If that’s already sounding a trifle familiar to the Hunky Dory fan in you, allow me to remind you of a line from ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’: And the best is kept until last…Įxhibit A is the opening track, a jaunty number called ‘Mama’s Boy’ in which Biff exhorts the parents of the flower-power generation to chill out about their children. The really interesting stuff lies elsewhere on Biff’s album. Bowie does it better, but Biff did it first. Bowie’s vocal is unarguably superior, but he’s aping much of what Biff does – for example that last extended ‘Fuh-reeeee!’, lifting into falsetto. For another thing, there’s the vocal: Biff sings most of ‘Fill Your Heart’ straight on the beat, whereas Bowie brings a dextrous swing to the whole affair, loosening up the song and, appropriately enough given the lyric, freeing it wonderfully. For one thing, there’s the piano: sweet though Biff’s playing is, it’s no match for Rick Wakeman’s dizzying virtuosity on Hunky Dory. A self-acknowledged magpie but never a plagiarist, Bowie freely acknowledges this debt in the handwritten liner notes on the back cover of Hunky Dory: ‘Mick and I agree that the ‘Fill Your Heart’ arrangement owes one hell of a lot to Arthur G Wright and his prototype.’ Nonetheless, Bowie succeeds in lifting the song to a new level. If you’ve heard Biff’s version of ‘Fill Your Heart’, you’ll know that Bowie’s rendition on Hunky Dory is extraordinarily faithful: in particular, the string arrangement and the parping sax breaks are practically identical to those created by Biff’s arranger, Arthur G Wright. Biff’s vocal stylings and his instrumental sound evidently made an impact on David at the beginning of the seventies, a time when our man was still finding his own voice as a singer-songwriter. Quite how resounding a chord is something I’m only now beginning to appreciate.ĭavid’s oft-quoted description of Biff Rose as ‘a flower-power Randy Newman’ is entirely apt: the quirky vignettes, eccentric wordplay and piano-and-strings arrangements which are Biff’s stock in trade readily call to mind Newman’s early work. Both of these songs originated on The Thorn in Mrs Rose’s Side, so we’ve always known that it was an LP which struck a chord with David. Those whose knowledge goes a little deeper will also be familiar with ‘Buzz the Fuzz’, a rather more whimsical Biff Rose composition which Bowie occasionally included in his live sets at around the same time.
I say ‘the entirety’ – it’s as short as most albums were in those days, clocking in at a refreshingly concise 35 minutes, but that’s more than enough time to shed new light on a whole stack of David Bowie’s early songs.īowiephiles will, of course, know the New Orleans-born Biff Rose as the co-author of ‘Fill Your Heart’, the hippy-dippy anthem to happiness, freedom and gentleness which our man seized, covered and made his own on Hunky Dory. I blush to confess that, for the first time in all my years as a David Bowie enthusiast, I’ve just sat down and listened to the entirety of Biff Rose’s 1968 album The Thorn in Mrs Rose’s Side. On other occasions – and this is one of them – it can be something which, as the old saying goes, has been hidden in plain view.
Sometimes this discovery can be something very obscure. One of the lessons learned from a lifetime’s immersion in David Bowie’s work is the certain knowledge – and this is something I happily came to terms with many years ago – that just when you thought you’d got the whole thing nailed, along comes an unexpected discovery which requires you to rethink everything you thought you knew. A Rose by any other name: the secret history of Biff and Bowie
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