Tilda Swinton names her favourite David Bowie song
As one of the greatest living British actors, Tilda Swinton never fails to bring due intensity to her roles. Her versatile talent has seen her portray an array of complex characters over the past three decades, from the cold, duplicitous White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to the devastated mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Off-screen, Swinton has a burning passion for music, which she’s never shy of expressing. At Glastonbury 2023, the actor graced the Park Stage as a spoken word performer during Max Richter’s dazzling set. Swinton is also currently attached to a new musical directed by Joshua Oppenheimer titled The End. The movie, also starring Michael Shannon and Stephen Graham, is scheduled for release in 2024.
In 2014, Swinton discussed some of her favourite songs of all time in an interview feature with KCRW. “I always find it a strange question, you know, ‘Do you like music?’ It’s like saying, ‘Do you like oxygen?’ And also the idea of choosing any particular music is very strange to me. I have what they call a catholic taste,” Swinton said, illustrating her passion for music.
Among her selections were tracks by Marilyn Manson, Barry White, Björk and Dewey Cox. When discussing Manson’s 2004 cover of Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’, she recalled her enjoyable time on the set of Narnia.
“Apart from being a very, very romantic song about long-distance relationships, [it] is the thing that I used to listen to and rock out to with my group of monsters when we were making the Narnia film on a mountain in New Zealand,” Swinton remembered. “And to keep warm, we would rock out to this.”
During the interview, Swinton reserved plenty of space to discuss her favourite British musical icon, David Bowie. Selecting the Starman’s 1975 Station to Station cut, ‘Wild Is the Wind’, she commented: “A great song which less people know maybe than all the other songs I could have chosen from Bowie. And it’s actually a track that, had we had the money, we would have the rights to put on the end of a great film I made called I Am Love. It’s very romantic, and I love this version.”
‘Wild Is the Wind’ was originally written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington for the 1957 film of the same name. The first version, as used in the movie, was recorded by Johnny Mathis, but it has since become a staple for covering artists, with David Bowie and Nina Simone among its most famed rejuvenators.
Speaking to Bafta in 2012, Swinton described Bowie as her “great, great North Star” while discussing the “transformative” effect her first album cover, Aladdin Sane, had on her as an artist.
Listen to David Bowie’s version of ‘Wild Is the Wind’ below.