Three Song Tuesday

It would be criminal not to feature my three favourite David Bowie songs. His influence on music and culture cannot be overstated.

Also relevant to this post and the spirit of Three Song Tuesday (and my mild obsession with all things Twin Peaks) is that he played Agent Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peak ‘Fire Walk With Me’. It was a brief part which saw him enter the FBI offices in Philadelphia and stumble into an office with agents Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan), Cole (David Lynch) and Rosenfeld (Miguel Ferrer) and say, “I’m not going to talk about Judy. In fact, we’re not going to talk about Judy at all. We’re going to keep her out of this.” He then points to Cooper and says, “Who do you think this is there?” and then goes on to describe the room above the convenience store. It’s a great scene and one of the reasons I Love Lynch’s work. At the end of clip Cooper says, “He was here” to which Cole asks, “But where did he go…” Check out the scene at the end of the three songs.

The Three songs: I grew up with his 80s stuff. ‘China Girl’ was probably the first Bowie song I ever heard. It was co-written with Iggy Pop while Bowie was in Berlin and featured first on Iggy’s ‘The idiot’ from 1977. Bowie released his version in 1983.

Around 1989 I had a mixtape that had ‘Heroes’ on it. I wore it out while reading a years worth of 2000AD weeklies. It was the epic Judge Dredd story “Necropolis’ and the connected “Tale of the dead man’ before it. The tape was one of those shitty green FX90 tapes with a propensity for stretching. Also present were Morrissey, Kissing the Pink, Bauhaus, Roxy Music and Joy Division.

A bar singer (Derek Sassen???) I used to watch often used to play ‘Five years’ as part of his set. I had no idea it was Bowie until years later. The line about the girl in the ice-cream parlor drinking milkshakes not knowing she was in the song gets me every time.

Thank you for the music.