Old music: David Bowie - Cygnet Committee

David Bowie recorded a fair amount of bland pop in his time. And I'm not just talking about Absolute Beginners . Even the strutting pomp of Ziggy and Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs and Young Americans seem rather banal now. But every Bowie album from the 70s contains a Desert Island track. Something you wouldn't want the world to lose. Lady Grinning Soul , All the Madmen , Always Crashing in the Same Car , Station to Station , Sweet Thing/Candidate , Quicksand … And, on the eponymous David Bowie album, rereleased as Space Oddity, there was this track, Cygnet Committee. I don't pretend to know what a Cygnet Committee was or is. I'm not sure Bowie himself does. And though there is a lot that is musically familiar about this piece (the descending prog-rock sequence at the opening, and the predictable major-chord cycle of the song's climax), it's the words that make the difference – and the way they are sung. The basic idea – relevant today in the upheaval sweeping the Arab world – is that revolutions founder on the new orthodoxies they impose ("We can force you to be free/ We can force you to believe"). There is the wretched oxymoron of the peaceful ideal of the mid-60s counterculture being subverted by the violence it abhorred, as the decades clicked over. ("I will fight for the right to be right/ I will kill for the good of the fight for the right to be right".) And then that alarming culmination: "We want to live. I want to live." Anywhere else that might be stating the obvious; here Bowie, hollow of cheekbone and hounded by a demonic lead guitar, makes it sound like an urgent priority. This is a piece of the period, a visceral scream that even 40 years later makes the hairs on the neck stand up. A movement came and went and left an awful lot of pieces to be cleared up afterwards.