“Goodnight Mr. Jones,” Joe Elliott’s Bowie tribute

During my interview with David Bowie Glamour Magazine founding co-editor Nick Smart, which I posted on Saturday (click HERE to link), we somehow got to talking about Def Leppard and how that band’s lead singer, Joe Elliott was a big fan of Bowie. I asked Nick if I remembered a Def Leppard song that paid tribute to Bowie, and he thought I was thinking of “Goodnight, Mr. Jones.”

As it turns out, I was thinking of “Rocket,” which I actually posted about last year. If you want to see that post and the video, click HERE.

But that left me wondering, what is “Goodnight, Mr. Jones”?

The song is Elliott’s homage to Bowie (it is actually by Elliott’s other band, the Down ’N’ Outz). Elliott was inspired to write the song after hearing the news of Bowie’s death in 2016, drawing from Bowie’s own final album, Blackstar. Elliott crafted the song with a musical pastiche, aiming for a sound reminiscent of Bowie’s iconic track “Life on Mars?,” while incorporating lyrical references to key moments in Bowie’s career. The emotional chorus was particularly important to Elliott, who managed to evoke both the cosmic and grounded elements of Bowie’s legacy.

Now, I got all that from an interview with Elliott, which you can read in full HERE. And if you watch the video of the song itself, you will pick up on all the Bowie references— most of them are pretty obvious. And you should watch the video— it is pretty cool and manages to incorporate most of Bowie’s studio album covers.

So, thank you Nick Smart for alerting me to the existence of this song. It certainly belongs somewhere on this blog!
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The Divine Symmetry series compares Bowie songs to other songs with some sort of similarity, intentional or otherwise. The Bowie references in “Goodnight, Mr. Jones” are sort of the point of the song, so I’m not iterating them here. The term “Divine Symmetry” is borrowed from Bowie’s song, “Quicksand.”