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Bowie, David - 1984 Loving the Alien
Identifier
019609
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
"Loving the Alien" is a track from the album Tonight by David Bowie. One of only two tracks on the album written solely by Bowie, the song was a surprisingly late release as a single (coming nine months after the release of "Blue Jean" as a single, and eight months after the album).
It was remixed as a single and issued in May 1985
As a demo track, the song was simply called "1", and Bowie said "'Alien' came about because of my feeling that so much history is wrong - as is being rediscovered all the time - and that we base so much on the wrong knowledge that we've gleaned."
He would later reflect that the production on the song undid the power of the lyric, and admitted the demo version had been better.
On the Reality Tour in 2003 and 2004, he again performed this track, but this time a stripped down version with only Bowie on vocals and Gerry Leonard on guitar; in a filmed performance of the tour, Bowie remarked that this arrangement was perhaps "the way it should have always been done."
A description of the experience
Loving The Alien (A Reality Tour 2003)
Watching them come and go
The Templars and the Saracens
They're travelling the holy land
Opening telegrams
Torture comes and torture goes
Knights who'd give you anything
They bear the cross of Coeur de Leon
Salvation for the mirror blind
But if you pray
all your sins are hooked upon the sky
Pray and the heathen lie will disappear
Prayers they hide
the saddest view
(Believing the strangest things,
loving the alien)
And your prayers they break the sky in two
(Believing the strangest things, loving the alien)
You pray til the break of dawn
(Believing the strangest things, loving the alien)
And you'll believe you're loving the alien
(Believing the strangest things, loving the alien)
Thinking of a different time
Palestine a modern problem
Bounty and your wealth in land
Terror in a best laid plan
Watching them come and go
Tomorrows and the yesterdays
Christians and the unbelievers
Hanging by the cross and nail