Quicksand (David Bowie song)
original song written, composed, and performed by David Bowie
"Quicksand" is a song written by the English singer-songwriter David Bowie and released on his 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Background
"Quicksand" was recorded on 14 July 1971 at Trident Studios in London. This ballad features multi-tracked acoustic guitars and a string arrangement by Mick Ronson. Producer Ken Scott, having recently engineered George Harrison's album All Things Must Pass, attempted to create a similarly powerful acoustic sound with this track.
Bowie said of the song, "The chain reaction of moving around throughout the bliss and then the calamity of America produced this epic of confusion. Anyway with my esoteric problems I could have written it in Plainview or Dulwich" and that it was a mixture of "narrative and surrealism".
Lyrically the song, like much of Bowie's work at this time, was influenced by Buddhism ("You can tell me all about it on the next bardo"), occultism, and Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Superman. It refers to the magical society Golden Dawn and name-checks one of its most famous members, Aleister Crowley, as well as Heinrich Himmler, Winston Churchill and Juan Pujol (codename: Garbo).
Reception
NME editors Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray have described it as "Bowie in his darkest and most metaphysical mood", while a contemporary review in Rolling Stone remarked on its "superb singing" and "beautiful guitar motif from Mick Ronson".
Live performances
Bowie performed the song during his 1997 Earthling Tour.
“Quicksand (David Bowie song)” enters the record as original song written, composed, and performed by David Bowie. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Quicksand, David and Bowie can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Quicksand (David Bowie song)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Quicksand, David and Bowie provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3299237. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1971 and 1997.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quicksand (David Bowie song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.