David Bowie: 'Where Are We Now?"

David Bowie chose his birthday, Tuesday, 8th January (which he shares with Elvis and Shirley Bassey), to release (with no advance publicity) his first single in a decade, 'Where Are We Now?'

Neil McCormick, reviewing the single in The Daily Telegraph, wrote: "Lush, stately, beautifully strange, weaving resonant piano chords, decaying synths and echoing drums around a simple chord progression and a weary, tenderly understated, quietly defiant vocal, David Bowie’s elegiac new single may be the most surprising, perfect and welcome comeback in rock history . . . It’s not a big, dramatic comeback and all the better for it. Rather it is a small, perfectly formed, poetic song, that doesn’t quite yield its mysteries and leaves you longing for more."

NME enthuses about the video, directed by Tony Oursler: "It's pretty weird and extremely cool. The heads of David Bowie and a mysterious lady are cut onto two teddy-doll outfits. Perhaps they are siamese wolf cubs. They sit on a pommel horse in a studio filled with curiosities and props: a massive egg, empty glass bottles, mannequins, a Labyrinth-syle crystal, one huge ear, a snowflake. Black and white footage of Berlin plays on a large screen behind them, referencing Bowie's period making 'Low', 'Heroes' and 'Lodger' in the German city. One of the shots shows the auto repair shop beneath the apartment he lived in the 70s. The more you watch, the more you'll see."

A new album, The Next Day, will be released on March 11th.