DAVID BOWIE – Look Back In Anger

“Look Back in Anger” is a song written by David Bowie and Brian Eno for the album Lodger (1979). It concerns “a tatty ‘Angel of Death'”, and features a guitar solo by Carlos Alomar.

RCA Records was unsure if America was ready for the sexual androgyny of “Boys Keep Swinging”, the lead-off single from Lodger in most territories, and “Look Back in Anger” was issued instead. The B-side was another track from Lodger called “Repetition”, a story of domestic violence. The single failed to chart.

“Look Back in Anger” has a mixed reputation among Bowie commentators. NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray described it as “probably the low point” of the album, while Nicholas Pegg considers it “one of Lodger’s dramatic highlights” and Chris O’Leary has called it “one of Bowie’s strongest songs of the late Seventies”.

Beyond the shared title, the song has nothing to do with the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger.

Bowie performed the song on his 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour (it is the opening number on the Serious Moonlight film) and reworked it in the mid-1990s as a heavy rock song for the Outside and Earthling tours.

You know who I am, he said The speaker was an angel He coughed and shook his crumpled wings Closed his eyes and moved his lips It’s time we should be going

Look back in anger, driven by the night Till you come (Waiting so long, I’ve been waiting so, waiting so) Look back in anger, see it in my eyes Till you come

No one seemed to hear him So he leafed through a magazine And, yawning, rubbed the sleep away Very sane he seemed to me

Look back in anger, driven by the night Till you come (Waiting so long, I’ve been waiting so, waiting so) Look back in anger, feel it in my voice Till you come

Producers: Tony Visconti David Bowie Musicians: David Bowie: vocals, guitar Dennis Davis: drums George Murray: bass Carlos Alomar: guitar Sean Mayes: piano Brian Eno: synthesizer, horse trumpet, Eroica horn Tony Visconti: backing vocals