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Even David Bowie Couldn't Handle This Song

Even David Bowie Couldn't Handle This Song
Image credit: Legion-Media

David Bowie was a man who stared down artistic reinvention like it owed him money.

Glam rock, soul, industrial, Berlin-era surrealism—nothing was too weird, too dense, or too emotionally messy for him to dive into headfirst. Except, apparently, one song.

In a 2003 interview with Vanity Fair, Bowie was asked to name his favorite albums. Instead of picking anything obvious, he went straight for a 12-inch single—Robert Wyatt's haunting 1982 version of Shipbuilding, co-written by Elvis Costello.

"Not an album, a 12-inch single," Bowie admitted, bending the rules. "A vinyl nonetheless. A well-thought-through and relentlessly affecting song... Wyatt's interpretation is the definitive. Heartbreaking—reduces strong men to blubbering girlies."

This from the guy who once recorded a full album while so coked out he forgot making it.

Wyatt's Shipbuilding wasn't a commercial monster, but it hit a nerve. Originally released in 1982 and reissued in 1983, it peaked at number 35 in the UK. The song paints a portrait of working-class towns dependent on the shipbuilding industry—suddenly revived by the Falklands War. Jobs return, the economy perks up, and young men ship out to die. It's quiet devastation, dressed as a ballad.

Bowie may have been prepping Let's Dance at the time, but Wyatt was deep into his radical phase. A card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he spent the early '80s releasing pro-union anthems, revolutionary ballads, and even reworking Stalinist tunes on Rough Trade Records. Shipbuilding stands apart—political, yes, but soft-spoken, mournful, and painfully grounded in real-world consequence.

Hard numbers:

  • Original release: 1982
  • UK chart peak (re-release, 1983): #35
  • Writer: Elvis Costello (music by Clive Langer)
  • Performed by: Robert Wyatt
  • Label: Rough Trade

The fact that this is the song that emotionally leveled Bowie tells you everything. This wasn't some avant-garde noise experiment or lyrical abstraction. This was a quiet lament about ordinary lives twisted by war, sung by a man who sounded like he actually lived them.

Bowie could play an alien, a Thin White Duke, a rock star possessed by Nietzsche—but Shipbuilding cracked through the act. Not many songs could do that.