<P> The lyrics are simple and repetitive, an older person reminiscing about time spent and time wasted: "Had to get the train / from Potsdamer Platz / you never knew that / that I could do that / just walking the dead", the last line of which, in the video, produces a grimace in the singer . He grimaces again just after: "A man lost in time near KaDeWe / just walking the dead", which precedes the refrain: "Where are we now / where are we now?" Chris Roberts called it a "spectral, frail yearning without chest - beating, candid in its few, clipped phrases and sighs concerning the heart's filthy lessons ." </P> <P> Graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, who created the cover for The Next Day, wrote that the song is a "comparison between Berlin when the wall fell and Berlin today". </P> <P> The music video, directed by Tony Oursler, shows Bowie and an unnamed female companion as conjoined "face in a hole" puppets sitting on a pommel horse, Bowie with the "permanently anxious eyes of the elderly Duke of Windsor," as Robert Everett - Green put it . The woman was later confirmed as artist Jacqueline Humphries, Oursler's wife . Bowie and Oursler reportedly wanted someone who looked like Bowie's PA, Corinne "Coco" Schwab, as she did in the 1970s in Berlin, where she, Bowie and Iggy Pop would hang out together . </P> <P> The video is set in what could be an artists' studio in Berlin, where Bowie lived from 1976, showing moving black - and - white footage of the city from the 1970s on a screen . It opens with a shot of a large diamond and an empty picture frame lying on the floor, before moving into a studio containing a mishmash of items, possibly from Bowie's own life or apartment in Berlin: there are mannequins, bottles, an egg, an eyeball on a shelf, a crystal, a snowflake, and a giant blue ear . Bowie is seen toward the end of the video wearing jeans, and a T - shirt that reads "m / s Song of Norway". Sophie Heawood writes that Song of Norway (1970) was a film (based on the operetta) that Bowie's girlfriend at the time, Hermione Farthingale, left him to appear in . </P>

Where are we now video who is the girl