David Bowie’s most personal song comes from his fourth album Hunky Dory, released in December 1971, and a flop until the release of Ziggy Stardust the following year.

Here’s a surprising pop fact: Hunky Dory, was Bowie’s first album to enter the charts . But not until nine months after its release – and not until his next album, Ziggy Stardust, had been a hit, reaching the giddy heights of No.5 in June 1972.  Its predecessor, Hunky Dory, followed it into the chart three months later, reaching No.3. 

n March 2002 I was lucky enough to see David Bowie perform for a small group of fans in the BBC’s tiny Maida Vale radio studio – one of the most special musical experiences I’ve had – and even luckier to chat to him before the show.

While smoking a fag out of the window outside the no-smoking dressing room, he told me he would be singing this song for the first and only time since the day it was recorded. He showed me the sheaf of (from memory) nine pages of A4 upon which he had transcribed the lyrics to read from during the recording.

I knew enough about the background to the song, which closes his 1971 album Hunky Dory, to know that its dense stream-of-consciousness lyric was said to be about his relationship with his half-brother Terry, who suffered from schizophrenia and committed suicide.

Bowie, who was very good at deflecting inquiries into his thoughts and feelings (I interviewed him four or five times and he was a master of evasion whenever he wished to avoid revealing something) characteristically dismissed the lyrics as making “absolutely no sense.”

That, along with the fact he so rarely sang it, and the lyric’s indefinable sense of melancholia, with its nostalgic imagery and allusions (“And my brother lays upon the rocks / He could be dead, he could be not, he could be you / He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature / Shooting up pie in the sky”) only served to convince me that it was deeply personal for him.

And there’s something so characteristic of him in the way he finally flips from something so intense and personal, as if fearful that he’s already revealed too much, into that Cockney-accented, almost comedic, finale: “Please come awaaay… hey”.

Anyway, he sang it that day. I was standing about six feet away from him at the front. And I couldn’t stop crying.