Suffragette City
by David Bowie
- 144
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 46
- Danceability
- 37
- Acousticness
"Suffragette City" first reached the public as a B-side. RCA put it on the flip of David Bowie's "Starman" on April 28, 1972, and it appeared on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars that June. In 1976 RCA gave it its own single to promote the compilation Changesonebowie in the UK, but that release failed to chart.
Before recording it himself, Bowie had offered the song to Mott the Hoople, on the condition that they drop their plan to break up. They refused and recorded "All the Young Dudes" instead. Bowie cut it on February 4, 1972 at Trident Studios with the Spiders from Mars, late in the sessions. Ken Scott used the ARP synthesizer at Trident to find the sound that mimicked a saxophone, and Mick Ronson played the notes. The piano riff owed a lot to Little Richard.
The lyrics carried a line borrowed from A Clockwork Orange, and the shouted "wham bam, thank you, ma'am" had appeared earlier on a Charles Mingus album and a Small Faces song. A false ending set up Bowie's cry before the band charged back in. His handwritten lyrics were part of the David Bowie Is exhibit from 2013 to 2018 and went to auction in late 2023.
Suffragette City runs at 144 BPM, the tempo of dubstep and trap counted in half time, and hardstyle. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.67 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 417 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.