The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett

BOY FROM FREECLOUD
    (Bowie)
    Recorded June 1969; single B-side. Re-recorded August 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP
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    The first Arts Lab was founded by Jim Haynes in Drury Lane, London. It was, Haynes declared, “an ‘energy centre’ where anything can happen depending upon the needs of the people running each individual Lab and the characteristics of the building. A Lab is a non-Institution . . . a Lab’s boundaries should be limitless.” The venue hosted art exhibitions by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, among many other happenings, and attracted curious visitors from across London. Among them was David Bowie, who by spring 1969 was living with underground journalist Mary Finnigan in Beckenham. As the Arts Lab ethic spread across the country, they launched a local venture at a pub in Beckenham High Street: a Folk Lab, initially, designed as a fund-raising focus for a wider Arts Lab collective. As a demonstration of Bowie’s almost invisible profile as a musician, he and Finnigan listed their home phone number in underground newspaper advertisements for their enterprise.
    â€œThe plan is to turn on the adults by spearheading the project at children,” Finnigan announced. “Initially, we will run Saturday morning poetry, music and mime scenes for children, gradually expanding to include theatre projects for kids.” Bowie, she said, “is enthusiastic about teaching mime, music and drama to kids.” His affinity with children was apparent from songs such as “There Is a Happy Land” [A25] and “When I’m Five” [A53]; his own experience of childhood was more ambiguous. At twenty-two, he admitted that “I feel almost middle-aged physically. I often regret not leading a more normal teenage life.”
    His idealism and regret informed the parable of the “Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud”: an innocent boy is threatened with hanging by his fellow citizens and is rescued by the mountain on which he lives, which destroys the village to save his life. “Everything the boy says is taken the wrong way,” Bowie explained, “both by those who fear him and those who love him. I suppose in a way he’s rather a prophet-figure.” The song added another dimension: the boy’s persecution was sparked by a fear that his madness might be contagious. Allowed to speak, though, the boy uttered nothing more insane than a cry of universal humanity: the hippie equivalent of Ziggy Stardust’s “you’re not alone” [61]. Twenty years later, Bowie reflected: “I always felt I was on the edge of events, the fringe of things, and left out. A lot of my characters in those early years seem to revolve around that one feeling.”
    â€œWild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud” was a courageous attempt to deal with this isolation on an almost operatic scale. Trapped in his prison, the boy was represented by the endless circularity of a D chord with a descending root, from which there was no escape; even a key shift led inexorably back down the scale to captivity. As the scene cut to the mountain, announced with a strident C major chord, the ground began to slide, and after a series of unexpected key changes, Bowie proclaimed the boy’s apparent freedom with a defiant proclamation of identity. Then the action began to race, with a flurry of abrupt tonic/subdominant and tonic/relative-minor chord changes—before, inexorably, the initial theme returned, to signal that hope had died. The melody kept close to the action, the boy’s plaintive cry reaching to Bowie’s familiar high G, and then being knocked back to earth.
    In its initial reading, the song was played out starkly against acoustic guitar and an almost aggressive, chopping cello played by Paul Buckmaster. When re-recorded for the David Bowie LP, it was left to gasp beneath an epic arrangement (“I heard a Wagnerian orchestra in my head,” admitted producer Tony