David Bowie: The Story of “The Supermen”

In 1965, during the recording of “I Pity The Fool” with the Manish Boys, twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Page and eighteen-year-old David Jones had crossed paths and the sessionman had given the aspiring rock star a turn on the guitar. He decided to use it for the first time in 1970 for “The Supermen” and will do an encore in 1997 in “Dead Man Walking”, on “Earthling”. However, the strength of the guitar phrase of the future leader of Led Zeppelin can be appreciated more in the alternative versions of “The Supermen”, the live ones or the one recorded during the sessions for “Ziggy Stardust” and then donated to the triple album “Glastonbury Fayre”, released to celebrate the very first edition of the well-known festival, in which Bowie participated in 1971.
Disseminated over the years in various publications – from the reissue of “Hunky Dory” to “Live at the BEEB” -, these versions are unfailingly more sober and drier, with the singing kept an octave lower and Ronson’s precious work in greater evidence. An agile simplicity that manages to enhance the composition more than the thunderous recording placed at the end of the album “The man who sold the world”.

It is true that the solemn voices and the monumental timpani which pay homage to Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (recalling the Nietzschean imagery on behalf of third parties) effectively close that sound circle that had been opened, always with timpani accompaniment, by “The Width Of A Circle” within an album where Bowie and the group almost always seek magniloquence, despite the use of an overall limited range of instruments.
It cannot be denied that the cosmogonic reveries of the text lent themselves to redundant sounds. As Bowie said in a promotional interview, “I put the seed of the idea of Homo superior that I was toying with. The advent of the New Man. A mystical thought, a humanoid race that lives forever, even if its gods are dying. The protagonist is a murderer, someone who finds a way to give death to his people in order to become the new god. I saw an interesting thing the other night in an episode of ‘Star Trek’. A spectacular series. There was an entity that entered the spaceship and neutralized all the weapons but made everyone on the crew fight each other and fed on that energy. I think the Superman could be something similar.”

However, in an interview in 1973 he was quite firm on the racial undertones that some saw in the concept. “I recorded a song called ‘The Supermen’ which was about Homo superior and from there I became interested in Nazism. I am appalled by their diabolical methods. There is no room in my head for their theory, its obscene consequences, the terrible disregard for human life.”
Nazism would return, as a nightmare and reverie, in future compositions. As for Homo superior, he would have revealed himself in some subsequent Bowian incarnation, and explicitly already on the following “Hunky Dory” in “Oh! You Pretty Things”, but certainly with a certain “camp” lightness that is completely missing in “The Man Who Sold The World”.

(Paolo Madeddu)

The complete text of this sheet is published in the book “David Bowie” by Paolo Madeddu, published by Giunti, courtesy of the author and the publisher. The book recounts all the songs published by David Bowie in the first part of his career, from 1964 to 1976: all the songs contained in the albums, the singles with their B-sides and the unreleased ones that appeared on live performances and, in two specific appendices, the song outlines, the auditions, the unreleased songs officially published after the artist’s death.