Originally the b-side of the ‘Space Oddity’ single, David Bowie re-recorded ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ during the sessions for his self-titled second album.

According to Bowie’s former landlady and lover Mary Finnigan, Bowie wrote the song in her garden at 24 Foxgrove Road, Beckenham, while playing with her young son.

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ is one of Bowie’s darkest early compositions. The titular,unnamed boy is condemned to death, awaiting the hangman’s noose at daybreak for the ‘crime’ of madness. Unknown to the townspeople, the boy shares a magical symbiosis with the surrounding mountains, and the village is reduced to rubble as the boy dies.

A source of inspiration appears to have been a 1962 translation of Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard’s book The Wild Boy of Aveyron, which Bowie read in early 1969. The book was an account of a French feral child known as Victor of Aveyron, who was discovered as a young adolescent in the early 19th Century. Itard was a doctor who effectively adopted Victor, studying and writing about his progress.

Bowie’s wild eyed boy is less tethered to a precise place and time, but shares a displacement and alien status among the villagers of the song. The song became the perfect counterpoint to the extraterrestrial isolation of ‘Space Oddity’, and signalled many of the themes which would be explored in subsequent songs: alienation, persecution, godlike potential, mortality, madness.

During the final British leg of the Ziggy Stardust tour in 1973, ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ was the first part of a medley which also included ‘All the Young Dudes’ and ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’. It can be heard on the 1983 release Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture.