The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell

Hours, 1999

This track is thematically pessimistic and, tragically, probably more pertinent to our unfolding future than it was at the dawn of the millennium. The Pretty Things of the song’s title are the spiritual progeny of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘bright young things’: carefree youth, the likes of which Bowie celebrated on Hunky Dory, yet that he now imagined were facing extinction in the ‘tough times’ of the contemporary zeitgeist. Allied to an engaging Reeves Gabrels guitar hook and a propulsive, driving chug, Pretty Things sounds less like a requiem for doomed young dudes (‘They wore it out, but they wore it well’), more a brooding rock monster.