‘Rubberband’

In a way, it’s kind of a miracle we’re talking about David Bowie at all in the year of our lord 2025, because his early years were a total mess. He had ‘Space Oddity’, which is a deserved classic to this day, but other than that, the pickings are slim, especially when you account for his self-titled 1967 debut album which is utter bollocks from start to finish.

Throw a dart at this album’s track listing and you’ll A) be giving it what it deserves and B) find a song worthy of this list. So, this woeful attempt at a music hall comedy song serves as a proxy for all of them. They all smack of Bowie trying unsuccessfully to unite his acting and rock star dreams. He ends up with this unholy union of The Kinks at their most smug and Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’. Calling it dire barely covers it.

‘The Laughing Gnome’

Another one from his debut album that shows the worst thing that can possibly happen to an artist whose ambitions outweigh their skills. You see, it’s one thing to release a bad debut. Loads of artists have them, from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Eminem via Fugees. Bowie had a worse debut album than all of them and then had the ultimate humiliation.

‘The Laughing Gnome’ is unconscionable. Godawful gnome puns, sped up voices, and a chorus that’ll burrow into your head like the Cordyceps from The Last of Us, the track was also a pretty massive hit. A song certified silver in the UK, which means sales of over a quarter of a million; 250,000 people bought that record, and, suddenly, David Bowie was “The Laughing Gnome Guy”. Only someone as much of a chameleon as Bowie could have gotten out of that one.

‘Rosalyn’

As unquestionable as his genius was, Bowie’s covers were always a hit and miss, which makes a strange degree of sense. He was always thrillingly himself, and the art of a good cover version is bridging the gap between your own style and someone else’s. For every electrifying live version of The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, there’s the fact that the only duff album of his 1970s pomp was the covers collection Pinups. A record slapped together to appease his record label, and boy howdy does it show.

The up-tempo nature of each track feels less like proto-punk energy and more like getting the whole migraine over with as quickly as possible. His version of The Pretty Things’ ‘Rosalyn’ makes the list for not just being an uninspired rattle through an already shrug-worthy song, but also for containing quite possibly the worst vocals Bowie ever laid down—seemingly trying for a David Johansen style sneer and ending up at a constipated Billy Idol. Oh dear.

‘Dancing in the Street’

The 1980s were a brutally strange time for Bowie. On the one hand, he was bigger than ever, cashing in his muso cred to become the world-conquering pop star he’d always imagined himself as. On the other hand, most of the actual music he released in that period was well below his high watermark. Drowning in mediocrity. Case in point, this preening shouting match between two past-it old dinosaurs slapped together to promote Live Aid.

If anything, the music is the least interesting part of the whole story. For one thing, you can just go and listen to the all-conquering Martha and the Vandellas’ original. However, the video makes it all worth it. It’s still absolutely hilarious, especially if you find the still-phenomenal no-music version of the video.

‘God Only Knows’

Yeah, do you know everything I was saying earlier about David Bowie being hit or miss as a covers artist? Take all that, multiply it by one of the greatest songs in the history of popular music, then divide it by being recorded during basically the only moment of Bowie’s entire recording career that you could call creatively bankrupt. He was arguably setting himself up for failure here, but he really didn’t have to fail this hard.

His vision for Brian Wilson’s masterpiece was to basically make it a soul song. Now, this had worked previously, with Betty Everett’s agreeable 1975 version. However, it wasn’t 1975 anymore but the glorious technicolour 1980s with nary a live instrument in sight. Imagine a chintzy, hold music version of The Beach Boys’ classic, with Bowie’s hammy baritone overblowing lyrics made to be delivered with child-like plainness. ‘God Only Knows’ why he bothered. Cocaine, probably.

‘Never Let Me Down’

Bowie’s reputation as something of a genre dilettante is more than earned. The man didn’t move from one genre to the next because he always wanted to make, say, proto-industrial ambient music like the second half of ‘Heroes’. He did it because, ever the actor, he wanted to give a new role a try. This reputation often distracts from how incredible Bowie was as a songwriter, though, which makes hookless dirges like the title track from his 1987 album sting all the more.

There’s at least a fairly heartwarming story behind the song. It’s a tribute to his best friend Coco Schwab, who helped extricate Bowie from his vampiric management deal with Mainman and a punishing drug addiction. One can’t help but think he needn’t have bothered. In Nicholas Pegg’s book The Complete David Bowie, the ‘Starman’ says that this track was “completely finished in 24 hours from the beginning of the writing to the end of the arranging”. Yeah, Dave, we can tell.

‘Glass Spider’

Real talk: spoken word moments in pop songs are as good as they are short. “Fuck it, it’s fine” from Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘bad idea right?’ Good! ‘Leader of the Pack’ by The Shangri-Las? Great opening dialogue! However, starting a song with a faux Tolkien-esque ramble about spiders that sounds like the intro to the worst D&D session you’ll ever have and is nearly the length of a song? Yeah, that’s bad, Dave. The ultimate insult comes if you actually put up with said soliloquy, because then you get to the song itself and Christ, the production.

Clattering, overpowering drum machines that sound like they were programmed by someone still reading the manual and wailing, whining guitar lines that sound like Bowie desperately trying to convince himself that Peter Frampton was worth his session fees. Both of them doing their level best to cover the lack of ideas or hooks in this never-ending dirge that’s annoying in how boring it is. Then, he named the biggest tour of his whole career after this song. Bloody hell.

‘Video Crime'<em> </em>

Now, this may not count to you as a David Bowie track, and that’s an argument to which I’d willingly listen. However, imagine if you joined a band with the actual David Bowie. The one who wrote ‘Life On Mars’, made Ziggy Stardust, played Jareth the Goblin King, y’know, THAT guy. Would you be telling the artist who gave the world ‘Heroes’, “yeah, that’s great, Dave, but we’ve already got a few of your songs on the set, how about we make some room for the rest of us?”

To me, Tin Machine is a David Bowie record in all but name, and I do not mean that as a compliment. The idea that he was trying to ape the godamn Pixies with this lumpy, artless mess is mind-boggling. It’s another attempt to cover up a dearth of actual songwriting hooks with sheer noise and instrumentation, but this time with the worst, most checked-out rehearsal tapes from some grunge also-rans. At least Bowie himself seemed to have a blast doing it.

‘Sex And The Church’

Now you listen here, Bowie’s 1990s were great, actually, and no one will silence my holy crusade. Tin Machine (or perhaps its abject failure) and the whole mess that had been the great man’s 1980s lit a fire under him. So, despite legions of Britpop bores building whole careers out of making Aladdin Sane more heterosexual, Bowie immersed himself in the scene to give the world its most exciting and boundary-pushing music. That was the dance and industrial music movement.

This led to a lot of great music that was pilloried at the time; ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ is an all-timer of a Bowie classic. However, enthusiasm and ideas can only count for so much, and the worst of it came from his attempt at a soundtrack album for the Hanif Kureishi novel The Buddha of Suburbia. What goes for icy, edgy cool ends up sounding more like the kind of music Jez from Peep Show makes. Avoid.

‘The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)’

Y’know, for an artist as theatrical, it’s strange Bowie never really got a genuine concept album off the ground in his prime. There are those who swear blind that Ziggy Stardust has a full-on storyline, and Diamond Dogs definitely started out life as a Bowie-fied take on 1984, but both of those became rock albums with highly pronounced themes. It wasn’t until 1995 that we got a full-on, story-driven concept album from Bowie in the form of Outside. Does it work? Umm… kind of.

The highs are there: ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ is another absolute Bowie classic, and it came from this album. But a lot of the record is saturated with tiresome guff like this track on the list. Granted, it is important to the story of the album. However, if a part of a story feels like homework that you have to keep up with despite your attention wavering, it probably doesn’t need to be a part of the story. Considering Outside‘s high points are some of the greatest moments of Bowie’s late career, a more severe editing process could have paid off greater dividends, and this ponderous work of faux-avant-garde nonsense would have been first on the chopping block.