Songfacts®:

• The fourth and final single from David Bowie's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album, "Up the Hill Backwards" features Robert Fripp on lead guitar. The King Crimson axeman recalled to Mojo in 2015: "Bowie had the intelligence to let me get up and fly. On 'Up The Hill Backwards,' his words were referring to Marcel Duchamp, and I interpreted that in my playing."
• Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. He first achieved fame not in his native country, but in the US, where his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York was the rage of the exhibition.
  
  A playful man, Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes through subversive actions such as putting everyday items like a bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool on display. Half a century later, this approach would be called conceptual art, though he himself used the term 'ready-mades' for his ideas.
  
  Duchamp ostensibly giving up art in the early twenties, devoting himself to chess, which he studied for the rest of his life to the exclusion of most other activities.