![]() ![]() Having given it the once over, the BBC instrumentalists were so impressed, they performed it a second time to master it. Drummer Woody Woodmansey has said the notoriously hard-to-please BBC string players were awaiting instruction, so guitarist Mick Ronson, having written his first ever string arrangement and wildly nervous, rolled a cigarette and explained how it should be played. After the song’s recording session, Rick Wakeman – the pianist who embellished the chords Bowie had played him on a “battered 12-string” – told his friends he’d just played on “the best song he’d ever had the privilege to work on”. Bowie’s B flat top note is only a semitone below the famous climax from Nessun DormaĮven in our impromptu version, the lyrics tumbled us into Bowie’s subconscious – and the music carries you deeper still. She loved the simplicity of its opening notes, a piano chord that transported her to her “happy place”, and just outside “Clo-Clo’s” bathroom, we performed a shaky duet. After explaining my mission to the tour leader, her eyes lit up: Life on Mars? was her wedding song. François had died young after trying to fix a squiffy lightbulb while sitting in his bathtub. Taking the official tour, more drama came to light. Having flown to Ibiza, cycled 900 miles around the island and then onward through the Spanish and French countryside, I now stood – lactic acid pooling in my thighs – outside François’s old house in Dannemois, 30 miles south of Paris. ‘Suburban dullness’ … the Beckenham bandstand where James’s journey – and the song – all began. Bowie, pride battered but not burst, snatched the chord progression and rearranged it with an ascending rock twist. ![]() The publisher thought it was awful and the chanson instead passed to Paul Anka, who came back with My Way. When Comme d’Habitude landed in his lap, he turned it into a song called Even a Fool Learns to Love. Bowie was in London’s Denmark Street rewriting European songs for anyone who would take them. What he didn’t mention was that the song was born from a kind of musical menage a trois with Frank Sinatra and singer Claude François, who wrote a chanson in 1967 called Comme d’Habitude. “I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. ‘Sailors bap-bap-bap-bap-baaa-bap’ … Middle-class ecstasy.” He took a riff he couldn’t shake back to his flat in Haddon Hall, Beckenham. A really beautiful day in the park, sitting on the steps of the bandstand. Commenting on the song’s construction he later said: “This song was so easy. Then aged 24, Bowie was gaining confidence as a writer.
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