David Bowie: Little Wonder Single (1997)

David Bowie
Jan 20, 1997
2 min read

Updated: Sep 23

David Bowie's "Little Wonder" was released as the second single from his album Earthling on January 20, 1997 accompanied by three remixes and released on January 27, 1997. The single achieved success, reaching number 14 in the UK and topping the charts in Japan. The music video, directed by Floria Sigismondi, features Bowie at three different ages. Biographer David Buckley describes it as a dance-oriented video, similar to Orbital's "The Box" (1996), rather than a rock one.

Little Wonder was among the initial tracks Bowie and Reeves Gabrels composed for the album. Bowie described the creation of the track as a "ridiculous" exercise in pure stream of consciousness: "I just picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and made a line for each of the dwarves' names. And that's the song [laughs]. And then I ran out of dwarves' names, so there's new dwarves in it like 'Stinky'." Initially intended to be a "nine-minute jungle electronic epic", the song was shortened to six minutes for the album. Biographer Chris O'Leary characterized it as a blend of arena rock and electronica, incorporating percussion and power chords from the Prodigy's "Firestarter", a 1996 UK number one that helped introduce drum and bass rhythms to the mainstream.