Loving the Alien
| "Loving the Alien" | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Single by David Bowie | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| from the album Tonight | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| B-side | Don't Look Down | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Released | May 1985 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Recorded | Le Studio, Morin-Heights, Quebec, Canada, May 1984 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Length | 7:11 (album version) 4:43 (single remix) |
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| Label | EMI America – EA195 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Writer(s) | David Bowie | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| David Bowie singles chronology | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| "The Scumfrog vs Bowie : Loving the Alien" | |
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| Single by David Bowie; The Scumfrog | |
| B-side | "8 Days, 7 Hours" |
| Released | 2002 |
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| Length | 3:20 (single version) |
| Label | Nettwerk America |
| Writer(s) | David Bowie |
"Loving the Alien" is a song written and recorded by David Bowie. It was the opening track to his sixteenth studio album Tonight. One of two tracks on the album written solely by Bowie, an edited version of the song was released as a single in May 1985, nine months after the release of lead single "Blue Jean" and eight months after the release of the album. "Loving the Alien" peaked at No. 19 in the UK Singles Chart. The song explored Bowie's "intense dislike" of organized religion. "Loving the Alien" inspired the title of Christopher Sandford's 1997 biography of Bowie.
As a demo track, the song was simply called "1". 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 recorded the demo in Montreux, Switzerland. He would later comment that the production on the song undid the power of the lyric, saying he preferred the demo version. The music video was co-directed by Bowie with frequent collaborator David Mallet. The original video included a shot at one point of Bowie with a nosebleed; this original version was only released on the 1987 video single "Day-In Day-Out". All subsequent releases of the video have the nosebleed scene edited out.
Bowie's biographer David Buckley called it "the only track on the album with the gravitas of much of his earlier work". Journalist Dylan Jones described it as "definitely the best song from the Tonight album".Yo Zushi of the New Statesman described the song as a "seven-minute masterpiece". While critical of much of Bowie's 1980s output in his appraisal of Best of Bowie in 2002, BBC reviewer Chris Jones stated: "Loving the Alien does have a strange distant beauty to it. Like watching a ballet through a telescope."
Bowie performed the song on his 1987 Glass Spider Tour. On the Reality Tour in 2003 and 2004, he again performed this song, but this time a stripped down version with only Bowie on vocals and Gerry Leonard on guitar; in the film of the tour, Bowie remarked that this arrangement was perhaps "the way it should have always been done."
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Wikipedia