Bowie, David - Dancing With The Big Boys Lyrics

Thanks for this one! I still have the vinyl. I remember putting this onto a party tape when it came out but it wasn't right for the middle of the road audience at that party ("Hey, what's this? I haven't heard it before..." which was a bad thing for that crowd) so fortunately I put a more MOR song next on the tape and we went from there.

Dancing with the Big Boys", which Bowie co-wrote with Iggy Pop, was written and recorded in eight hours as they egged each other on. In what was described as an "exhilarating rush", Bowie and Pop "went in [to the studio] with a few bottles of beer and would virtually bellow out anything that came into their heads," said Padgham. "And I just recorded it all." The song is about the "little guy" being crushed by "oppressive corporate structures." The lyrics were taken from a backlog of unused lyrics; the line "this dot marks your location" was a reference to a "lengthy irritating stay" at a New York Hotel (Bowie had been looking at the hotel room's fire escape map), and "Your family is a football team" was a reference to the immigrant families working in New York; "the whole family [has] to work together for survival." The track elicited this from Bowie:

There's a particular sound I'm after that I haven't really got yet; I'll either crack it on the next album or retire from it. I think I got quite close to it on "Dancing with the Big Boys." ... I got very musical over the last couple of years - trying to write musically and develop things the way people used to write in the Fifties. I stayed away from experimentation. Now, I think I should be a bit more adventurous. And in "Big Boys," Iggy and I broke away from all that for one track, and it came nearer to the sound I was looking for than anything else.