



“'Cause love’s such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And loves dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves”

Track 100: Shadow Man (unfinished Ziggy out-take)
Shadow Man is a fragile folk ballad concerned with a haunting – the haunting of the I by the self, the person you are now by its shadow. Bowie’s voice is tortured, and always on the edge of breaking: ‘He’ll show you tomorrow / He’ll show you the sorrows / Of what you did today’. There is thus an essential Bowie twist here: it is not the past which haunts you – but rather the future. The consequences of your actions now will necessarily impact the times to come and it is this indistinct doppelgänger of possible outcomes from tomorrow that haunts you. It is – although apparently an unfinished cut – really an acoustic track, but one accompanied by the band with a certain country-style. In this way it feels more akin to the Space Oddity period (which – as some claim – is when it was originally composed). Accordingly, it is hard to see how it would have fitted – musically at least – with the Ziggy album form which it was dropped. Though before the concept of Ziggy was guiding the selection of tracks and the later writing, the new record was looking very different if the out-takes we know of are considered: remakes from the past, covers of Brel and Berry, not to mention the other out-takes we have encountered of new compositions and those that are either lost or still in the archive (One Paper Left; It’s Gonna Rain; and even a new version of Looking For A Friend – see trackbytrack 81 and more stuff below). This version of Shadow Man would never be officially released; however, the song was re-recorded by Bowie around 2000 for the ultimately abandoned Toy project.
‘Shadow Man’: Out-take from the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album. Unreleased. Written by David Bowie. Available on bootlegs.
More stuff:
Shadow Man on Pushing Ahead of the Dame - which also mentions One Paper Left and It’s Gonna Rain - lost / archive tracks for the Ziggy album