"We had the idea [for "Nightclubbing"] on the last day of recording...The musicians had all packed everything away, some of them had already left on the plane. Coco Schwab came in armed with two ugly plastic masks. Bowie put one on for a laugh and sat down at the piano and played some old Hoagy Carmichael stuff. I went in and told him, 'That's it, that's exactly what I want.' I wrote the lyric in ten minutes and we recorded the song with a lousy drum machine. Bowie kept on saying, 'But we gotta get back the drummer, you're not gonna have that freaky sound on the tape!' And I replied, 'Hey, no way, it kicks ass, it's better than a drummer.' I always encouraged him to express the darkest and most deranged part of his art. Bowie helped me with some of the lyrics and said, 'Why don't you write a description of walking through the night like ghosts?'"

Iggy Pop, cited in The Complete David Bowie (2004 edition), p.153