Released 14 October 1977 Length 3:15 Writer(s) David Bowie | Genre Art rock Label RCA Records | |
Recorded Hansa Studio by the Wall, West Berlin
July–August 1977 | ||
"Sons of the Silent Age" is a song written by David Bowie in 1977 for the album "Heroes". According to Brian Eno, it was the only song on the album composed prior to the recording sessions, all others being improvised in the Hansa by the Wall studio. Bowie himself indicated that Sons of the Silent Age could at one stage have been the title for album, rather than "Heroes".
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Biographer David Buckley remarked on the song's "doomy sax-driven verses set incongruously aside cheesy choruses". The lyrics have been interpreted as a third-person revisitation of the themes of psychotic withdrawal explored on Bowie’s previous album Low ("Pacing their rooms just like a cell’s dimensions"), as well as referencing the characters from his 1970 song "The Supermen" ("They never die they just go to sleep one day") on the album The Man Who Sold the World. Author Nicholas Pegg speculated that the line "platforms, blank looks, no books" alluded to the Nazi regime.