I was playing some music while I ate my breakfast. It was a playlist of the songs I’d listened to most often this year and it happened that ‘Wild is the Wind’ by David Bowie came up (here it is on Youtube, here on Spotify). It’s a lush, extravagant, love song, originally recorded by Johnny Mathis in the fifties:
…Give me more than one caress
Satisfy this hungriness
Let the wind blow through your heart
For wild is the wind
Wild is the wind
You touch me
I hear the sound of mandolins
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins… etc etc
(I think the mandolins line is terrible by the way! It really jars. But I like the rest of it.)
Many people have covered this song, including, memorably, Nina Simone, but it’s well suited to Bowie, whose powerful voice and sense of drama seemed to enable him (often, if not always) to get away with melodrama without seeming tongue-in-cheek. I know the song well and was only half-listening. I left the room to do something, closing the door behind me, and forgot about the music.
A minute later, I noticed a strange muffled sound from behind the door, a kind of agonised cry or moan, which for a moment I couldn’t place. But it was the song still playing. Stripped of its words, its melody, its elegant theatricality, it sounded like an animal, far off in the distance, howling with longing into the darkness.
