"All the Madmen" is a song written by the English singer-songwriter David Bowie in 1970 for his album The Man Who Sold the World, released later that year in the US and in April 1971 in the UK.
Bowie has said that the song was written for and about his half brother, Terry Burns, who had schizophrenia and was an inmate of Cane Hill Hospital (pictured on the original U.S. cover of The Man Who Sold the World) until his suicide in 1985.
The second track on The Man Who Sold the World, "All the Madmen" was circulated to radio stations by Mercury Records, in edited form and in mono, as a promo single (featuring the same song on both sides) in the U.S. in December 1970, prior to Bowie's planned promotional tour there in early 1971.
[6][7] An official release, featuring "Janine" from his previous album David Bowie as the B-side, is thought to have been planned but shelved, and a handful of stock copies (73173) have been found.
[8] In June 1973, RCA Records, which had re-released the song's parent album the previous year, issued "All the Madmen" as a single in Eastern Europe, backed with "Soul Love" from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.