...and Happy 60th Birthday to David Bowie.

It's a big day for musical birthdays; Shirley Bassey is 70 today and Elvis Presley would have been 72. (Sean Paul and R. Kelly also celebrate theirs.)

To commemorate Bowie's big day, here are my ten favourite Bowie songs (off the top of my head today, at least). What are yours?

01 Ashes To Ashes - The sequel to number 2.
Because it's brilliant and nonsense and brilliant nonsense, with a wonderfully pretentious video and an association for me that I can't go into here(!)



02 Space Oddity - The prequel to the sequel.
The re-release of this 1969 hit in 1975 coincided with me getting my first cassette recorder. (Kasuga, wherever they came from.) I used to play this a lot and drift away during that bit where it all goes weird, imagining I was in space. The storyline also used to scare me a bit.

Interesting homemade(?) video:



03 Starman - Why do I like all the space-themed ones best? Boy George's favourite Bowie song, as covered by him when he won Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes.



04 Absolute Beginners
I’m possibly the only person in the world who loved the film, which was savaged by the critics AND this, Bowie’s theme tune, but I do, so there. I even have Absolute Beginners on video, partly because I attended the swanky Birmingham premiere. Oh yes. (I've never attended any film premiere since.)



05 Boys Keep Swinging
Because when you're a 13-year old closeted gay boy, hearing a song on the radio that says 'when you're a boy, other boys check you out' is very, very exciting indeed. The best (and yet the most ludicrous) song ever written about being a boy.

06 China Girl
Brilliant song, brilliant video.

07 Let's Dance
As above.

08 Under Pressure (with Queen)
Because you can't beat a bit of overblown pop with an 'um ba ba beh, um ba ba beh, do dey da, do dey da'.

09 Hallo Spaceboy! (with Pet Shop Boys)
Another spacey one! Perhaps I should have been an astronaut. Given the combined stock of these two acts in 1996, I've never understood why this only made number 12.

10 Dancing In The Street (with Mick Jagger)
Because the drummer on this track (and behind Bowie at Live Aid) once stayed in our student house. It was Prefab Sprout's Neil Conti. More than that, I cannot say. Happy memories of that student house (even though it should have been condemned).

(I tried to squeeze eleven songs into my top ten, so Fashion has just missed out.)

Labels: 60, birthday, david bowie, elvis presley, shirley bassey, top ten

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