At the Time of Glam

It's no secret that David Bowie expressed, on more than one occasion, a deep admiration for Lucio Battisti, going so far as to call him one of the two greatest songwriters in the world. The other, for the record, was Lou Reed.

For a brief period in the early Nineties, when the singer-songwriter from Poggio Bustone was by then fully immersed in his creative phase with Pasquale Panella, rumours even began to circulate of a possible collaboration with the Thin White Duke. That never materialized, but it's an idea that sounds far from illogical, given the subterranean artistic affinities that, even from a distance, linked the two.

And yet an indirect but very real contact between the two worlds had already taken place twenty years earlier. In 1973, to be precise, with the most famous of the Spiders from Mars acting as go-between. But to fully piece the story together, we need to rewind even further, to the end of the previous decade.

A first, indirect rendez-vous had in fact already occurred in 1969, with the ill-fated "Ragazzo solo, ragazza sola", the Italian-language version of "Space Oddity" that David Bowie recorded in 1969 with the help of Lucio Battisti's lyricist, Giulio Rapetti, better known as Mogol. The lyrics turned out to be a far cry from the magic of the original, as did the British dandy's performance, delivered in a broken, almost caricatural Italian. The contrast between the majestic, visionary music of the Major Tom saga and such a pedestrian text created an obvious rift, undoing the fusion of words and sound that made the original so powerful.

Four years later, on 2 August 1973, having just finished recording his covers album "Pin Ups", David Bowie landed in Italy with his wife Angie, settling into a country residence near Rome, Villa San Nicola in La Storta. With him was his faithful ally Mick Ronson, guitarist of the Spiders from Mars, along with his wife Suzi Fussey, personal hairdresser to both the Thin White Duke and his mother. During those days of relaxation and encounters, friends and acquaintances came to pay court to Bowie, among them Patty Pravo, who had met him precisely during the recording session for "Ragazzo solo, ragazza sola".

When Bowie returned to London on 7 August to work on the mixing of "Pin Ups", Ronson and Fussey decided to stay on in Rome for another two weeks. It was during that time that the guitarist, a cornerstone of the Ziggy Stardust band and the whole glam rock saga, began listening compulsively to Italian music. He was struck in particular by one song: "Io vorrei… non vorrei… ma se vuoi". Written by Mogol and Battisti, it had been included on the album "Il mio canto libero" (1972) and stood as one of the peaks of their creative partnership, in which words and music intertwined and fed off each other. It's no accident that some critics have read it in almost madrigal-like terms. In the chorus, the rising and falling motion of the notes mimics the very movement of the sea, translating into sound lines such as "come può uno scoglio arginare il mare" or "le discese ardite e le risalite".

Mick Ronson fell hopelessly in love with it, so much so that a year later, while working on his debut solo album, the song came back to him, prompting him to record an English-language version. He therefore asked Bowie himself to write new lyrics, which became "Music Is Lethal", the fourth track on Ronson's album "Slaughter On 10th Avenue", released in February 1974. "Music Is Lethal" was thus officially credited to the joint songwriting duo of David Bowie and Lucio Battisti. In 2008, however, Suzi Fussey would claim to have actually co-written it herself, stating that Bowie took the songwriting credit only because, at the time, she wasn't in a position to claim it.

What is certain is that, musically, the track closely follows the original, filtered through the unmistakable bite of Ronson's guitar. The lyrics, on the other hand, inhabit an entirely different world: gone are the rocks, the sea and the daring descents, replaced by urban snapshots, adult tensions and an ambiguous sensuality that seems to have been lifted straight from Bowie's own vocabulary.

Mick Ronson's Italian obsession didn't end there. On his following album, "Play Don't Worry", the English guitarist once again drew on a song by one of our singer-songwriters, this time Claudio Baglioni, covering his "Io me ne andrei" under the title "The Empty Bed". His partnership with David Bowie, however, would soon fracture. "Pin Ups" remained the last album to feature them working together for almost twenty years. They would only reunite in 1993 for "Black Tie White Noise", made just a few months before Ronson's death from liver cancer.

What always kept the two men connected, though, was their shared passion for Lucio Battisti, further proof of the international stature of the singer-songwriter from Lazio, who in 1977 would even attempt to conquer America with the controversial "Images" project. But that is very much another story. What remains is only the regret that the elective affinities linking the British dandy and the curly-haired singer-songwriter from Rieti never turned into an actual collaboration, the results of which would truly have been impossible to predict.

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01/03/2026