Michael Stipe sang what I would describe as a stark and astonishing version of Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World on “The Tonight Show” recently, presumably as a warmup/promo for the Skype livestream of the charity tribute show at Carnegie Hall.
I posted the video clip on my Facebook page and it got various “likes” and “shares”. One private comment from a friend alluded to his intense dislike of the rendition, citing its faux attempt at artiness through simply lowering the tempo and how awful the piano was. To me, Stipe’s always had quite an amazing timbre and texture to his voice my first having heard it in my second year at Uni way back in the 1980s (friends saw them at Tiffany’s in Newcastle, although I didn’t get to seem REM live (twice) until the Green tour in 1988. I thought the rendition was, like I said, astonishing.
However, there is certainly little merit in simply slowing a cover version of a song in an attempt to make it more emotive, more artistic. I don’t feel that’s really what Stipe was doing there, it’s not like he was auditioning for “The Voice”, nor was he simply doing a Gary Jules on an old pop song (Tears for Fears’ Mad World).
Apropos of nothing, back in the 1960s before Bowie was even vaguely well known and before he was performing with my friend John Hutchinson, he was commissioned to write new lyrics for a French tune called Comme d’Habitude. You’d recognise the tune immediately, it is today world famous as My Way, but the publishers opted for Paul Anka’s words instead of those submitted by Bowie. Imagine how different the careers of Bowie, Sinatra, and Sid Vicious might have been had My Way instead been Life on Mars…by the way, my guitar-led version of that song here in a lower key but pretty much the same tempo.
Life on Mars has a strange and esoteric lyric, but Bowie later described it, at a single live show, as simply a love song (to his first true love Hermione “the girl with the mousy hairy” Farthingale). He’d shared the stage with her and Hutch in the trio The Feathers back in the day. Hutch went on to be one of the auxiliary Spiders from Mars, I met him a few years ago in his local and joined in on the open mic session the next year, he plays fab Django Reinhardt type stuff).
Intriguingly though, Life on Mars was actually according to Bowie himself an attempt at writing a full-on version of a My Way. Back in the 1960s, Bowie was feeling his way writing songs for other people. He put new lyrics to the 1967 French tune “Comme d’habitude” by Claude François and Jacques Revaux. Bowie’s version – “Even a Fool Learns to Love” – was never released. But songwriter Paul Anka bought up the writes and put his own lyrics to the tune – it would become Frank Sinatra’s signature song – “My Way”, like I said.
Having been robbed of the lyrical opportunity for fame with that French song, Bowie wanted to retaliate musically speaking and “Life on Mars” became in a sense his My Way. Weirld, the Bowie song also took inspiration in the line “look at that caveman go” from the song Alley Oop from 1960 American one-hit wonders The Hollywood Argyles a doo-wap band. Mad world, eh Michael?