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 à trois with Frank Sinatra and singer Claude François, who wrote a chanson in 1967 called Comme d’Habitude. Her frustration and will to escape suburban dullness was surely his own. He spun a cosmic yarn from that mousy girl’s disillusionment and her escape through the silver screen, in surreal imagery of cows, clowns and cavemen. It had seen better days but it had also seen greatness, because this is where Bowie sat and wrote Life on Mars? in 1971. After huffing and puffing 13 miles across London, I wheeled through Croydon Road Recreation Ground to a rusting Edwardian bandstand. My journey actually began not in Ibiza but the place the song did: the borough of Bromley. Other writers have followed literary footsteps to get into authors’ minds, so why not a music lyric? I should know as I cycled one of the song’s lyrics – “from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads” – pedalling 4,345km (2,700 miles) in search of a deeper understanding. Trying to deconstruct this tale starring mice, Mickey Mouse and a mousy-haired girl is about as easy as getting to Mars itself. A cornucopia of surreal images, a musical soap opera to float away with, it still regularly appears in lists of the greatest ever Bowie songs – and indeed lists of the greatest songs by anyone. Today marks 50 years since David Bowie’s Life on Mars? was released as a single.
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