You love David Bowie, don't you? Of course, you do. Everyone does. But I'd bet out of all his albums in your collection you don't have this one. You might even look at the cover and then the track list and think it's a compilation of his early quirky songs. Read on.It gets you from the off with a bright, folky oboe motif with handclaps. Bowie's natural London tones tell us the funny but sad tale of grown up child Uncle Arthur whose attempt to escape from his mother's dominance into happy wedlock is thwarted because his new bride isn't his mum. A British kitchen sink film in two minutes and seven seconds. Sell me a Coat is a kind Disneyfied Paint it Black with a gorgeous orchestral arrangement. Rubber Band is all Edwardian music hall about a romantic oneupmanship. You could easily transpose it to the Carnaby St world of rock stars in old military uniforms of the swinging London where Bowie lived and traded but I don't think we're even that deep here. Love You Till Tuesday is an impossibly cute note to a girl that she could have him all to herself for a limited time only if she played her cards right (he might even extend it to Wednesday). He's the Dandy of Ray Davies' song but doesn't need to be told he's alright.
These first four songs do what a pop album in 1967 was required to do, engage with stories and lure with a kind of musical open architecture whereby a harpsichord might sit in a mix beside a fuzzed up Stratocaster. The big invaders had reset the rules about albums in the previous years, Revolver, Aftermath, Face to Face, A Quick One and more; if you wanted to put a hit single in the first track and the rest of the two sides with a lot of Chuck Berry covers you were no longer going to be noticed. The password was sophistication. That's what you get here. Maybe too much.
There is a Happy Land is a dreamy evocation of the space created in childhood where the grownups may not go. We Are Hungry Men is a kind of Future Shock set to a rock backing with Bowie in a number of dramatic roles including news readers, German accented tyrants, a would-be messiah and his followers. It has moments of clear portent but not of the future of the West as much as Bowie's own, looking ahead to similar but better crafted pieces like Running Gun Blues or Saviour Machine (and then the personae of Ziggy or the Thin White Duke). It shoots itself in the foot with the campy voices and jokey thrust which are completely at odds with the more earnest passages. But it's interesting. When I Live My Dream closes the old side one with a ballad which is lovely but a little mothballed even for its time. What it does is extend Bowie's stylistic range into the grand sweep of future tracks like Sweet Thing or Wild is the Wind.
Little Bombadier opens with lush strings playing a waltz. The title character, traumatised by war retreats into childhood and plays with children as though he was another child, gets warned off by plainclothes cops and flees the scene. Bowie is more in stride with this one as his Weimar cabaret approach and straighter arrangement allow the song to grow into itself rather than sound like someone doing musical tricks. Silly Boy Blue's heralding trumpets tell of a novitiate Tibetan monk whose sense that he is the reincarnation of a master gets him into constant trouble. Come and Buy Toys is a straight folk strum (with some very lovely acoustic finger style guitar playing) contrasting the abandon of childhood with the child's future working on the land. Although he never pursued the feel of it further than this the seriousness of the song and deceptive simplicity of the performance look ahead to the album he would better build upon in a few years' time.
Join the Gang is a regression to the winking social satire of the first side with a roll call of swinging Londoners. It's energetic and funny ... the first time. She's Got Medals is the kind of Cockney rocker the Small Faces made their own. Here, the story of a transsexual who goes to war is marred by a few too many cor blimey asides and knowing winks which is a great pity as the music is a brilliant moving rocker that could've gone somewhere. Maid of Bond Street offers the hollowness of fame wed with dissatisfaction in a Twiggy like model. It's a jazzy waltz with some fancy vocal hoofing but also some real pain. Please, Mr Grave Digger is sung without musical accompaniment but set deeply in a soundscape of wet weather and cracking twigs underfoot. A murderer returns to the grave of the child he molested and murdered. Confessing to the grave digger, he must then remove the new witness into a grave of his own. The fade has him mumbling to himself about the cold he's caught and various other fragments. And that's it, that's the way the album ends.
His erstwhile manager, Ken Pitt, was keen to develop Bowie away from his earlier mod R&B attempts on the charts and fame and steer him into a more generalist entertainer like Anthony Newley. That is what's behind the massive swings in style and tone that tear this album from its potential shelf mates like A Quick One or Face to Face. While Ray Davies might go from ragging the Carnabitian army with a rollicking mockery to the poignancy of Waterloo Sunset, or the Who from Boris the Spider to So Sad About Us, Bowie here, in debuting the new name in his first long player, feels like he's trying to cover every possibility as a master of whichever style he comes across. At its best the results point us to his future career as a songwriter of high power but at its worst he hides his light under bushels of Christmas novelty song mediocrity.
Is that harsh? No, it's disappointed. Bowie's strengths are clear from track to track but his eager youth and managerial myopia made this album sound like an over keen audition tape for an Anthony Newley warm up act. It's harder to take this set when you recognise its clear signs of things to come. When he emerged two years later with an album also eponymously titled (as though attempting to obscure the first) but better known as Space Oddity it was as a much more confident artist whose London accent sounded natural rather than self-protective and whose songs found more solid setting for their range of mood and imagination. If the darkness of We Are Hungry Men was smothered in wincing cuteness it was to find release in the eerie epic Cygnet Commitee or the horror in space of Space Oddity both of which function as songs first and then as plots.
But, let's be fair. There are songs on the debut that stand now, as much as anything from the late '60s. Bowie collaborated on the arrangements of this first set of wholly original material. That's like the way he taught himself piano to write the songs on Hunky Dory. Bowie's first full decade of success, ending in 1980, is witness to the power of career concentration and the willingness to explore and learn whatever was needed for the next one so that each of them emerged both signature and distinct from the previous one. In this album he changed his name by borrowing from an adventurer who had given his name to a knife and told the world he was ready. Yes, it's hampered by aesthetic guesses which can be so off that they embarrass but it's also in line with its times (perhaps too much: it's birth as a retail item was troubled by the coincidental release of Sergeant Pepper).
Put it this way, you know those people who affect flamboyance in their dress and manner but turn out to be flatly conventional in their opinions? Well, this album is the opposite of that. The goofy showbiz and pearly king swagger conceal stories with depth about stress, crime, reincarnation, death, superficiality and the dark side of fame. This is from a twenty year old who had come to understand that his attempts to be a Jagger-like figure were doomed as long as there was a real Jagger, who saw a song in every news report or morning walk and carved them finished out of sheer imagination. And he did it outside of the mainstream in that he did it alone. What we should be hearing among the Cockney and the goofy sound effects is the emergence of an artist and a star. It flopped. He didn't. Ten years later he captivated the world with a story about a couple kissing at the Berlin Wall. And he ended his days with farewells that crossed dimensions and entered massive landscapes. This box of novelties and winks wasn't the first time he was driven by imagination but it was the first time he could show us how it worked. So, if you come across it, let it play and see that at work.
