Some commentators have seen references in the song to Bowie's half-brother Terry Burns, who suffered from
schizophrenia, while others such as
Tom Robinson have discerned a "gay agenda". Bowie himself admitted in 1977 that it was "very much based on myself and my brother" and in 2000 he elaborated that it was "another vaguely anecdotal piece about my feelings about myself and my brother, or my other doppelganger. I was never quite sure what real position Terry had in my life, whether Terry was a real person or whether I was actually referencing another part of me, and I think 'Bewlay Brothers' was really about that." In 2008 Bowie revealed that "Bewlay" was taken from the tobacconist shop chain, House of Bewlay. This he used as "a
cognomen - in place of my own. This wasn't just a song about brotherhood so I didn't want to misrepresent it by using my true name. Having said that, I wouldn't know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within it. It's a
palimpsest, then". On another occasion he repeated that he "couldn't imagine what the person who wrote that had on his mind at the time". The
coda features Bowie's voice distorted by
varispeeding;
NME critics
Roy Carr and
Charles Shaar Murray likened the effect to Bowie's earlier song "
The Laughing Gnome", but "in considerably more sinister guise". Compiler Andy Greene said, Virtually no entry in the David Bowie songbook has confused the hardcores quite like "The Bewlay Brothers." It was the final track recorded for
Hunky Dory and Bowie said at the time the lyrics were nonsense, but in later years he hinted it was inspired by his schizophrenic half-brother Terry. "I was never quite sure what real position Terry had in my life," he said in 2000, "whether Terry was a real person or whether I was actually referencing another part of me, and I think 'Bewlay Brothers' was really about that." Others have seen clear homosexual overtones in the surreal lyrics, but Bowie's never commented on that. He's also only played it five times, and those were all between 2002 and 2004.
John Mendelsohn of
Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "'The Bewlay Brothers' sounds like something that got left off
The Man Who Sold because it wasn't loud enough. Musically it's quiet and barren and sinister, lyrically virtually impenetrable — a stream-of-consciousness stream of strange and (seemingly) unrelated imagery — and it closes with several repetitions of a chilling chorus sung in a broad Cockney accent, which, if it's any help, David usually invokes when he's attempting to communicate something about the impossibility of ever completely transcending the mundane circumstances of one's birth." ==Live versions==