David Bowie - Buddha Of Suburbia

Title: The Buddha of Suburbia
Format: CD Single

Label: Arista
Year: 1993

Tracks - Buddha Of Suburbia / South Horizon / Dead Against It / Buddha Of Suburbia (Rock Mix)

The Thin White Duke may have returned but let’s face it, Where Are We Now? is a backwards stroll compared to anything Bowie released as he sped through the Seventies.

Reflecting on a time, a place and a creative peak best evidenced in Thomas Jerome Seabrook’s Bowie In Berlin, surely it's little more than a faded snapshot in comparison with anything on those five essential long players?

Many will disagree but the fact we still argue long and hard about David Bowie speaks volumes about his impact and influence on successive generations. Mostly though, the new track reminds me of some earlier wistfulness.

Two decades old now, Bowie’s theme for the televised retelling of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia arrived on a single and ‘soundtrack’ album alongside that year’s Black Tie White Noise. It was a productive twelve months and both song and book detail the author’s restless desire to escape a South London town Bowie would have known well from his own youth.

Despite the paperback’s nod to punk being laughably stilted, Kureishi has said it draws on his experiences growing up on the periphery of The Bromley Contingent, the art school Bowie fans who latched onto the Pistols and redesigned British youth culture in his absence.

I guess there's old wave, there's new wave and there's David Bowie....