|  From
bowienet.com - some notes about each track from the 1999 album.
THURSDAY'S CHILD (Bowie/Gabrels)
This dream-along, lushly-wrought ballad
is as pretty as pop gets. The backing is square for a Bowie
song, but all's well, since this is a haunting, insistent melody,
hooky too. The anthemic, almost gospel 'Throw me tomorrow' section
is a beauty and one of Bowie's finest ever. Mr Parody is never
shut out in the cold for long in a Bowie song though, and it's
hard not see lines such as 'Shuffling days and lonesome nights'
as a mildly ironic swipe at Elvis-style pop slush. Bowie, in
fact, was 'Wednesday born', but sees himself as the mythic 'Thursday's
child', with far to go.
Personal
factoids tumble out of the song, as Bowie assesses his own childhood
with a faint air of mawkishness, 'Maybe I'm born right out of
my time', he sings, then adds, in another astrological rumination,
'Lucky old sun is in my sky'. The key line in the song, indeed
the leitmotif of the album, is the killer line, 'seeing my past
to let it go'. Bowie is using hours to take on the legacy of
his youth and to break free from it. A really fine song, perfectly
realised, and Bowie's vocal - vulnerable, searching for the
note, dipping under and over it, then entrapping it - is a sign
of quality. Holly Palmer's downright sexy backing vocals are
featured too.
SOMETHING IN THE AIR
(Bowie/Gabrels)
Chill, claustrophobic, anatomising
the brutality and heartbreak of a doomed relationship, this
is one of Bowie's finest pieces of songwriting. 'Lived with
the best times, left with the worst/ I've danced with you too
long', intones the battle-scarred Bowie. Remorseful and bitter,
the song, like many on the album, appears to be sung to a real-life
addressee, a once-loved partner now exiled with regret from
Bowie's life. This most direct of songs is full of dread charm
and simple evocation: Gabrels shadows Mick Ronson quite closely
on this track, whilst throwing in some beautiful harmonic touches
of his own, and the song's dénouement, when Bowie's blood-curdlingly
raw vocal sweeps through the octaves, and a calamitous crescendo
of Ziggy-era sound (think 'Five Years', or perhaps 'Time'),
are the album's dramatic highpoints.
SURVIVE (Bowie/Gabrels)
The perfect expression of Bowie's
bittersweet melancholia, 'Survive', the strongest cut on the
album, will hopefully become a classic Bowie single somewhere
down the line. There is a sing-along melody, equal to any in
the Bowie canon, on which Gabrels really shines. Dubbed by detractors
a one-trick pony, on hours… Gabrels reveals a poetic side
to his playing which has hitherto been concealed.
On 'Survive',
with its sea of twelve-string, hauntingly delicate lead guitar
and an ending that echoes the electric piano break in long-ago
'Starman', Gabrels is ascendant – his finest moment on
the album. On this track, Bowie is wading through a wash of
memories. He sings: 'Beatle Boys/All snowy white/Razzle dazzle
clubs every night/ Wish I'd sent a valentine/I love you'. The
shock of hearing such emotional words is what makes hours…
unique.
IF I'M DREAMING MY LIFE
(Bowie/Gabrels)
By now Bowie is woozy from images
of his past, first of his mother, then his father. 'When the
father steps aside/ At the wrong time', he sings, presumably
recalling the untimely death of his father just as Bowie had
entered adulthood. Lyrically, Bowie is again drawing on a stock
of holy images - 'All the flowers so/ From the gallery/ With
the hymns of night/Singing come to me' - in this psalmic odyssey.
A close kin to the sublime 'Word On A Wing', the song breaks
down on the altar steps two-thirds in with the sound of an organ,
and Bowie's vocals turn into a litany.
Gabrels
plays an opening riff out of the Pink Floyd 'Echoes' songbook
and can't resist a Tin Machinetastic lift of Hendrix's 'Little
Wing' for a mid-song psychedelic rush. This song, more than
any on the album, could have come from the Tin Machine days
and perhaps needed stripping of its bluesy sixties-isms to make
it work as well as it could.
SEVEN (Bowie/Gabrels)
Another quite obvious single. The
reason? Another melody to get the family whistling. A George
Harrisonesque lead guitar line weeps through, and another classic
pop tune is with us. Building from a busky opening, 'Seven'
is destined to become part of Bowie's live set. Lyrically, things
are, as ever, not quite so bouncy. Bowie writes of himself as
having been set aside for a special calling, abandoned by his
creators: 'The Gods forget they made me/ So I forget them too'.
'Seven' deals autobiographically, if impressionistically, with
the blurry remembrances that have come to embody his father,
mother and brother.
Interestingly,
both Bowie and Gabrels were/are fascinated by numerology, another
theme on the album. Earthling had seven dwarves and more on
'Little Wonder', and, of course, 'Seven Years In Tibet', and
'Heart's Filthy Lesson' from Outside was used in the shit-scary
Seven film. Now a song, 'Seven'. Is this perhaps another 'book
of hours' reference, this time to the seven canonical hours
when prayer took place? Whatever, the song fits easily into
the overall temporal theme of the album.
WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING
(Lyrics: Bowie/Alex Grant, Music: Bowie/Gabrels)
A
strange one this, since, lyrically, it doesn't fit in at all,
although this is hardly surprising, as the lyrics are by none
other than Cybersong contest winner, Alex Grant. In late 1998,
Bowienet ran an intriguing competition in which Bowie fans were
asked to write a set of lyrics to a Bowie/Gabrels tune, replacing
Bowie's (actually rather good) 'La, la, las' with their own
words. With his eminently Bowie-esque effort, Grant won, beating
off some high-profile entrants such as a couple of members of
the Cure, whose effort, egg well and truly on face, didn't even
make the frame. Grant was then asked to join Bowie in the studio,
where Bowie cut the record and cajoled Grant into singing back-ups.
The event was webcasted too. It is a good (not great) song,
and Gabrels' guitar work gives the album an altogether rockier
edge, which is continued on.
THE PRETTY THINGS ARE
TO GOING TO HELL (Bowie/Gabrels)
'I am a dragon, I am a drug', sings Bowie in this first
glam-rock tune since 'Rebel Rebel', and an addictive one it
is too. Gabrels' riff will have the air guitarists raving, whilst
Bowie finally says goodbye to all his glam-inspired children,
who were driving their 'mamas and papas insane' in 1971, but
who are now marching off to the delights of hellfire: 'The pretty
things are going to hell/They wore it out, but they wore it
well'. A slightly different version crops up on the soundtrack
to the film Stigmata, scored by Mike Garson and the Smashing
Pumpkins' supremo Billy Corgan. Good stuff, and perhaps the
only track on the record that captures the hormonal rush of
Earthling. Would be a brave choice as a single.
NEW ANGELS OF PROMISE
(Bowie/Gabrels)
The
final third of hours is more textural, more filmic, and was
scored for the Omikron soundtrack. 'New Angels Of Prom ise'
is one of the more self-referential tracks on the album, the
insistent pulsing riff of the opening bars a reminder of 'Outside',
and the melody faintly reminiscent of 'Sons Of The Silent Age'
from 'Heroes'. Its synthy flute refrain and boldly dramatic
shapes make for some old-style Bowie theatricality and outreach.
Sterling Campbell's hurricane-force and intensely theatrical
drum figures are chilling. A strong song.
BRILLIANT ADVENTURE
(Bowie/Gabrels)
This short, though serene and delicate, instrumental was
apparently recorded almost live outside the Bowie residence
in Bermuda. Again, that flute sound is there, but it's Bowie's
koto that drives this piece of zen exotica towards nirvana.
THE DREAMERS (Bowie/Gabrels)
A cascade of tinkling chimes (also used on 'If I'm Dreaming
My Life') opens
this, the most impressionistic piece of writing on the album,
with its
life-is-but-a-dream theme (hinting at Aboriginal dreamtime?).
Bowie's vocal,
contorted and distorted, lends the cut a hit of filmic menace,
but it is
not, perhaps, the most inventive of his melodies. No matter.
With a rumoured
90 songs from the Bowie/Gabrels library of sound awaiting recording
and
release, all being well we should not have to wait too long
for the next
instalment from the most thrilling musical catalogue on the
planet.
Hours...
Promos
VH-1
Storytellers
Setlist from August 23, 1999 taping:
- Life
On Mars
- Thursday's
Child
- Can't
Help Thinking About Me
- Seven
- China
Girl
- Survive
- Word
On A Wing
- Drive
In Saturday
Encore
- Thursday's
Child (re-taped)
- I
Can't Read
- Always
Crashing In The Same Car
- If
I'm Dreaming My Life
- The
Pretty Things Are Going To Hell
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