Bowie cover of the week: Hebephrenic performs “Memory of a Free Festival, Pt. 2”

It’s hard for me to say “Memory of a Free Festival” is an underrated Bowie song, because, what exactly does that mean? Its the final song on a well-known album (Space Oddity) and will come up again when I write a forthcoming blog entry about how Bowie tended to close out his albums. It’s not exactly unknown, but at the same time I have rarely heard it outside the context of the album itself. That said, I think it’s one of Bowie’s stronger early works, with a lot of foreshadowing about what’s to come. So I like that this band, Hebephrenic (named after a type of Schizophrenia), chose to cover, not the entire song, but its second half, which might as well be called, “The Sun Machine is Coming Down.”

Bowie would occasionally write a song that is actually two songs. Some examples of this include “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise);” “Station to Station,” and “Blackstar.” “Memory of a Free Festival” was, as far as I can tell, the first. Part one is a commentary on the twilight of the 60s and hippy music festival culture. According to Bowie legend, it was inspired by Bowie’s own bad experience at a free festival. But that’s all I’m going to write here about the first part of the song, because the cover is of the second half, which as you will here, is perfectly capable of standing up on its own.

The second half is about space aliens from Venus landing in their “sun machine”— a spaceship— and having a party, or, to be more precise, “we’re going to have a party.” So “Space Oddity” opens and closes with references to space, thematically telegraphing everything from Ziggy Stardust to “TV-C15” to “Hallo Spaceboy.”

From what I can tell, Hebephrenic is a real band, possibly a metal band, but I never heard of them before coming across this recently posted (but possibly quite old) clip. I like what they did here, which is why I selected it as the cover of the week.