The Album Intruders, Ep. 1 - It Ain’t Easy

The life of the vinyl 12-inch 33 rpm album is almost eighty years old. How often since all those countless album releases has there been an album with one track on it that doesn’t seem to belong, that is out of kilter with the rest of the album, that needs dumping in order not to interfere with the whole listening experience? It is something that niggles away and has done for over fifty years that my very favourite album, a 10/10 classic, does indeed contain one such track. Would there indeed have been a better track to occupy its space?

David Bowie at the height of his powers as Ziggy Stardust. © Mick Rock, 1972/1973

The album in question is the one that shot David Bowie on the road to superstardom, his incomparable 1972 Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The legendary cover, the inner sleeve with all the lyrics and the headshots of the band. One song though does not have its lyrics for all to sing along to, namely the only track on the album not penned by Bowie himself, the Ron Davies song “It Ain’t Easy”. For many of us in their mid-teens at the time Ron Davies was a decent striker plying his trade for Southampton. Surely he wasn’t turning his hand to songwriting too? There was indeed another Ron Davies who had released a couple of albums as the sixties became the seventies, and had indeed seen the song that would appear on Ziggy covered by no less a band than Three Dog Night of “Joy to the World” and “Mama Told Me Not to Come” fame. It was certainly a big leap for Bowie at the peak of his prolific songwriting phase around Hunky Dory/Ziggy Stardust (1971/1972) to record this folk-blues song in the first place let alone include it on an album that was more a tale of doomed rock and roll stardom defining Glam Rock, to which thematically it bore no similarity.

Ziggy Stardust opens with the apocalyptic “Five Years” and ends with Ziggy’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”. Why in the middle is there this three minute song, not a particularly memorable one either despite the best efforts of the backing singers to add some excitement to it? The Spiders from Mars had performed the song as early as 1971 at the BBC so it had certainly been in their repertoire for a while, but if it wasn’t considered good enough for inclusion on Hunky Dory, why on earth did Bowie see fit to include it on the even more exclusive Ziggy? Was there a Hunky Dory track that could have been kept back until the following year that would have sat better sonically, lyrically and thematically as a side one closer on Ziggy? “Oh You Pretty Things” springs to mind but then would people associate the song with Herman’s Hermits who had already charted with it? “Kooks” surely seemed far too luvvy-duvvy for Ziggy? The lyrics of tracks “Andy Warhol”, “Song for Bob Dylan” and “The Bewlay Brothers” precluded them. “Life on Mars” looks the perfect match for Bowie’s lunar and stellar obsessions, but that song had very little to do with the red planet, more pre-occupied as it was with the nature of fame.  

And so, as the search continues for a far better side one closure we turn to 1974’s Diamond Dogs, and there within is a song that may just have been the perfect fit for Ziggy, dealing as it does with the connection between a singer and his fans and seemingly foreseeing the end of the career, the Suicide that would end side two. The song is “Rock and Roll With Me”. Now of course it would have been impossible for a song recorded in early ’74 to have been included on a 1972 album unless of course the song was hanging around in the air for a while before Diamond Dogs appeared. As his long-time friend Geoff MacCormack is co-credited with the songwriting of “Rock and Roll With Me” and was indeed present at the aforementioned BBC sessions where “It Ain’t Easy” was played, then maybe just maybe the song existed as a twinkle in Bowie’s eye way back then. And imagine if it had, then what a glorious chorus to finish side one of Ziggy and prepare us for the superlatives of side two.

And you? Do you have any tracks to add to our Album Intruders, those songs that just don’t seem to belong? If so, then drop us a line.