David Bowie Cover of the Week: Sébastien Bédé covers “Sense of Doubt”

Sébastien Bédé has produced some of my favorite remixes of Bowie songs, especially from Heathen. I’ve featured some of his remixes on my blog in the past, and interviewed him last year (you can read the interview by clicking HERE). But a remix is not a cover, and thus not eligible for my completely arbitrary criteria for “cover of the week.” This past week, however, Sébastien posted a genuine cover, of the instrumental “Sense of Doubt” off “Heroes”, and it is my featured selection!

Sébastien’s cover is similar to Bowie’s original. Unlike many of his remixes, that draw out subtleties of Bowie’s vocal performances, “Sense of Doubt” has no articulated words at all (though Bowie used his voice as a kind of instrument). The value is less in giving the piece a new take and more in showing us how Sébastien approached the task. In that respect, it is the video that is especially interesting. We see Sébastien playing the piano, the theremin and the Stylophone.* A theremin is an electronic musical instrument played without physical contact, producing sound by the movement of hands near two metal antennas that control pitch and volume. Meanwhile, a Stylophone is a small, portable electronic keyboard played using a stylus to touch the metal surface of its keys, producing a distinctive buzzing tone often used in experimental and pop music including a few by Bowie.

There’s a video of Bowie performing the song live, but he uses different instruments, or more accurately a different instrument– a larger synthesizer (click HERE to see Bowie’s live performance). So Sébastien appears to have created very similar music using different tools, which to me is very cool!

I also like hearing the piece out of the context of “Heroes.” I was recently listening to a compilation of Bowie instrumentals called All Saints, which worked as pleasant background music rather than the frenetic first side of “Heroes” that dramatically shifts to slower and slower instrumentals on what was originally meant to be the flip side of an album, before again shifting to the vocalized closing song, “The Secret Life of Arabia.” I don’t mean to imply that it all doesn’t work together on “Heroes,” but that, just as I often like listening to that album’s vocalized songs without the instrumentals, the reverse is also true. Plus, in this immediate case, it is seldom that I hear a cover of one of Bowie’s covers at all, so I was delighted to find this one.
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* That’s not all– Sébastien’s YouTube video notes list all the instruments he plays and tools he uses in this piece: Yamaha Piano, Classic Stylophone, Stylophone Theremin, Minimoog Voyager, Moog Grandmother, Animoog, GForce M-Tron, Stylophone GenX-1, Moog Synthesizers, GForce Software, Softube Studios.