Skip to main content

Enter your email below to be the first to hear about new releases, upcoming events, and more from Dig!

Please enter a valid email address
Please accept the terms
Thursday’s Child: David Bowie’s Grown-Up Meditation On Days Gone By
Warner Music
In Depth

Thursday’s Child: David Bowie’s Grown-Up Meditation On Days Gone By

Introducing a new maturity to David Bowie’s writing, Thursday’s Child was a reflective song from an elder statesman of rock.

Back

Released as the lead single from his 1999 album, ‘hours…’, Thursday’s Child set the tone for what would arguably be David Bowie’s most contemplative album up until his final release, 2016’s Blackstar. But though Bowie himself would discourage listeners from interpreting ‘hours…’ as a personal reckoning with mortality, songs such as Thursday’s Child all but demanded that both fans and artist stopped to consider the distance they’d come together in the 30 years since Bowie first gained major recognition, with his breakthrough single, Space Oddity.

“All of my life I’ve tried so hard/Doing the best with what I had,” Bowie sang at the song’s opening. Yet despite the overtones of despondency, Thursday’s Child was proof that Bowie still had what it took to create profoundly affecting art.

Listen to the best of David Bowie here.

The backstory: “I hesitate to say it’s autobiographical”

After jumping feet first into the pop mainstream in the 80s, Bowie made some of the most challenging music of his career throughout the 90s, exploring everything from electronica-based soundtrack work (The Buddha Of Suburbia, 1993) to multimedia world-building (1. Outside, 1995) and full-tilt drum’n’bass (Earthling, 1997). As the cover to ‘hours…’ made plain, his final record of the decade would put that period to rest, as the then 52-year-old Bowie – pictured cradling his Earthling-era self on the album’s sleeve – turned his thoughts towards ageing.

And yet, he was adamant that ‘hours…’ stood apart from the facts of his own life. “It’s a more personal piece, but I hesitate to say it’s autobiographical,” he told Uncut magazine. “The progenitor of this piece is obviously a man who is fairly disillusioned. He’s not a happy man. Whereas I am an incredibly happy man! So what I was trying to do, more than anything else, was capture some of the angst and feelings of… guys of my age. I’d say, broadly, it’s songs for my generation.”

The recording: “The simpler I played, the better it was”

Given that Thursday’s Child was one of seven ‘hours…’ songs used, in alternate form, in the soundtrack that Bowie and guitarist Reeves Gabrels had recorded for a new supernatural-themed computer game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, it was clear that Bowie was happy blurring the edges of reality. And yet, during a BowieNet web chat in April 1999, he promised fans that they would be “surprised at the intimacy of” the music he had been recording, at Seaview Studio, in Bermuda, throughout the early months of the year.

One of the last songs to be written for ‘hours…’, Thursday’s Child was, like much of the rest of the album, built on pre-programmed drums and layered synths played by Bowie and Gabrels, with Mark Plati adding bass and drummer Mike Levesque recording live drums on top, in a style that seemed counterintuitive to the way most percussionists were asked to interact with their electronic counterparts. “The drum machine provides the swing and the acoustic drums provide the rock,” Levesque later told Uncut, speaking of the way Thursday’s Child came together. “The simpler I played, the better it was.”

As sessions moved to New York City, Bowie floated the idea of having R&B trio TLC duet with him on the song’s chorus and recite the sing-song references to Monday’s Child, the 19th-century nursery rhyme that Thursday’s Child invited comparison with. After Mark Plati’s then six-year-old daughter, Alice, refused to take part (“She said she’d rather sing with her friends than with grown-ups,” Plati later said), Gabrels suggested friend and former Berklee College Of Music student Holly Palmer as the ideal candidate. After passing an on-the-spot audition via speakerphone, Palmer headed to the studio, where she laid down a vocal that would secure her a place in Bowie’s live band for the ‘hours…’ mini-tour.

The release: “A strange and slow moving piece”

Chosen as the lead single from ‘hours…’, Thursday’s Child was released on 20 September 1999 and would go on to reach No.16 in the UK; 15 years later, Rolling Stone magazine placed it fifth in a list titled 20 Insanely Great David Bowie Songs Only Hardcore Fans Know. As well as a Radio Edit, the song was issued in its original Omikron guise as well as a Rock Mix that included more prominent electric guitar parts and electronica flourishes that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Bowie’s earlier work of the 90s.

The reflective nature of Thursday’s Child’s lyrics was underscored in the song’s promo video, in which Bowie, after being confronted by his younger self in the mirror, swaps places with his doppelgänger in what he called “a strange and slow moving piece that wanders between a present and a past in a bewildering fashion”. Standing at the centre of it all was Bowie: at ease with his own synthesising – of past, present and anything else that came to mind.

The legacy: Fans could peel back the layers and keep finding more

Although, in his BowieNet discussion, Bowie would admit that “you’re kind of meant to know the nursery rhyme” that Thursday’s Child alludes to, he told the audience at his VH1 Storytellers special that the song had been named after an Eartha Kitt biography he’d discovered as a teenager (crucially, he added, the lyrics were “not actually about Eartha Kitt”). Delving further, Bowie historian Nicholas Pegg has also noted connections with songs by The Velvet Underground (All Tomorrow’s Parties) and Ray Charles (That Lucky Old Sun), as well as an allusion to John Donne’s 1633 poem The Sun Rising.

Like the “Thursday’s child” of the nursery rhyme – someone who “has far to go” – fans could peel back the layers of the song and keep finding more. Indeed, those who rushed to the calendars of yesteryear in search of biographical clues were left thwarted: Bowie’s birthday, 8 January 1947, was a Wednesday, making him, by the logic of the rhyme, “full of woe”.

That may have been the case had Bowie truly been the subject of the song – someone he described as feeling as though “he’d achieved anything that he was ever going to achieve in his life and that the way forward looked as bleak as much of his past had done”. Evidently, that could not have been true of Bowie. Well into his fourth decade as an artist, his past spoke for itself. As for his future: that would hold some of the most remarkable music of his career.

Buy David Bowie vinyl, box sets and more at the Dig! store.

More Like This

I Feel For You: The Prince Song That Gave Chaka Khan A Global Mega-Hit
In Depth

I Feel For You: The Prince Song That Gave Chaka Khan A Global Mega-Hit

Originally written by Prince, I Feel For You became a smash after Chaka Khan recorded a hip-hop-inspired version featuring Melle Mel.

‘Chocolate And Cheese’: Behind Ween’s Deliciously Weird Cult Classic
In Depth

‘Chocolate And Cheese’: Behind Ween’s Deliciously Weird Cult Classic

Bizarrely eclectic and grotesquely absurd, ‘Chocolate And Cheese’ saw Ween go from lo-fi oddballs to a roly-poly professional studio band.

Sign up to our newsletter

Be the first to hear about new releases, upcoming events, and more from Dig!

Sign Up