Some Are

Low reissue bonus track, 1991

DaviD lonGDon, Big Big train

“This beautiful, haunting song was recorded by Bowie and Eno during the Low sessions [1976], but it wasn’t actually released until Rykodisc reissued Bowie’s catalogue [in 1991] and we finally heard it as a bonus track. I’ve just revisited it again, and in my opinion it really ought to have been on

Low, though of course it’s part of David’s most fascinating era. Low has everything.

“Though it’s hardly an easy listen – side one is pretty kind, but its flip is experimental – it’s one of the most revolutionary albums of the 1970s. Working with Eno made David see things in a different way, and Low is a prime example of that. Eno used a system of cards that would be consulted randomly. For instance, one would say: ‘Make the least significant thing the most prominent,’ and off you’d go on a path that was completely unforeseen.

“Bowie later spoke of his inspiration for Some

Are. When he wrote about it, he was thinking about a “failed Napoleonic force stumbling back through Smolensk. Finding the unburied corpses of their comrades left from their original advance on Moscow. Or possibly a snowman with a carrot for a nose, a crumpled Crystal Palace Football Club admission ticket at his feet. A Weltschmerz [world weariness] indeed.”

“Woah. And as if that wasn’t enough, play it through headphones and you can hear the sound of wolves – they sound very distressed. It’s creepy and deadly.”