David’s youth was strongly marked by the alienation of his own persona from society. When he put himself in the clothes of Major Tom or Ziggy Stardust, he was just showing to the world how he was when he was just a teenager. He said in an interview in 1997:

I felt often – ever since a teenager,” he later confided, “so adrift, and so not part of everyone else – with so many dark secrets about my family in the cupboard. It made me feel very much on the outside of everything”. This sense of being adrift – the archetypal “Major Tom” experience of disconnection, dissociation, and being “on the outside of everything” – centred on his formative childhood years: he later referred to “an awful lot of emotional and spiritual mutilation” going on within his family. And of the plethora of ‘alien characters’ in his songs, he once observed: “they were metaphysically in place to suggest that I felt alienated, that I felt distanced from society and that I was really in search of some kind of connection.

In 2001, David’s mother passed away at the age on 88 years. This could have made Bowie recall his past experiences with his own family at Brixton. This could explain the voice of the song, which seems to be sung by a young boy who is singing to a person who has passed away and who wants to know how she (if is referring to his mother) is.