Artist Guide - David Bowie Pt 1

Where to start when faced with a legacy stretching over forty years bequeathed by one of pop’s great shapeshifters? Part-timers may opt for the Best Of, and whilst this is perfectly acceptable, those digging deeper will finder greater reward. Dame David helpfully released 10 original studio albums over a 10 year period that is generally accepted to be his creative peak. This decade-long purple patch forms the basis of this guide, split into two parts to aid digestion. The comments section is below for any Bowie zealots vexed at my omission of The Man Who Sold The World, Let’s Dance or the Labyrinth soundtrack indeed…

Hunky Dory (1971) After the false start of his only hit Space Oddity in 1969 and the following year’s patchy The Man Who Sold The World album, Bowie had been dropped by his record label when he began this, his first true classic. This album represented perfect synergy for Bowie as his songwriting and lyrical abilities came of age, with the musicians who would later become the Spiders From Mars backing him for the first time.

An accessible, lushly orchestrated album laden with some of the more instantly recognisable tunes from Bowie’s oeuvre, Hunky Dory is predominantly a gentle, acoustic affair underpinned by a rich, melodic directness, though the proto-glam thrashings of Queen Bitch serve as a precursor to the Ziggy Stardust era. It would be a solemn soul who could resist the hooks of Changes, its weighty lyrical substance (concerning his own capacity for reinvention) rendered light and breezy by its infectious melody.

Indeed, the musical ebullience of Hunky Dory itself, in particular the droll campery of Fill Your Heart and the warm singalong Kooks, is in contrast to lyrical themes that show Bowie’s existential reflections coming to the fore – generational divides, the joys of fatherhood and the future of man. The latter topic is referenced in Oh! You Pretty Things, via the lyric “Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use” and Nietzschean references to “Homo Superior”, though this song was, somewhat incongruously, also a solo hit for Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits.

Ambivalent “tributes” to contemporaries abound – see Andy Warhol, Song For Bob Dylan and Queen Bitch (a Velvet Underground vignette). Succinctly describing Dylan as having a voice “like sand and glue” (gently pastiched by Bowie), Song For Bob Dylan acknowledges the folk singer’s ability to write words which “could pin us to the floor”, though in truth tries to cajole Dylan to return to the intensity of his sixties work. In all, an exhibition of classic songwriting by a nascent talent, oft-imitated, pilfered and diluted by less-gifted sorts in the intervening decades.

The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972) Perhaps THE definitive concept album, Ziggy Stardust concerns an alien rock star who comes to fame when the dying planet Earth has only five years left (see opening track, helpfully called Five Years) and having remained true to the rock lifestyle of bacchanalian excess is eventually a casualty of his own success (see final track, again helpfully entitled Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide).

Backing band the Spiders from Mars come to the fore, lending a group dynamic to the album where each member plays a more active role in the music rather simply backing Bowie. In particular, lead guitarist Mick Ronson, an emotive, melodic player of whom Bowie said “you believed every note had been wrenched from his soul”, was the perfect foil to Bowie in the early 70s and his paint-stripping performances here lend a visceral thrill to this glam-rock odyssey. Listen to the solo at the end of Moonage Daydream as it trills into oblivion and marvel at the fact that Bowie had pictorially represented how he wanted the solo to sound via squiggly lines drawn with a crayon. At the same time, Bowie yells “In out-ah! Far out-ah!” like Mark E Smith might if he were alien, bisexual and prone to wearing make-up applied with a trowel.

This album also counts the seminal Starman amongst its tracks, a masterwork whose impact could not be dulled even by countless club singer interpretations on Stars In Their Eyes, and Lady Stardust, a homage to fellow glam rocker Marc Bolan that seems self-referential in places - “people stared at the make-up on his face” could easily refer to the public response to a heavily made-up Bowie or the legions of fans who copied his look - a bold move when viewed in the social context of 1972, homosexuality only having been legalised five years earlier. A reference point for anyone wanting to understand how today’s musical landscape evolved, this is an album thrillingly played from an era when rock and roll was still relatively young and retained the power to weave itself into the fabric of popular culture.

Aladdin Sane (1973) Following the huge success of Ziggy Stardust, this was the first album Bowie recorded as a bona fide superstar, posing in full Ziggy-get up on the cover in one of rock’s most iconic images. Musically, Aladdin Sane augments the glam rock of Ziggy Stardust with Mike Garson’s elegant piano, adding a flavour of avant-garde jazz to the title track and a touch of classical majesty to Lady Grinning Soul’s camp melodrama.

Revisiting, not for the last time, the apocalyptic theme used on his The Man Who Sold The World album three years earlier, Drive In Saturday juxtaposes a doo-wop backing with a vision of the future where mankind has to relearn sex from old porn movies, the mechanics and emotions of intercourse being but a distant memory in this particular Bowie dystopia. The Prettiest Star shares some of this 1950s musical revivalism, but with a more lyrically straightforward (for Bowie) homage of love, complete with a Ronson solo that may make you swallow your own tongue.

Tellingly, a frantic cover of the Rolling Stones Let’s Spend The Night Together doesn’t specify the gender of the addressee (unlike Jagger’s anthem-for-the-alpha-male original), perhaps to maintain the aura of sexual ambiguity synonymous with Bowie’s glam phase. Elsewhere, Panic In Detroit slinks along with a snake-hipped Bo Diddley beat and ends with a dual guitar freakout, whereas Cracked Actor rocks like a bastard’s bastard. What more can one say? Another gem in the Dame’s jewellery box.

Diamond Dogs (1974) Apocalyptic visions return once more with this album, originally intended to be an theatrical representation of George Orwell’s 1984, but that concept was halted after Orwell’s widow protested. This did at least offer free rein for Bowie to vent forth his own tangential musings of a doomed future, though a cursory glance at the song titles Big Brother and 1984 betrays the roots of the original idea. As you might imagine, Big Brother features Bowie looking to the future and seeing it dominated by an omnipresent Orwellian figure, though if he really could have viewed the post-millennial years and seen them dominated not by 1984’s shadowy autocrat but a vapid reality TV namesake, I wonder which he would have thought the greater evil…?

Musically, 1984 offers a taste, with its Shaft-esque wah-wah guitars, of the black American soul sound that was to follow. Rock & Roll With Me also highlights this transition, its glam rock guitar rendered almost peripheral, pushed aside to make room for the soulful balladry whose sound would be reprised and embellished on Young Americans.

By now Bowie had relinquished the services of Ronson and the supporting musicians who played on his last few albums and not wanting to entrust his music to others at this point, he plays most of the instruments on the album himself. As such, Bowie fills the space vacated by Ronson with his own saxophone and keyboard playing, attempting frayed lead guitar parts occasionally – this gives the album an unpolished, almost lo-fi quality but the abrasive rifferama of Rebel Rebel ensures his contribution to air guitar history. The Stones-esque title track provides a triumphant glam rock swansong, Bowie jumping ship with enviable foresight just before the scene became stale, his next incarnation ready and waiting…

Young Americans (1975) Known as Bowie’s Philadelphia soul album, its exquisite backing vocals are high in the mix and prominent throughout, the pitch perfect warmth of a young Luther Vandross (!) and chums enabling Bowie’s compositions to soar, despite him being slightly out of his idiom with this new venture which he partly dismissed as “plastic soul”. A touch harsh perhaps, as Bowie’s songwriting remains as strong as ever and it took courage to leave behind his established Ziggy Stardust persona (still identifiable both on the cover and in the music of Diamond Dogs). The title track is perhaps the most forceful and immediate track on the album, with a lyrical standpoint that Bowie has suggested is more personal (a sentiment echoed throughout the album) – here he is no longer writing conceptually or from a or character’s perspective.

Guitarist Carlos Alomar, whose methodical, tasteful (yet always funky) playing would form a bedrock to Bowie’s sound for the rest of the decade, makes his debut here – check out Right and Fascination, where not an ounce of musical flab is evident in Alomar’s unfeasibly tight jangling. Fame features John Lennon and must surely figure as the former Beatle’s funkiest recorded moment, though his performance is limited to some stabs of fuzzed-up guitar and shouting “Fame” in falsetto behind Bowie. Lennon also contributes backing vocals to a version of Across The Universe which manages to be both gently funktastic and sympathetic to the original - arguably one of the finer Fabs covers.

Whereas this album’s prominent saxophone noodling may be off-putting to non-soul aficionados and the sheer technical ability of the backing singers can also make Bowie sound thin and reedy at times, for the most part this is lush, soulful, engaging and affecting – in short, another triumph.

Please note that the years 1976 – 1980 are covered in part 2