From Robyn on Patreon in 2026
This song has long skulked in the cloakroom of my brain: never fully in light, discussed, rated or feted. It’s track 2 on side 1 of David Bowie’s Young Americans: a hit record, for sure, yet seldom seen as one of his key albums. A bit like Captain Beefheart’s "The Spotlight Kid", it comes over as a transitional phase on the way to glory. Nonetheless, those ‘plastic soul’ songs (as their author himself termed them) have lain preserved in memory, and in all the evolving formats for recorded music, since 1975 when it first appeared: vinyl, cassette, compact disc, download, streaming and… back to vinyl again. Smooth, suffused with hedonistic angst like much pre-punk classic rock from 50 (!) years ago.
I listened to it a lot in the long hot summer of 1976, and this track "Win: encapsulates, for me, the leisurely dread of those times. To whom is Bowie singing: himself, perhaps, or someone close to him who is mirror-adjacent? The focus is fractured, with odd lines breaking through intact, pregnant with warning:
Slow down, let someone love you
and
Someone like you
Should not be allowed to start any fires
Somebody somewhere is dying of pleasure, but dying nonetheless. Me, I was a skinny, bearded, young hippie, wandering through sun-baked Cambridge, incubating the Soft Boys in my head, trying to recruit the right guys for the job. I was wheeling a new-born daughter and/or an infant stepson around in a pair of striped baby strollers. Drinking cider or strong Fenland ale in the evenings, shaking my head at the disco music on the jukeboxes in the pubs. Bowie seemed to be one of the few forces in pop music that made sense to my already-nostalgic psychedelic head.
Roll forward 50 years, and I’m a white-headed Boomer in a small recording studio in Cardiff, South Wales, crooning this song an octave lower than Bowie himself did back in the Smoke Age at Sigma Sound, Philadelphia. A few miles up the road from us my stepson now lives with his two children, no longer infants. Charlie the recording engineer shakes a pair of headphones, puzzled, and looks up with a flash of recognition:
“Oh, you’re singing THAT one? I thought I knew it from somewhere. Takes you back, doesn’t it?”