From the soundtrack to the Hanif Kureishi TV adaptation, the greatest lost Bowie song of all is a bravura remix of one confused suburban boy’s life story to accompany another’s. Is there anything more Bowie than the line “Englishman going insiiiiiiine?”  Balls-out single-entendre glam filth as Mr Stardust yelpingly narrates an everyday story of backstage fellatio. Lost for years and a surprise to even – ahem – hardened Bowiephiles, this is brilliantly, uniquely nasty.  While we’re on no-holds-barred polymorphous perversion, the magnificently lascivious glam B-side to Changes was something of a lost and wandering child until given a home on Bowie’s rolling reissue programme. Ends, hilariously, with a choir of vulgar boatmen.  The plushest product of his white soul period, this gospelised slice of self-examination should have been a generational anthem. Ludicrously, it was binned in favour of a hammy and otiose version of the Beatles’ Across the Universe.  A supremely odd yet supremely singable piece of hippy whimsy about pilots literally bombing a lone old man on a piece of waste ground. (Why? Who knows.) Bowie’s now-instinctive melodic sense renders a ropey vocal beside the point.  We’re all supposed to hate drum’n’bass Bowie, but there is no denying the ridiculous charm and rattling, Firestarter energy of this nonsensical squib. Bowie is speaking the lingua franca of showbiz cockney again and it’s not dissimilar from …  … bright young Bowie swaggering in his Anthony Newley mod-about-town incarnation, a London boulevardier with the future in his pocket (“Don’t like your new face? That’s not nice …”). It’s all you can do not to yell Parklife! during the chorus. For the flipside of Bowie’s swinging London, see …  He was on the side of the outsiders long before Ziggy Stardust. This poignant, perceptive early song captures the milieu of Soho mods, runaways, pill victims and queer vagabonds with uncanny precision. A distant psychedelic motif prefigures his and their shared futures.  Forecasting the disturbing Mitteleuropean scarecrow Bowie of Blackstar and Lazarus, this hastily-recorded but quite entrancing take on Brecht’s paean to amoral pleasure is a singular delight: “Nothing could be harder than the quest for fun.”  This Morrissey song – produced in the original by Mick Ronson – essentially rewrites Bowie’s Rock’n’Roll Suicide. Bowie returns the favour with an impassioned, choir assisted version. “It’s me singing Morrissey singing me,” he explained, although the performance is more wind-tunnel Bowie than torchsong Moz.  An intriguing curio from Bowie’s stillborn musical of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with a bizarre, parping proto-funk accompaniment, and a single in the US and Japan. As with even Bowie’s dashed-off stuff during the 70s, once heard it’s a total earworm.  Yes, they were pretty dreadful but in this you can hear what Tin Machine done right might have sounded like – a desperate, histrionic lyric with a sprawling metal soundtrack. Fix the production and you’ve got a fit-for-purpose grunge band.  Scuzzed-up re-recording of an anaemic early hippy-dippy single, revelling in Bowie’s fascination with Aleister Crowley and his occult sex magick. The spirit of Marc Bolan is banished and a fouler one installed.  Bowie’s industrial rock and goatee period is not his best-loved but as ever there were pearls to be had. This broadside against US cultural imperialism is a little trite and very pre-9/11 but it rocks with more confidence than much of his 90s output.  Written in 1971, during Ziggy and recorded in a pillowy string arrangement 30 years later, this is senior Bowie singing young Bowie in quite the most affecting manner.  An ugly, thwacking fiasco on Bowie’s 1987 nadir, Never Let Me Down, this Chernobyl jeremiad was a lovely song in need of restoration to its original features. Stripped back, it sounds enchantingly like the Smiths.  “Inside every teenage girl there’s a fountain / Inside every young pair of pants there’s a mountain.” Sharing almost nothing with the Candidate on Diamond Dogs but slated for his Nineteen Eighty-Four musical, this raffish stream-of-consciousness plugs Bowie’s Orwell obsessions into his more carnal imaginings. No wonder Orwell’s widow knocked him back.  Originally recorded in 1992 as a spangled-up disco pastiche, this sat in the cupboard for a decade before being reworked as a sparse piece of sinister lounge jazz. Atonal yet bewitching, it’s Bowie’s final collaboration with piano surrealist Mike Garson.  A screaming, Scary Monsters-style rock stampede telling the story of immigrants Lev and Sophie coming to the US – Franz Ferdinand and the Spiders from Mars. What the hell was this doing hidden away as an extra track?  If you want to bawl your eyes out, then consult this (and avoid the ugly Beck mixes). A simple, beautiful look back to his Hunky Dory moments, but also a defiant hymn to living without fear in the now, no matter what. Which is what he went on to do.
Tucked away on compilations, hidden on B-sides or released decades after they were written, there are plenty of Bowie gems to seek out: here are 20 of the best