What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever?
As a teenager, I bought a book of Bowie sheet music and learnt several songs well enough that I could probably have busked them on a street corner if I’d been brave enough. I still know most of the words to Five Years. It should be my anthem, with the words changed to ‘Fifty Years’.
What gripped me wasn’t just the melody. It was the sheer theatre of it: an ordinary news announcement that turns into an apocalyptic countdown. It was dystopian, mysterious and strangely moving. Long before I knew what “storytelling through song” really meant, Bowie had shown me.
Even now, if someone says, “A song lyric that’s stuck with you forever?”, that’s the one that immediately starts playing in my head.
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