by Paul Trynka
Producer: Tony Visconti.
A failure of an album that betrayed its creator’s lack of confidence, Bowie’s second release was almost an afterthought to his obvious breakthrough song, ‘Space Oddity’ – its style and song selections arranged by committee. Predictably, perhaps, it therefore never quite transcends its obvious influences and limitations to become a coherent statement in its own right. Yet in the larger context of David’s career, it has many moments of charm, for the very reason that it is unconsidered and confused. ‘Letter to Hermione’ is gorgeously gauche, while ‘Cygnet Committee’ is a grandiose construction which shows David attempting to piece together a philosophy and style – and failing. Only ‘Space Oddity’ truly transcends its intentions.
The Man Who Sold the World
Recorded: April – May 1970; Trident and Advision Studios, London.
Released: Mercury, November 1970 (US); Philips, April 1971 (UK).
Chart Peak: 26 (UK); 105 (US). Both on RCA re-release.
Key Personnel: Mick Ronson (gtr); Tony Visconti (bs); Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey (dms); Ralph Mace (Moog synthesiser).
Producer: Tony Visconti.
Bowie’s first truly gripping work, The Man Who Sold the World is dark in sound and tone. Crucially it took collaborators – fellow artists, even – to fashion David Bowie’s sound for him, and engineer Ken Scott confirms that Tony Visconti and Mick Ronson laboured on their own for much of the album. Yet, for all that, the spark that fires up this album was Bowie’s: in framing the concept and delegating crucial tasks, he inspired his collaborators to surpass anything they achieved on their own (Ronson, Visconti and Woodmansey’s work as Ronno would be famously dull). However erratic his involvement, the album’s sense of unease – the disturbing unreality of the title track, the twisting visions of ‘Width of a Circle’, or the child-like empathy of ‘All the Madmen’ – derives entirely from Bowie, who seems most himself when he relies most on others.
Hunky Dory
Recorded: July 1971; Trident Studios, London.
Released: RCA, December 1971.
Chart Peak: 3 (UK); 93 (US).
Key Personnel: Mick Ronson (gtr); Trevor Bolder (bs); Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey (dms); Rick Wakeman (pno).
Producers: Ken Scott and David Bowie.
The opening salvo of the majestic trio of albums that launched the Bowie legend was understated compared to its successors. While there were plenty of out-there moments – the campness of ‘Queen Bitch’, the louche tribute to Andy Warhol, and the enigmatic ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ – in the main, Hunky Dory’s appeal was subtle, deriving mainly from the faultless effervescence of the writing. Above all, there is an infectious love of life and a sure-footed sense of destiny: ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ slogan, ‘make way for the homo superior’, is self-aggrandising, a camp joke and a manifesto for a kooky philosophy.
Hunky Dory is as crucial a part of Bowie’s cultural legacy as its better-known successor, for where Ziggy, in essence, involved donning a quilted catsuit, Hunky Dory was based on self-transformation and positive visualisation. Ziggy’s songs are skilled and knowing, Hunky Dory’s are translucently innocent and effortless: ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ was inspired by a dream; ‘Life On Mars?’ arrived on a bus trip to Lewisham; ‘Kooks’ was arranged and recorded within days of Duncan’s birth. The arrangement and playing, too, is instinctive but faultless, the product both of Mick Ronson’s unrivalled musicality and of Bowie’s motivational skills. The tributes to Warhol, Dylan and Lou Reed are both naive and cynical; by paying them fealty, Bowie also gives himself licence to assimilate them. Lastly, ‘Changes’ would be the manifesto that energised Bowie and all around him; matching a luscious McCartney-style melody with a powerful Lennon-style message, it would only graze the charts but, crucially, would energise a tiny group of believers, who helped their ‘golden boy’ ascend to fame over the months that followed.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders From Mars
Recorded: November 1971 – January 1972 ; Trident Studios, London.
Released: RCA, June 1972.
Chart Peak: 5 (UK); 75 (US).
Key Personnel: Mick Ronson (gtr); Tony Visconti (bs); Trevor Bolder (bs); Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey (dms).
Producers: Ken Scott and David Bowie.
If Hunky Dory came from the heart, Ziggy came from the head. The constituent elements were being assembled as early as January, 1971, when David wrote the magnificent, pile-driving ‘Moonage Daydream’ a few days after first hearing an Iggy record. Other crucial blocks were hoisted into place right up to the final days of recording, with the title track and breakthrough single ‘Starman’ written well into the sessions. Inspired by Iggy and fifties rocker Vince Taylor, Ziggy was rather polite in comparison: its songs more precise and both delivery and production arguably over-refined. (Only the Santa Monica bootleg, an underrated influence on seventies punk that was officially released in 2008, demonstrates the power of The Spiders in their prime.) Instead, it’s the drama of the ideas that give the album its power, opening and closing with two magnificent ballads, ‘Five Years’ and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’, and taking the listener on an exhausting emotional rollercoaster in between. The songs function perfectly as rock ‘n’ roll, with Mick Ronson’s guitar the electricity that brings each finely crafted chord sequence to life, so perfectly that they’d inspire a generation of rock bands – even Iggy and his Stooges, who lifted ‘Suffragette City’s’ central chord change for their punk anthem ‘Search and Destroy’. Yet they also stand apart from rock ‘n’roll, which gives them a wider power, for Ziggy works overall as a drama which demands suspension of disbelief from each of us, and hence makes us all participants. Even today, it’s a thrill to be part of the action.
Aladdin Sane
Recorded: October 1972; RCA, NYC. December 1972 and January 1973; Trident, London.
Released: RCA, April 1973.
Chart Peak: 1 (UK), 17 (US).
Key Personnel: Mick Ronson (gtr); Trevor Bolder (bs); Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey (dms); Mike Garson (pno); Ken Fordham, Brian Wilshaw (sax).
Producers: Ken Scott and David Bowie.
Both slicker and sketchier than its predecessor, Aladdin Sane is in some ways a more convincing document on the nature of fame and show business than Ziggy – its flakiness adds authenticity. The strained, edgy cover of ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ is shallow, yet glamorous; ‘The Jean Genie’, too, is outrageously slick, a magnificently flagrant rip-off of The Yardbirds. Yet the album’s great songs are cavernous in their depth, with Mike Garson’s rippling piano evoking decadence or oblivion in haunting songs like ‘Aladdin Sane’ or ‘Time’, while Ronson and Bolder’s musicianship is devastatingly sophisticated, most notably on ‘Lady Grinning Soul’. The personal dramas being played out add to the edginess: ‘The Prettiest Star’ is a restatement of David’s paean to Angie, recorded just as he decided his marriage was doomed, while arguments over Woody’s drumming on ‘Panic in Detroit’ helped inspire the termination of The Spiders, just as they were at their peak.
Pin Ups
Recorded: July – August 1973; Château D’Hérouville, France.
Released: RCA, October 1973.
Chart Peak: 1 (UK); 23 (US).
Key Personnel: Mick Ronson (gtr etc.); Trevor Bolder (bs); Aynsley Dunbar (dms); Mike Garson (pno); Ken Fordham (sax); Geoff MacCormack (perc, backing vox).
Producers: Ken Scott and David Bowie.
Recorded in a race to beat Bryan Ferry’s covers album, Pin Ups was an odd mixture of nostalgia and cynicism. Mick Ronson had mixed feelings about his imminent solo career, Trevor Bolder and Ken Scott were completely estranged, while David affected indifference to the power struggles around him. Pin Ups was therefore nostalgic not only for the good times of sixties London (some of it seen through the eyes of a Yank – Scott Richardson – who helped choose the tracks), but for The Spiders themselves. The album itself is both a Warholian display
of appropriation – featuring songs like The Who’s ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, that Bowie had already used once with The Lower Third – and a demonstration of Bowie the unabashed fan. For Americans, the album represented a brilliantly decadent collection of garage-band nuggets; for many Brits, the covers were predictable, insipid and watered down, with the frenzied teenage angst of songs like The Easybeats’ ‘Friday On My Mind’ reworked into turgid, platform-booted camp. Unashamedly exploitative, intermittently vital, the album fell well short of brilliance except in one respect: it was a devastating ‘so what?’ riposte to those who claimed that Bowie’s music was merely a cynical reworking of The Who, The Kinks and The Yardbirds.
Diamond Dogs
Recorded: December 1973 – January 1974; Olympic Studios, London and Studio L, Hilversum, The Netherlands.
Released: RCA, April 1974.
Chart Peak: 1 (UK); 5 (US).
Key Personnel: Herbie Flowers (bs); David Bowie, Alan Parker (gtr); Aynsley Dunbar, Tony Newman (dms);
Producer: David Bowie (Tony Visconti oversees mix).
Bowie’s depiction of a future dystopia was messy and sprawling, inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, but also permeated with the paranoia now besetting his friends and colleagues. Previous sessions had been focused and compact; Diamond Dogs – once the nucleus had been assembled around Blue Mink musicians Flowers, Parker and Newman – was confused, with overdubs layered on messily and Spiders bassist Trevor Bolder called in – perhaps out of desperation – to help salvage one song. Bowie’s songwriting changed, too: the melodic inventiveness and rolling chord sequences he’d first harnessed on Hunky Dory disappeared; instead there’s a new concentration on texture, simple rock chord sequences and swaggering rhythms heavily influenced by The Rolling Stones, whom Bowie aimed to knock off their pedestal. Adding to the mess, there was confusion about the credits, and the catchy ‘Rebel Rebel’ stands out like a sore thumb alongside the resonant ‘Sweet Thing’ and the bizarre, hellish funk of ‘1984’. Overall, the album is a beautiful mess, its confused mêlée every bit as appropriate as Ziggy’s finely honed choreography.
David Live
Recorded: 8–12 July 1974; Tower Theatre, Philadelphia, PA.
Released: RCA, October 1974.
Chart Peak: 2 (UK); 8 (US).
Key Personnel: Earl Slick (gtr); Mike Garson (pno); Herbie Flowers (bs); Tony Newman (dms); David Sanborn (sax); Richard Grando (baritone sax); Pablo Rosario (perc); Geoff MacCormack, Gui Andrisano (backing vox).
Producer: Tony Visconti
The old-school showbiz element of Bowie’s career was never more evident than in MainMan’s revival of the neglected tradition of covers and live albums, designed primarily to keep the corporate presses rolling. Widely lambasted on release, David Live does indeed show his music coarsened, with overcooked backing and over-emoted singing replacing the electrifying joy of, say, The Spiders’ Santa Monica bootleg. The album is not totally devoid of charm – Sanborn’s sax interlacing with the ‘All the Young Dudes’ chorus; the shuffling undercurrent of drums and bass on ‘Rebel Rebel’ – but the album highlight, ‘Here Today, Gone Tomorrow’, is perhaps the ultimate indictment. In this setting, it sounds stripped down and affecting, but one listen to the Ohio Players’ jewel-like original reminds us how lumpen the Bowie machine has become.
Young Americans
Recorded: August 1974; Sigma Sound, Philadelphia, PA. January 1975; Electric Lady, NYC.
Released: RCA, March 1975.
Chart Peak: 2 (UK); 9 (US).
Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar (gtr); Willie Weeks (bs); Andy Newmark (dms); Mike Garson (pno); David Sanborn (sax); Larry Washington (conga); Pablo Rosario (perc); Ava Cherry, Luther Vandross, Robin Clark, Anthony Hinton, Diane Sumler, Geoff MacCormak (backing vox). ‘Fame’ and ‘Across the Universe’ musicians include Earl Slick, John Lennon (gtr); Emir Kason (bs); Dennis Davis (dms).
Producer: Tony Visconti.
The commercial success of Young Americans was so overwhelming, the stylistic makeover so complete, that it has become a set-piece, an exemplar of an artist often typecast as manipulative, or cold-blooded. Yet the opposite is the case: the genesis of Young Americans was instinctive, born of a fan’s enthusiasm, and the album was recorded on the hoof, like the material that inspired it. The rushed recording adds an edge and adrenalin readily audible on the title track, a splicing of brittle funk with Springsteen-style lyrical imagery, that, given more gloss, would have sounded trite. ‘Can You Hear Me?’ and ‘Fascination’, too, are entrancing, sketched out quickly. The album’s high and low points were similarly rushed: ‘Fame’, recorded in New York, is an impressionistic assemblage that, with its unvarying central chord sequence and riff adapted from The Rascals’ ‘Jungle Walk’, anticipated the sampling culture of the eighties and nineties; ‘Across the Universe’, the other last-minute addition, is a cloying example of Bowie’s new, over-emoted, yodelling singing style, partly inspired by Bryan Ferry; worse still, it bumped off ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ – a superb showpiece for Bowie’s voice. Sketchy and inconsistent from today’s perspective, in 1975 the album restored the momentum lost by the unconvincing David Live, while the impressionistic working methods pioneered here would underpin Bowie’s career through the rest of the decade – and more.
Station to Station
Recorded: November 1975; Cherokee and Record Plant Studios, Los Angeles, CA.
Released: RCA, January 1976.
Chart Peak: 5 (UK); 3 (US).
Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar, Earl Slick (gtr); Dennis Davis (dms); George Murray (bs); Roy Bittan (pno); Geoff MacCormack (backing vox).
Producers: David Bowie and Harry Maslin.
The key turning point in Bowie’s recording career, Station to Station marked the transition from conventional songs, written on the piano or guitar and recorded at breakneck speed, to slabs of sound constructed entirely in the studio. Even those songs sketched out before Bowie arrived at Cherokee, such as ‘Golden Years’, were transformed within it – all of its key elements worked up while the studio clock was running.
Most accounts depict Bowie undergoing some kind of cocaine-induced breakdown during the end of 1975; his psychological trauma was indeed extreme, but during the sessions even drug buddies like Glenn Hughes noted he was in full command of the studio. Given that Bowie himself has little memory of this time, we will never get a more coherent picture of his mental state than in the contents of this album. The title track is obsessive, megalomaniacal, yearning for spiritual clarity yet oddly muso (the churning rhythms and heavy textures were inspired by Jethro Tull); the catchy, mildly deranged ‘TVC 15’ – its vocal interjections obviously influenced by The Yardbirds’ ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ – was a comical take on Bowie’s recent months spent watching grainy Second World War footage over and over; while the magnificent, sensitive ‘Golden Years’ also reflects Bowie’s ability to surface from a cocaine jag and dispense insightful career advice or a hilariously deadpan joke. Although the melodicism of Hunky Dory was by now a thing of the past, Station to Station is packed with invention – a bizarre blending of spritely and monumental themes – and marks the point at which David Bowie moved from pop musician to phenomenon.
Low
Recorded: September – early October 1976; Château D’Hérouville, Paris. Overdubbed and mixed Hansa Studio 2, Berlin.
Released: RCA, January 1977.
Chart Peak: 2 (UK); 11 (US).
Key Personnel: Brian Eno (vocals, kbds and treatments); Carlos Alomar, Ricky Gardiner (gtr); Dennis Davis (dms); George Murray (bs); Roy Young (pno, organ).
Producers: David Bowie and Tony Visconti.
Its title was a reference both to being low profile, and to David’s mental state – beset by marital and management problems. Yet those troubles were offset by the thrill of a new beginning, and an album that was dismissed by many on release as inhuman and inaccessible stands today as joyous, uplifting and optimistic. The glacial beauty of Brian Eno’
s EMS synthesiser, which dominates side two, is balanced by the zest and humanity of side one. Bowie’s voice is rendered naked and unaffected, with many songs enlivened by distinctive soul references – for instance, the melody from ‘Stand By Me’ that echoes ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. As if to help orientate the listener, the album follows an impeccable internal logic, with concise, up-tempo instrumentals bookending side one, which was chockfull of catchy melodies and rhythms, to contrast with the icy languor of side two. As Bowie intended, this is great art, but it’s great pop music, too.
“Heroes”
Recorded: May 1977; Hansa Studio 2, Berlin.
Released: RCA, October 1977.
Chart Peak: 3 (UK); 35 (US).
Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp (gtr); Dennis Davis (dms); George Murray (bs); Brian Eno (synths etc.).
Producers: David Bowie and Tony Visconti.
The only album of Bowie’s ‘Berlin trilogy’ to be recorded entirely in the city – at Hansa’s capacious Studio 2 – “Heroes” was a tougher, heavier album than its predecessor, with chunkier rhythms overlaid by Robert Fripp’s audacious guitar work, all recorded in two days flat. Bowie’s own lyrics and singing were freer: the most intuitive, improvised and simple of his career. The songs, meanwhile, were assembled in almost random fashion from odd snippets, then lovingly overlaid, with odd little melodies – a marimba here, a koto there – emerging on every new listen. Although the album is less funky and more Germanic than Low, the key figure alongside Bowie and Eno is Carlos Alomar, whose inventive, infectious guitar melodies underpin most of the songs – most notably the title track, where he powers the music on even as Robert Fripp’s guitar soars above and Bowie’s voice, totally without artifice, cranks up the emotional temperature. His simplest, most affecting and most memorable song, the title track sounds timeless today but was out of time in 1977, only reaching number twenty-four in the UK singles charts.