’t last forever, and Bowie’s narrator has already experienced that feeling and pushed past it.

With the song starting with guitar in the introduction and horns and percussion ratcheting up from the third verse onward, the music swells up with a key change for the second, “no love, you’re not alone” - which to come back to the theatre would be a stage instruction to kill the main lights and fix a spotlight on the singer. This gets us to the “Give me your hands” line that some say are a lift from Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream asking for applause, but many now acknowledge the input from Bowie’s wife at the time, Angela.

In 2000 she said;

“Rock n’ Roll Suicide spoke to me personally and it was my personal anthem for everyone everywhere who had endured the humiliation of growing up with stupidity and I am that all-embracing in my interpretation. That’s the incredible thing about David’s music: here we are, 30 years on still discussing a solo, a chorus, the meaning of the words….Rock n’ Roll Suicide has the positive affirmative – "you’re wonderful” and “Give me your hands you’re not alone” refrain, that I could hear as I walked into a restaurant or jumped up in the morning.“

The song signs off with a flourish of strings and a D-flat chord. I know I’ve read this line before somewhere about that chord. The thought that it bookends what is now revered as classic rock, or at least what counted for it when I was a teenager with another famous chord recorded less than three miles away; The E-major The Beatles recorded for ‘A Day In The LIfe’ on 22nd February 1967 at Abbey Road Studios and this one recorded 4th February 1972 at Trident Studios.

Five Years - that’s all we’ve got.

1. Only guitarist Mick Ronson was aware

2. On playing the song on Theme Time Radio Hour in 2007, Bob Dylan recalled Bowie telling everyone he would retire after the Ziggy Stardust tour. Dylan says he told him not to.

3. RCA, grubbing for money, released ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ as a single in 1974; it did poorly, ending Bowie’s run of seven successive top 20 UK singles

4. Others point to the Spanish poet Manuel Machado’s “Tonás y livianas”: “Life is a cigarette…some smoke it in a hurry.”

5. Bowie was the first person to write English lyrics set to the tune of ‘Comme d’habitude’.