“David liked to work at top speed,” recalled ex-Soft Boys and Thompson Twins bassist Matthew Seligman. ‘Absolute Beginners’, the title song for the film then in pre-production, was completed at a breakneck pace. Once he saw what we could do, he relaxed. That’s how Bowie operated – from the germ of an idea, which the group polished up into the master. Over an afternoon it evolved into the backing track, which we recorded. The whole band helped out, whether it was a missing chord or a rhyme for the last verse. Former Prefab Sprout guitarist Kevin Armstrong, for whom this was the beginning of a sporadic ten-year working relationship, explained that Bowie “came in with the song ‘Absolute Beginners’ half written. This unorthodox overture turned out to be from David Bowie, who had approached producers Alan Winstanley and Clive Langer with the demo of ‘Absolute Beginners’. In June 1985 a group of session musicians working with Thomas Dolby at Abbey Road received letters from EMI inviting them to work on a session with “Mr X”. This is a heavily remixed, worked-on nineties creation.” ‘Abdulmajid’ provides the basis for the second movement of Philip Glass’s 1997 “Heroes” “I recall working on this on but it was abandoned,” Tony Visconti told me. Its original title, if there was one, is unknown. Mixed in 1991 for release as a bonus track, this Eastern-influenced instrumental dating from the “Heroes” sessions was renamed in honour of Bowie’s then fiancée Iman Muhammid Abdulmajid. Where appropriate, prominent cover versions of Bowie’s songs are mentioned, but I make no attempt to include every last one among those I have elected to ignore are covers found on “tribute albums” recorded by obscure bands. Some Bowie books have cited long lists of numbers mooted for Bowie’s 1968 cabaret act I have restricted myself to those David actually rehearsed, omitting the many that never went further than Kenneth Pitt’s notebook. Except in cases of exceptional interest, I have restricted myself to material from 1964 – i.e. This chapter covers songs written, recorded, covered, produced or played live by David Bowie, either by himself or for other artists.
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