Written by Valentino Scotto
In May 1979, David Bowie opened Lodger, the closing chapter of the trilogy he began in Berlin with Low and “Heroes”. “Fantastic Voyage” drifts in on piano and a small orchestra of mandolins, played by producer Tony Visconti. It preserves a gentle vibration in its tone, an almost quaint sensation. It is one of the most quietly political songs Bowie has ever recorded.
Written at the height of the Cold War, the theme of the song’s lyrics surveys a world of missiles, imperiled civilizations, and decisions made far above the heads of the people who must live with them. It’s remarkable where Bowie stands in the event: not at the podium but at ground level, among ordinary people. “We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression,” he sings, a line that lands twice. There is the private meaning to that line, the daily work of protecting your own spirit. And there is the public one: the gloom manufactured by the powerful, pressed down onto everyone below. Bowie states it plainly in an interview with ‘Melody Maker’ on May 19th, 1979 a week before the release of ‘Lodger’: “One constantly feels that so many things are out of our own control, and it’s just this infuriating thing that you don’t want to have their depression ruling your life or dictating how you will wake up each morning.”
The song’s moral center arrives in a single, repeated refusal: “Dignity is valuable, but our lives are valuable too.” It is an argument against every ideology that trades human lives for political abstractions such as national pride and strategic advantage. Bowie sets the fatalism of ordinary people against the recklessness of leaders willing to “shoot some of those missiles,” and he leaves no doubt in our minds whose side he is on.
But the line that should stop every storyteller cold comes near the end. Confronted with the fear of annihilation, “an entire people wiped out”, the narrator’s response is not despair. It is documentation: “I’ve got to write it down,” Bowie insists, “and it won’t be forgotten.” The entire impulse of documentary storytelling compressed into one lyric. It is the conviction that bearing witness is the first act of justice and forgetting the first act of erasure. This is the entire purpose of Docutribe’s existence: documenting and storytelling through filmmaking with the purpose to activate positive change at the local community level, from Boston neighborhoods to our partnerships in Ukraine. Community living, through the very injustices Bowie sang about in 1979. The subjects change; yet the duty we have, to write it down, has not.
How the song was made carries a lesson of its own. Bowie’s collaborator Brian Eno co-created Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards designed to break routine thinking when the pressure of the studio pushes artists toward safe, proven solutions. During the Berlin era sessions, Eno and Bowie would each draw a card in secret and follow its instruction. On one occasion, a card said to make everything as similar as possible while the other said to emphasize differences. The collision produced something neither could have planned. “Fantastic Voyage” itself was an experiment: it shares the same chord structure as “Boys Keep Swinging,” another track Bowie wrote on the Lodger album, transformed entirely through tempo, melody, and arrangement. Even the mandolins were borrowed from a music shop in Montreux.
There is something deeply democratic in that kind of style. Innovation in the song reminds us that it is not a budget line, it is a willingness to approach the familiar sideways. That is precisely the spirit of innovative storytelling Docutribe champions: communities confronting everyday challenges creatively with the tools and traditions already in their hands. You do not need an orchestra. You need a point of view, an instrument (sometimes borrowed), and the nerve to try the same old chords a different way.
Nearly five decades after the creation of “Fantastic Voyage", it has lost none of its urgency. Missiles still fly. Communities are still asked to absorb somebody else’s depression. And the song’s quiet instruction still stands: refuse to let the powerful dictate how you wake up each morning, insist that our lives are valuable too, and when injustice happens; write it down, film it, tell it, so it won’t be forgotten. That is the voyage Bowie invited us on. At Docutribe, it is the one we take with every story we help a community tell. We hope you’ll take it with us: listen to the song, then ask what story from your own community needs writing down.
Sources & further listening
Bowie, David. Interview. Melody Maker, 19 May 1979.
"David Bowie – Fantastic Voyage Lyrics." Genius, genius.com/David-bowie-fantastic-voyage-lyrics. Accessed 8 July 2026.
"Fantastic Voyage." The Bowie Bible, 15 Mar. 2019, www.bowiebible.com/songs/fantastic-voyage/. Accessed 8 July 2026.
Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. Rev. ed., Titan Books, 2016.
Prados, Manuel. "Oblique Strategies (Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt)." Manuel Prados, manuelprados.net/oblique-strategies/. Accessed 8 July 2026.
Scoates, Christopher. Brian Eno: Visual Music. Chronicle Books, 2013.
Visconti, Tony. Liner notes. A New Career in a New Town (1977–1982), Parlophone, 2017.
