woke up in the middle of the night with this song in my head.
got up very early this morning to go through my storage boxes
with cd's and dug it up.

i've been listening to this song most of the day and i love,
love, love it.

from the first time i heard it, it sounded like a song i had
heard years ago and fell in love with. it felt so farmiliar.

absolutely too cool!

which version? the 'buddha of suburbia' version or the 'outside' version?

i love that song too. the little piano bit at the beginning reminds me of "gimme some lovin".

This song is so overlooked it's criminal.

It captures perfectly the feeling of whatever-mr-bowie was trying to capture and present to us. "I'm so thankful that we're strangers when we meet" just might be one of the most poignant lyrical lines written in the history of pop / rock. And on the personal side, I love songs that manage to convey feelings of happiness and melancholy at the same time, it's not an easy accomplishment from the songwriter's perspective.

IstenSzek said:

novabrkr said:

absolutely right. that line is one of my fav lyrics of all time.

it says so much in those few words. conveys more than some other
artists entire albums do.

Anxiety said:

that would be the "outside" version. i have like 15 bowie albums but
i still miss the Buddah of Suburbia. i'm trying to get acquainted
with them as i get them and not just download a discography all at
one. and Bowie's albums mostly keep me interested a long time.

IstenSzek said:

i think that's the way to do it...the year i first dived into bowie, i'd raid the used bins and get like three or four at a time and just absorb each of them one by one, no hurries...some of the albums fell through the cracks for me and it's taken longer to absorb some albums than others. 'buddha' is a great album, once you get around to it. i think it's ridiculous how slept-on it is.

Anxiety said:

i'll be sure to look for it next time i go record browsing

Anxiety said:

i know! me too! i love that song. altho i think i prefer the outside version.

Milty said:

i think i like both versions equally, though i think it sounds more "at home" on the "buddha" album.

Anxiety said:

Co-sign. The Buddha album all the way.

OMG, that song is pure, unaltered, total genius. I ALWAYS have the line "All my violence/is raining tears upon the sheets" stuck in my head. Constantly.
In fact, I just put this on a CD I made for a friend. We have our special compilations for partys where everyone else propably think we're totally out of our minds. Like 'How come U don't call me anymore', we actually sing that in the right key and everything. I know that song will be on there.

How I love that song.


Come back, Bowie. Please.

calldapplwondery83 said:

where'd he go?

IstenSzek said:

Great song from a great album (Outside)!

I've always loved this tune & the vocal. To me...I think it is the instrumentation...it has always been the companion piece to 'Absolute Beginners', my all-time favorite Bowie tune.

Anxiety said:

It's his "Come".

it's one of my favorite music vids too
[Edited 6/19/07 20:06pm]

possibly my favorite bowie song.

i love "no trendy rechauffee". man, i need a new bowie album STAT!

Awesome song. One of my favorite Bowie songs that I hardly ever think of or acknowledge as such.


Wonderful. Reminds me of my lover and I every time I get home from where I'm at at the moment

Anxiety said:

I don't know He's been replaced by a paunchy middle-aged woman with no ambition

on the cd single why is THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD called "live" ?

dawntreader said:

either because it's the live arrangement or because it actually is a live recording and bowie had the crowd noise taken out because (so i've read) he dislikes crowd noise in live recordings.

Anxiety said:

i bet he likes prince's "one nite alone"

IstenSzek said:

there's so much audience on that, i almost sued prince for royalties.

Anxiety said:

it wasnt that bad

except for Adore maybe

IstenSzek said:

Shamelessly stolen from bowienet:

The Buddha of Suburbia - EMI Catalogue Marketing

Release date: 17th September 2007

The Buddha of Suburbia was David Bowie’s 19th full studio album released in 1993. Asked to write and perform the music for the BBC2 four part mini series, although classified as a soundtrack, only the title track on the album was featured in the programme itself. A television adaptation of a 1990 book written by Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia is a (semi) autobiographical tale featuring Karim – a South London teenager desperate to escape the suburbs which confine him. Kureishi at the time was already well known for his screenplay of My Beautiful Launderette, the 1985 film which centered on issues of sexuality, race and class in volatile 1980’s Britain.

Tracklisting:

01 Buddha Of Suburbia (4:28)
02 Sex And The Church (6:25)
03 South Horizon (5:26)
04 The Mysteries (7:12)
05 Bleed Like A Craze, Dad (5:22)
06 Strangers When We Meet (4:58)
07 Dead Against It (5:48)
08 Untitled No. 1 (5:01)
09 Ian Fish, U.K. Heir (6:27)
10 Buddha Of Suburbia (4:19) (featuring Lenny Kravitz on guitar)

All songs written by David Bowie

As David himself explains:

’This album may well have been one of the most enjoyable projects that I’ve been involved with. Although this collection of music bears little resemblance to the motif driven small pieces that became the actual transmitted soundtrack for the BBC play of Buddha, director Roger Mitchell’s request that I supply some stuff for Hanif Kureishi’s fabulous play got me on a real roll.

Weeks later however, left to my own devices, these same pieces just took on a life of their own in the studio, with lots of narrative provocation from Hanif’s play and dozens of personal 70's memories providing a textural backdrop in my imagination that laid the groundwork for a truly exciting work situation.

I took the TV play motifs and discarded them completely except that is for the theme song. The pace of work was unbelievably frenetic taking only 6 days to write and record though a full fifteen days to mix, owing in part to some technical breakdowns – nothing too serious but enough to put our team out by five or six days.

My personal memory stock for this album was made up from an almighty plethora of influences and reminiscences from the 1970`s. Here, below, is just a tiny selection of what went through my mind while writing.

Free association lyrics
Kraftwerk
Pink Floyd
Bromley
Harry Partch
Croydon
Costume
Eno
Blues clubs Soho
Prostitutes & Soho
Unter de Linden
Ronnie Scott`s club
Brücke Museum in Berlin
Travels thru Russia
Pet Sounds
Loneliness
Friends of the Krays I had known
O`Jays
Neu
Mark Bolan
Philip Glass in New York clubs
Richard Strauss
Philip Glass playing in London 1970/1
Drag
T.Rex
Die Mauer, Berlin
The Casserole
Drugs
Roxy Music
Mum

The list is actually endless but the above initially springs to mind. Fifty percent of the lyrical content is used just because I like the sound of the word. Some of it is reasonably narrative driven. Many of my working forms are taken in whole or in part from my collaborations with Brian Eno, (who in my humble opinion occupies a parallel position in late 20th century popular music that Clement Greenberg in the 40`s or Richard Hamilton in the 60`s had to visual art.) The cut-up style that is obviously used on such tracks as Bleed Like A Craze, Dad (yes, it is a play on Krays) and Dead Against it springs from the Brion Gyson/William Burroughs school of Fucking with the Fabric of Time. The very magical multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kizilcay was so pivotal in interpreting my musical desires, foibles and arrangements that it's just not funny.’
-----

The Buddha of Suburbia CD and DVD are both released on September 17th. (05.14.2007 RUMOUR: BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA TO GET DVD AND CD RELEASE? & 06.04.2007 NEWS: BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA DVD AND CD UPDATE

Anxiety said:

Hmmm... you're right. As you almost always are.

Great song, Strangers When We Meet. Rumoured to be about Angie, who was then penning another autobio about her life with him.

It has the same anthemic quality as Heroes and Teenage Wildlife. Not sure what it's doing at the end of Outside. Maybe it's some sort of light relief after the bleakness of the album, like the Secret Life of Arabia was at the end of Heroes.

I assume the Buddha reissue will be remastered.

Shapeshifter said:

i always thought it played like an epilogue or an afterwards...it was personally kind of reassuring to me, listening to outside and then having the last song remind me of the previous album, which to me represented the return of the freakish experimental bowie i love - it was kind of like a final reassurance that the lame years were over.