STATION TO STATION @ 50

We open on a black and white movie. An old steam locomotive hisses thickly and rhythmically from one side of the field to the other. A distant wail of guitar feedback like an industrial era whistle. Piano notes plonk up and down and up and down like footsteps on a platform. The rest of the band join the progress, stopping to play a fancier figure before falling back into the grinding rhythm. Then a croon:

The return of the thin white duke, throwing darts in lovers' eyes.

You can see him, tall, gangling, in a Panama hat and cape, maybe a cigarette at the end of a long holder, in silhouette, walking dangerously toward you. Is he a vampire? A criminal mastermind? He breaks into song, a distant operatic caterwaul of travel and dark adventure, driving like a demon from station to station. Feels like Europe, mittel Europe, lightless nights, cocktails and betrayal. 

And then it launches into a big jaunty rock groove with a vocal that David Byrne would have replayed on a loop for whole afternoons. 

It's not the side effects of the cocaine. I'm thinking that it must be love.

And everything's too late. It's too late to be late again.

Bowie's strangest and most indefinable persona, the Thin White Duke, starts the only album he lived on with the biggest epic since Width of a Circle from his metal showcase The Man Who Sold the World. Is the Duke the same guy but older and more lethally experienced?

The European canon is here.

Maybe it is. This ain't Young Americans, this is regicide. The world conflicts of Aladdin Sane, the apocalypse of Ziggy. The post apocalyptic delirium of Diamond Dogs. And now this. 

The cover art is a still from his sci-fi film The Man Who Fell to Earth in which, impeccably cast as an alien, Bowie finally came through on the big screen like one of his stage identities. Pencil thin, his designer suits haning from his shoulders and his big fringed hair bright orange over his bloddlessly white face. Even the typesetting came into it. Red on white, sans serif font running together above the photo on the front and the same on the back with the strangely brief track listing. Six songs? Was he trying to outdo Led Zeppelin? The first track spills over the ten minute mark. Nothing's under four minutes, most are over five. This is not the guitar slinging of the Ziggy albums nor the big bright blue-eyed soul of the previous disc. It sounds like a band but the band is only allowed to play the songs, not drift into solos. More than Young Americans, this is a studio bound record.

Having put us through an itinerary of the dark and mystic underworld, Bowie then gives us a funk workout that is sharper than anything on his funk record. Golden Years starts with a delicious Strat riff that breaks into a dreamy dance track with big, modal, harmonised vocals chanting the title. It sounds like a ritual. The solo vocal comes in with a reassuring tone and follows the scansion of the bassline. He's talking to someone he calls (in falsetto) Angel. He offers her a bright life and his protection as they move from limousine to limousine and a cable of five star hotels. The cheerful handclapping disco is blended with the solemnity of the chorus chant which makes it sound like he means it. There's a video of Bowie miming this on Soul Train in late '75. He's a barely contained mess in the brief interview with he host who senses potential disaster and rushes the singer into the number. Once the groove comes up he's fine, though, mouthing every syllable and improv perfectly. One of the very few white artists to appear on the show, he towers on the riser above a crowd of happily grooving black audience and it feels both warm and alien. It would have been the weirdest sounding song they ever danced to. They seem happy about it.

Word on a Wing is the second epic of the album. Slow single notes on a piano. Someone's thinking about a melody. Slowly beneath it, a synthesised high string sound. The band comes in with a sweet sounding backing. Bowie's voice is confident to charming as he intones: "In this world of grand illusion you walked into my life out of my dreams." Like many of the other lines, this will be repeated to different effect throughout this intriguing song. It sounds increasingly like an earnest plea for meaning, connection and fulfilment. the chorus goes further by invoking a lord and the wish "my prayer flies like a word on a wing." Another thematic motif is the notion of a scheme of things. 

This is interesting. It's interesting as Bowie was an avowed atheist at this time, though he was dabbling in a host of mystical avenues. We might be getting presumptuous by thinking the lord he's addressing is the one of the Bible. Could be Nietzsche. Could be Crowley. Bowie was going through such a foggy lifestyle involving any number of self-medications like magical arcana and plain old drugs (he's already mentioned the cocaine). His appearance in the Soul Train video borders on alarming. He looks anorexic, not just thin and he's barely coherent during the hosts interview. He famously claimed that he couldn't remember writing and recording this album at all. Is Word on a Wing a real plea to a power, any power, to redeem him?

Or, and I'm not being flippant, is it just a creative exercise in imagining prayer, a character in desperation as his voice grows in intensity, circling back to the scheme of things, the age of grand illusion, settling on the cooing falsetto of the chorus? Then, when he is done, we return to the serenity of theopening moments, a high soprano voice descends but seems to transform into a synthesiser. It reminds me of a scene from Peter Carey's Bliss where a character facing execution is briefly elevated by the sight of a butterfly but then sees that it's just a lolly wrapper lifting and falling in the breeze.

The old side two opens with TVC15. A boogie piano plays a honky tonk figure as distant backing vocals lift the glottal stammer of The Yardbirds Good Morning Little Schoolgirl. The band and double tracked vocals come in with a story of a man whose girlfriend was devoured by a television. The story was Iggy Pop's from a night of tripping and Bowie took it more into the territory of David Cronenberg's Videodrome which was seven years from production. The verses are run on and ragged in scansion but have the meaty tone of a '70s band invoking a '50s band. A brief moment of order happens with Bowie crooning "transition, transmission," over stylised '50s palm muted guitar before the big chordy chant takes over: "Oh my TVC 15, oh oh, TVC 15. Repeat. Just a funny story or a tale of technological consumption? If nothing else, it's superior filler.

Stay is a hard funk workout with near metal guitar filling it out. The bass pushes past the guitars  and dances in the centre while the drums go on a gymnastic workout. Bowie's vocal sounds anxious as he tries to get her to stay the night. The melody is modal like Golden Years but its furrowed concern makes it constantly uneasy. This is like a Young Americans track that's woken after a nightmare. I finally got around to leaving this playing when listening to the whole album. It gives so little but insists so much. I used to skip it, even on the vinyl I knew it on, first. Bowie himself loved it or felt it needed resolution as he kept putting it into his sets into the following decade. The song ends on a lengthy solo that plays into the fade. Desperate but do I care?

Finally we come to the song that turned me on the record. Wild is the Wind is a cover of a song by Dimitry Tiomkin and Ned Washington and had become a standard by the likes of Johnny Mathis. A gentle sway of clean electric guitars and acoustics, drums, bass and piano. Bowie's vocal carries nothing but sincerity and his voices climbs all around its dolorous melody, melancholy but deeply romantic. It seems to curl out from the darkness of the night like a single plume of cigarette smoke that forms into a billowing cloud of silver cloud before it dissipates and fades. Utterly beautiful.

This was the first Bowie record I bought when it was new. The school cassette freemarket gave us all complete Bowie collections between tapes and vinyl and everyone had their favourites. I came to Station to Station almost by accident. I was studying for late high school exams, smoking too many cigarettes and needing something in the background that I wouldn't get distracted by and sing along to. This mostly neglected album suggested itself with its stark red song titles against the white of the sleeve. I put it on. The big gushing start of the title track took to the air and I was right, it would support not subvert my efforts at swatting. And I kept on turning to it, enjoying the sound of its brittle arrangements and big spooky vocals, sitting on the floor of my room with the lights out. It got to me as none of the others had. I don't mean I liked it better, it was more that I felt it got to me more directly. Like The Sex Pistols at the end of 1977, or This Year's Model in 1978, it was a record that knew me.

It is still an effortless listen. The arrangements all sound like they could be easily played live. The basic rock band of Ziggy to Diamond Dogs but with the particular sheen of Aladdin Sane, the shining piano and often beligerent guitars. It thankfully lacked the overproduction of Young Americans. Most of all it revisited the spooky Bowie of After All, Aladdin Sane title track, We Are the Dead, or The Bewley Brothers. That "I don't know what I was thinking but I had to follow it" sound. It does frequently freezes down to mechanicality, even the funk tracks and would lose a lot of Bowie fans going through the '70s albums. If you do step on to its platform, take a seat on the bench and wait. Here be treasures and they feel how you do.

BOWIE'S YOUNG AMERICANS @ 50

The common wisdom about David Bowie's '70s career is that he chameleon-ed his way through a parade of characters with stunningly different personae. The truth is a little harder. It's more like phases. Early '70s was long hair and folk to metal to pop. Ziggy was glam played with razor blades and then, after reaching the end of what rock could give him, he left the funeral and took up soul. Kind of.

There's no persona attached to Young Americans. Even the visage, the spiky mullet of the Ziggy years has softened to a white '70s nightclub ghost. The eyebrows haven't grown back yet but give them time. What is different is that this album was the one that broke him in America. It and the lead single Fame made him mainstream radio fodder and assured his place permanently in the music firmament in pop music's biggest and most central market. That said, this is the one that nobody calls favourite, if they remember it's in the line up at all. So what's wrong?

First, it just doesn't sound like him. The title track kicks off with a tom tom flourish and a shambling groove with soprano sax garnishes. Bowie sounds like he's singing in a Donovan style tremolo but it might be delay. From the off he's telling us something crucial about the exercise: he's not trying to sound black. He loved soul from his mod days and planned a music genre forward album, not a passport to the Apollo. This means that, like his flirt with metal in Man Who Sold the World, Bowie made a Bowie album that absorbed influences to enhance his songwriting. Fine, but does it work?

Not always. But the kick off  Young Americans is an amiable shuffle through a series of scenes underneath the American Dream, stories of disappointment and struggle as the big women's chorus brightly chimes in with all night and alright and breezy supports of the line Young American. A light and cokey energy drives the track and it's almost over before you realise there hasn't been a note of guitar before you get a little on the home stretch. It almost needed the cover sticker, "contains no rock music".

Win is a kind of ballad with its floaty phased guitar, distant women backing vocals and bedroom vocal. The chorus flashes to life with wailing guitars and crashing cymbals. Underneath this is a lyric telling of a relationship based on power as much as love. When his almost whispered vocal ends the chorus with, "all you've got to do is win," it sounds equally that it is a condition for lifelong success and a more intimate interpersonal victory. It could easily be an expansion of the opening track.

If you hear Fascination and wonder at Bowie's sudden aptitude for funk, know that it is Luther Vandross's music that Bowie wrote words to (and credited Vandross properly). Treated bass and wah wah guitah start the groove before Bowie enters in falsetto until the chorus comes in with a call and response between him and the backing singers. It's a testament of lust examined as physical sensations adding up to the arresting state of the title. After two verses and choruses the song stretches out in a jam to the fade.

Right enters with a languid funk groove before a sax starts in with some tasteful ninth harmonies. After some taut vocals the interplay with the backing singers allows all the voices to form more of a texture than bearers of statements. Nevertheless, the repetition of never turning back and doing it the right way could be sexual or relevant to some of the substance abuse Bowie was going through at the time. But the groove is all with this one, despite the seriousness of the fragmented voices, and the groove rules us until the fade at the end of side one.

The most Bowie sounding of all the tracks, Somebody Up There Likes Me, might remind you of When You Rock and Roll With Me. A forward thrusting full band arrangement strides to the verses which seem to be about a public figure who might be a Kennedy or a Christ. Very rich backing vocals include blissful intervals and some perky falsetto oohs flown in from Sympathy for the Devil. Through all the joy of the music (which could easily be ironically so) there is a warning of the big pollie smile hiding rapacious corruption.

Across the Universe is the Beatle song covered with none of the panache that Bowie had applied (not always successfully) to the songs that inspired his youth on the Pin Ups album. This outing is a grimacing travesty. It sounds like Bowie came in one morning and was played this cover that he'd forgotten recording and he had a take recording it with as many vocal tricks as he could muster. No one has ever covered this song well. Bowie's attempt is not a rule breaker.

Can You Hear Me? Starts with the confident groove of a Son of a Preacher Man but cruises instead as a breezy love song. The brass and strings is the closest the album gets to the classic Philly soul sound he was trying for. The big brassy choruses and outro with its perfect vocal harmonies are a joy.

Fame is a collaboration with John Lennon and one of the few hard funk songs I actually like. Also, it got him on to Soul Train. Fame begins with a flourish of guitar textures like a billowing cloud before it ticks into a hard funk workout. Bowie's vocal is anguished and nervous. As he sings fame in a downward portamento, Lennon rasps it with an upward motion. The arrangement was concocted from several sources including a cover of Footstompin' that Carlos Alomar added to with the essential riff as well as the style rather than the substance of other music. James Brown later lifted this arrangement whole for his song Hot (there's a tribute!). This scarring song about dodgy management was Bowie's first American number one, an edgy funk workout produced after all the big singalong songs he'd already done. A chiming piano chord repeatedly reminds us of a constantly ringing phone. A middle eight with both Lennon and Bowie in full scream mode impresses and Bowie's old friend the varispeed comes in for a descent on the word fame form chipmunk high to baritone low. The thump and growl moves us into the fade. Game over.

After acquainting myself with it in the past few weeks for this blog more than I have ever listened to the whole album, I can say that I like it much more than I used to. The only skip track is the Beatles cover and the last song is one of Bowie's killers. Is it good? Is it bad? It's effective. Bowie extracted himself from the grammar and routine of rock music and lived up to a self-imposed challenge. What he gave up is songs that stadium crowds and shower balladeers could sing. There are catchy hooks throughout the two sides but nothing to jog the memory into putting this on for that special number. Fame is a go to but I defy any casual home singer to tackle Young Americans. 

That said, this record got him through. After it was over, the tour that it parasitised from Diamond Dogs was done and he had a couple of real American hits on his hands, this one was quietly allowed to rest in the shade of Dogs, before it, and the mighty Station to Station, that came after. There are funk workouts on the follow up (including the sublime Golden Years and the far less interesting Stay) but that was it for outright honking grooves. After that it was the Berlin albums to the end of the decade and then it was stadium pop Bowie. But, back o'er the years, in 1975, this was the latest (and who knows, last) album by the weirdo star man who really did fall to earth with such identifiably street level sounds. His look on the cover is like the pod people in Bodysnatchers stopped mid transition where the features are only just recognisable and give you the creeps to see. There are real concerns in these songs and some inventive music that used the flavours of untried traditions to forge something rich and strange. It's just such a pity it's so hard to remember.

LODGER @ 45

Why I had this but not the previous two Bowie albums on vinyl is illustrative of how I used to think as a record buyer when I was a teenager. I cared less for the first than the second side of Low and I didn't want to buy a record only play half of it. Heroes kind of made sense all the way through but for any album to call itself after its most accessible track and have the rest sounding like finished failed experiments was not one I'd want on anything but cassette. But it wasn't just the music. I loved the covers of both of those albums. Low looked mysterious and sci-fi. Heroes looked at strong as its title. But I missed the joke in the first (low profile, for those who can't picture it) and didn't get the point of the second. So, I was fine with home-taped cassettes. But Lodger had a weird cover and I liked all the songs I heard off it beforehand. It was only vaguely known as the Berlin Trilogy at the time so there was no sense of urgency in collecting all three.

The myth that MTV likes to sell is that the music video was invented for it. Countdown had been playing them for over half a decade before. Bowie did something different with Lodger in that he made a few clips for songs, whether they were singles or not, and let them loose on to the world's tv. DJ, Boys Keep Swinging and Look Back in Anger all had scripted short films to accompany them that featured Bowie and others miming the lyrics, pretending to play or just being in scenes. It was like seeing different trailers for the same movie. So, why this album rather than the others? It suckered me better than the others.

Fantastic Voyage begins with a few bongo beats that, if they'd been on a record only one year later, would have been a drum machine. The song is a mix of the Bowie Ballad (Word on a Wing, Sweet Thing) and a few distinct rhythm styles from languid, breezy exotica to a kind of soft '50s rock (like TVC15). As the coconut fronds sway by the beach we're treated to a lyric, in Bowie's romantic croon, that's all ineluctable downer, depression, prolonged youth, cold war missiles, and the need to get it all down. The oddly laidback melancholy is a fitting opener by an artist who always aced the first track of his albums. 

Bowie had recently shaken his fear of flying and had spent a lot of the two years between the last albums and this one, jet setting to any corner he could find that he'd heard of but never been to. And this is a record (in two senses) of his discovery of the world on the map, not just the one made of gigs, hustles, media and tours. He became a tourist and wanted the world to know about it. But this isn't just traveller's tales over port and dessert, it's Bowie's.

And as the pianos and bongos of the ballad fade into silence, we're ready for another. Then, we get punched in the head with a weird percussive figure on drums and the lowest piano keys. It's in 4/4 but feels more like something that a drummer would come up with to show off. Bowie's double tracked vocal tears in without a breath at more words per second than you can understand on the first few listens (the LP came with printed lyrics) and it's all panic and paranoia against a slow moving background where no one cares if you are stranded or not, which heightens the anxiety. The narrator plans or hallucinates becoming part of the mythology of the bushland before a gear change introduces a chorus of hellos and goodbyes in the local dialect. These become a chant that takes over the middle and end of the song and might be either the fleeting nature of travel or getting stuck in local daily life forever. If we were lulled by the ballad, we're now wide awake.

Move On starts in a gallop of drums and chorused guitars as Bowie sings quite plainly about his itchy feet. A looser, more romantic section is backed with gorgeous wordless vocals that sound as exotic as the trimmings of the previous two songs. Bowie in contemporary interview revealed that this feature came about after he mistakenly threaded All the Young Dudes back to front and was struck by the yearning sound of the chorus running backwards. I only recently heard this proven and it's extraordinary. A stirring anthem of running westward with the sun.

Yassassin (Long Live) is reggae through Turkish pop music. The title provides its own translation in the brackets. The song with call and response choruses and a halting verse and bridge speaks of migration, perhaps from Turkiye to German cities as Geistarbeiten but it could equally be just from country to city. The shift is disruptive and there is a need for reference points as a heavily middle-eastern violin part snakes through the rhythm. This song always worked best for me in the North Queensland heat where I really got to know the feel of it.

Side one ends with jaunty anthem to jaunting, Red Sails. A truncation of the old standard Red Sails in the Sunset, this is Son of Move On as the even more pumping band keep Bowie aloft as he tries out different ways of doing the refrain between the pentatonic verse melody. Adrian Belew drops in for a note scattering solo (and then the Fripp-like feedback at the end: never worked out if this was an ebow or not, they were around at the time). So, whether the thunder ocean or Island are yelled out or smoothed to a lulling harmony, the octave leaps of the guitars and bass and Bowie's crowd rousing cries lead us on beyond the horizon with a flourish of sheer joy.

DJ opens side two with a a strident bass and piano being smeared in processed guitar and electric violin. When Bowie's vocal comes in - "I'm home. Lost my job. And incurably ill" - the person that immediately springs to mind is David Byrne whose high strung staccato style had been intriguing anyone listening under the radar at the time. Eno had just produced Fear of Music for Talking Heads (the opening track of which had an Afro Funk feel that Eno would have brought with him here as one of Bowie's chief participants).  The DJ, here, is a club spinner rather than a radio host. Bowie heard of such a one getting fired for allowing a few seconds of silence between records which sounded weird and dystopic. The video for the track is a mix of Bowie strolling the streets of Manhattan and in a studio destroying turntables and audio equipment. Adrian Belew's solo was the result of him being played the song without vocals. It is a thrilling mash of wails, tritone sirens and some creamy melodics. Belew recorded six takes all of which were kept and switched between as though switching channels and hearing different solos on the same song. The bridge is a slow and tense meditation on the perception of time when in crisis and ends with an anguished plea for recognition. He is what he plays.

Look Back in Anger is another gallop with rich instrumentation and Bowie harmonising with himself is his operatic voice. The chorus comes in with a Beatlesque backing vocal ("waiting so long") which he interrupts with an impassioned singing of the title. The video shows him in a stylised bohemian artist loft at one of his own paintings. The more he looks at it and tinkers with the brush the more smudged and daubed with paint his face becomes. The overall feel has a kind of action sequence urgency with a chunky funky guitar solo and some French horn colouring. Another moment of eclecticism in this wandering set, and a very tasty morsel it is.

Boys Keep Swinging is a joke that's still funny. With a Heroes like backing (players switching from their normal instruments) Bowie again takes on his Euro opera boom to bellow out the advantages of being a lad. It has a kind of Cabaret swagger and a similar call and response chorus but one very different in tone from the previous track. It works through the sheer boastfulness, no one could think like this (until you meet one). The video is a forward step and only makes the song funnier. Bowie starts out alone on a small stage, making Jagger moves at the mic. Then it cuts for the choruses to a trio of female backing vocalists (including one that looks like an ancient bluestocking) who are all Bowie in very convincing drag. This is presented straight, as a meta joke. MTV be buggered, Bowie had music video down in the late '60s.

And then there's this. Repetition is the strangest song in any of Bowie's '70s tracklists. Think about that as you read it. Bowie had just given the world two of his most experimental works ever, and all of his albums from the 1970s had had darker, weirder corners, but this one wins. Remember, I'm not saying it's an oddball song (it is) but its place, even in an album this restlessly eclectic, is so ill-fitting. But that's why it works.

First, the subject matter had never been addressed by Bowie and wasn't a favourite topic in rock music: domestic violence. Johnny, working class and feeling trammelled by life, comes home from work, probably tanked, and verbally and then physically assaults his wife. The arrangement is a sparse rock band with a loping bass and siren like figures played on a slide guitar which destabilise the situation, keeping it constantly tense. 

Aside from a few lines sung as Johnny, Bowie keeps his vocal low and quiet, observational as he moves through one of his most genuinely poetic lyrics: "he'll get home around seven, cause the Chevy's real old. And he could have had a Cadillac if the school had taught him right." The lines seem to scoop up the daily antipathy right up to the only line with a vocal harmony, and it's almost murmured and in a low register: "But the space in her eyes shows through."  And then the camera slowly cranes away from the scene as we first hear Johnny's thought, "and he could've married Anne with the blue silk blouse," and then the observer's quiet insistence, "shows through..." That it comes close to breaking out but never does tightens the skin around it, keeping its horror protected. This song has actually been covered a few times, most poignantly by the post punk band The Au Pairs who didn't copy the arrangement but kept the quiet, matter of fact approach to the vocals and the effect is the same, a troubling mix of sadness and spookiness.

Red Money closes the album. It's a repurposing of the track Bowie worked on with Iggy Pop for The Idiot. There's some added instrumentation and effects but it's the self same track with different lyrics and vocal melody. There's more of a funk edge to this go around, carrying on the tradition of earlier funk landscapes like Fame, The Secret Life of Arabia. It's also something of a presage for his '80s career with its funk and pop sensibilities. It begins with a glittery chord progression that calls Fame to mind and then settles in for a funk workout that also looks forward to the album that ushered Talking Heads into their '80s and wider appeal, Remain in Light. Bowie ends by moving forward and standing still all at once.

This is the last Bowie album I love whole. It's one of the few I bought when it was released (though I had cassettes of a few) and this is the one that felt like mine rather than to a previous generation. I think you're meant to put the cut off at the next one, Scary Monsters, blithely ignoring the rest. I tend to think that, as mighty as the best of that one are, they just don't add up the way this one does. I played this next to Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, and all the '60s stuff I was increasingly getting into and it fitted perfectly. So did Low and Station to Station. I remember studying for my Grade 12 exams with it (and coffee and a few select brands of cigarette), turning it up or down according to my attention span and need for void-filling when the energy fell below zero. 

And then I moved down to Brisbane to polish my crappy results up to University level and took a few cassettes but no records (the new place didn't have a system) and listened to the radio and watched Sounds, Nightmoves and Countdown. Then, at the end of the year, I returned to Townsville for the Xmas holidays and caught up with people by getting them around. I put this LP on with every visit and got even more out of it by virtue of hearing beneath the conversation (eventually, I would test albums by hearing them while doing housework; they can really get through that way). It has come to mean that time, the second tier listening sessions under voices, and the continual discoveries of the holidays for me. And it's still a good occasional listen, and all the way through every time.

Aladdin Sane @ 50

Big guitar chords introduce a groove that would have been at home on Exile on Main Street from the year before. It's also a kind of Velvet Underground vibe if they'd been a stadium band. Bowie had long admired that band and had produced Lou Reed's breakthrough Transformer album the year before. If that's starting to sound like a party then it should as it's the setting for the lyric which is a series of images of something wild and fun happening at Shaky's. 

Another thing going on here is that Bowie is giving a kind of expressionistic portrayal throughout the album of the 1972 tour of the U.S. Watch that Man is related to Bowie's experience of seeing the New York Dolls in NYC and the after parties that we on the footpath must rely on imagination to picture. Tracks on the album were assigned cities. 

The infamous aspect of Watch that Man, though, is not the decadence on show but how hard it is to hear about it. Bowie's vocal is so well buried he sounds like he's coming through the amp mics. This was a mistake and it was sent back for correction but when the mix with the upfront vocal came back they went with the first one. If you're still thinking of the Stones this is not so off the track as a lot of the rockers on Exile have Jagger's vocals way down in the mix. The Stones even had a history of it going back to things like 19th Nervous Breakdown. Watch that Man does sound like a mistake though. When I first heard it (Christmas morning 1977) I thought the stereo had dropped a channel or maybe the record had a pressing error. But, nope, in that frustratingly lo-infomation world there was just no easy way of finding out until you got back to school and asked around. 

But when you got used to it the levels started making sense. Little Ziggy/David/Aladdin lost in the Big Apple as the party just gets crazy.

After the big party we turn and face the strange with the title track. Aladdin Sane (1913, 1938, 197?) begins with a tolling piano chord against a featherlight jazzy bossa nova. Bowie's vocal is tinged with fatigue as though the party of the first track has left him wasted. He recalls images of high life with a sense of impending doom. The first two years in the title's brackets are just prior to world wars and the question mark left after the contemporary date hangs on eerily. "Who'll love Aladdin Sane? Battlecries and champagne just in time for sunrise," Bowie whoops over the chorus. And then the full power of the secret weapon of this album is unleashed in a long apocalyptic solo of violent dissonance and chiming open harmony. Mike Garson brought, at Bowie's insistence, his avant-jazz piano to the record and it hangs over or gathers the music together almost continuously. The two chord grind of the chorus is straight out of On Broadway which gets a reference in the fading vocal but the wandering solo builds storms of trouble before calming for the reminder, calming but never too far from the spooky aura of the song. And then ends on a self effacing doddly plop.

Moving to Seattle-Phoenix for Drive-In Saturday and we're in 50's doo-wop land and imagining a future of poured out phones and watching old movies on video (a term that existed at the time but not in common parlance) as they try to rekindle sexual behaviour that an unnamed cataclysm has reduced to memory. Bowie was scared of flying at the time (Aladdin Sane was written on a ship) so he was driven or took the train. At one point, he spied a clump of huge silvery domes and imagined them as post-nuclear attack living quarters and wondered what the life would be like in them. Not that he knew it then but the scenario in Drive-In Saturday was close to his character's bored reality in The Man Who Fell to Earth a few years on. The song ends with a growing tide of vocals slowly flooding down as the title repeats and covers everything.

Panic in Detroit breaks in with a Bo Diddley rhythm and a very un-Bo Diddley chord progression (similar to the A-F in Suffragette City). Bowie's vocal is ansiety-ridden as he recounts a story of street violence and its aftermath when all order is crumbling and the city itself seems to consume itself. This is a Motor City where the cars are sleep at traffic lights. The source of most of this was the figure from Detroit whom Bowie would be spending a lot of time and creativy energy: Iggy Pop (ok, he's from Ann Arbor but it's close). The lengthy fade has the compelling riff charging on while Mick Ronson teases, screams and whines from his Les Paul and Bowie's yelps grow distant and echoed.

The old side one ends with Cracked Actor who's all spent stardom and flat sleaze. The entirely appropriately Stonesy grind of heavy distortion and feedback introduces Bowie's harranguing vocal which tells in the first person of what the faded movie star does with his post glitz years. It's the closest thing musically to the Ziggy album but its tone is forbidding and grimacing. We're in Los Angeles in the 1970s, filled with old idols hiding behind the curtains with their tongues out, Goats Head Soup meets Sunset Boulevard.

Side two starts with Mike Garson playing a strident Jacques Brel figure before Bowie's theatrical voice comes in with a flourish about time's claim on all, great and small, angel or devil he doesn't care. And when the grand guignol creeping stops the whole band bashes in and the voice stretches into anguish. It might only be about waiting to go on stage as seconds elongate. The next verse gets us back to the stage with a few lines about screeeeaming with boredom before Ronson's inspired guitar scream warbles down the semitones like a theremin in an old horror movie. Another chorus and the wordless la las take us out but instead of fadnng we get the last word given, as it must here, to time itself, yelling its own name. We are in New Orleans.

The Prettiest Star  plays like all those cod Victorian music hall takes from the late '60s by the likes of The Kinks, The Beatles and The Zombies but done as a Mick Ronson rocker. It's 2/4 flapper rhythm sways along as we hear of a love whose absence drives ruefulness. The song's own prettiness is undercut by Bowie's vocal which sounds spent.

The cover of Let's Spend the Night Together is one I didn't skip this time only because I needed to report on the whole album. From the crashing ugliness of Garsons discords that distort the Stones riff to Bowie's strangling vocal that throws most of the original melody out the window. There's a breakdown section where he speaks of a kind of teen rebel sexuality that ends in prehistoric grunts from Mick Ronson's guitar before everything dives back into the pill popping energy. All of this is intentional, clearly, but it just doesn't convince me. It comes across more as a kind of dare to listeners to revile his ravaging of a classic. It's like the worst of the tracks on the Pin Ups covers album where, instead of working with what was there to begin with, he has taken the conscious route to piss off the old guard. I guess that's it, for me: it's juvenile.

Back in New York we get to the most iconic track on the record, the one that people who have never heard the album will know, The Jean Genie. Against a hard blues riff Bowie variously croons and Jaggerishly hectors about a figure part human part reptile. Instead of Iggy's stories, it's Iggy himself or a world-built version of him, slinking or rampaging through the city from subway to skyscraper. The strutting talking blues is utterly infectious in the verse and breaks out excitingly for the chorus. The guitar/harmonica tremolo one note solo recalls the nastier moments of the '60s Who or Yardbrids and here just doubles up the intensity. A hard rock masterpiece.

We might have ended there but there's one more thing to say and its in the wider European context that yet does not feel like home. Garson's introduction is all flash and show but when Bowie's yearning croon starts the piano holds it aloft with a gorgeous constant glittering arpeggio. Ronson's layered guitars come in for the chorus which concludes with a John Barry semitone switch for that extra moment of danger. It's a love affair which is all silky sex and expensive fragrance, champagne and bottomless credit cards. But she will be your living end, the yearn of aftermath will haunt your days just as the James Bond figure in the guitars and piano do. A moment of purest musical seduction.

Seduction is the undeclared theme of the whole album which is a kind of expressionistic recall of the Ziggy Stardust the year before. It doesn't end with Rock and Roll Suicide because it's based on lived rather than imagined experience. Most of it is about the America Bowie saw opening up to him, its highest and shiniest and its darkest and most violent. It gave him nights of constant compelling pleasure and moments of cold terror and that's what we have here. It's less coherent than Ziggy as a musical song cycle but that's a symptom of its true life source. As Conrad said of Heart of Darkness, it's experience pushed a little, very little. 

I don't often mention the cover art of these records I write about but this one rates a paragraph at least. The iconic strength of this cover is such that all you have to do to evoke the spirit of David Bowie in anything you present is to put it in a copper mullet and draw a lighting flash across its face. It's could be a cartoon character or an office coffee mug but it will say Bowie even to people who know nothing else of the artist. People who have never heard this album or know its title, recognise the imagery and its meaning of flamboyant stardom. The cover was a gatefold and the middle image was a full body photo from the same session in which Bowie is looking beyond the camera's gaze into the lights, two stylised flashes behind him and his body transforming from skin tone to a silver spray on coat that removes his genital package and fades before we see his feet. The back cover is a pen and ink outline of the front with the song titles and credits. The inner sleeve has the lyrics and more multi coloured flashes. If the cover of Ziggy described a rising rock star in the back streets of a rainy London, this conveyed him into the infinite white of the starship he expected would take him to the cosmos.

It's strange how I and quite a few fellow Bowie fans can forget this album when listing their favourites, despite its imagery offering the most popular depiction of him. Is it the annoying buried vocal of the opening track, the difficult jazz soloing of the title track, the obnoxious Stones cover version? IT's hard to say why this gets less love than the harsher Heroes (that title track is not like the rest of the record) or the largely resistant Scary Monsters. I've frequently heard it described as bitsy or mixed but, really, there's a lot of adherence between these tracks and what they are telling us. Bowie found fame and found it was still a struggle and that clashed with the meteoric rise promised in Ziggy Stardust. If the fans wanted Suffragette City they got Panic in Detroit, if they expected Starman, they got Cracked Actor. Really, though, what was being offered was an outstretched hand to pull them up and fans don't always want to go where their idols lead.

1972@50: DAVID BOWIE - THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS

The procession arrives slowly, crisp footfalls on the snare drum and, as it gets closer, the kick playing a pulse between it and the snare. When it reaches us, a huge, bright acoustic chord rings across all six strings as Bowie enters to tell his tale. The news is out: Earth has five years of life left before its destruction from an unidentified force. Chaos fuels desperation in the city and a groundswell of violence begins to simmer as the narrator falls in love at first sight with someone he sees in an ice cream parlour. He declares his love as the chorus follows the same '50s progression, bursting into life with a call and response between backing vocals and Bowie's impassioned lead. A bolt of sci-fi horror has become a teen anthem and, for a moment at least, things seem beautiful again. Well, they would if we weren't being continually reminded by droning voices that we're on a clock. The strings light up like fireworks and the whole city is singing it until they can no longer whereby the drums softly pull their retreat.

Soul Love begins as a more sprightly acoustic number with a vaguely latin beat. Until you read the lyric it sounds like an innocuous filler there to put the word love into an LP side. But it does go to strange places. A mother grieves over her son the soldier, the intensity of young love to the complicated love that religion preaches without always practicing. And the chorus, a tugging electric barre chord fest and higher vocal, sings of love as a mass of contradictions. It's bizarre until you consider that it's the observations of a starman, Ziggy, who understands romantic love and a kind of universal variant but understands the limits. Love is not loving the same way that a painting of a pipe is not, itself, a pipe. These are the observations of a stranger noting what the doomed earthlings might only know as mundane. The song fades on a lazy swinging playthough of the verse as instrumental.

Moonage Daydream bashes to life as a pair of industrial strength power chords. "I'm an alligator," Bowie wails and keeps up the imagery of dreams and fantasies as the tone changes from the love of the last track to big grinding sex. A near contemporary review I remember from the late '70s looked back to this song as being cobbled by a bag of cliches from the bubblegum sci-fi tradition: space face, 'lectric eye, ray gun etc. But what Bowie is doing here has much more to do with Ziggy coping with sex. And not just sex, but big, explosive carnality that might as easily eviscerate as transport its players to ecstasy. Two verses and many choruses take us there, at least to watch and listen as Mick Ronson's screaming solo soars and his orchestral arrangements spread out in glittering splendour. The song was good enough to serve as a capsule for Bowie's decades of fame and invention in one of the most powerful documents of his life. Not bad for cheesy imagery.

The gentle strum and airy vocal of Starman takes wing with drums, close voice and arresting chord progression, going from shared teenaged intrigue to a soaring rocket of a chorus in which Bowie leaps an octave between the syllables star and man. The guitar riff that leads from the chorus is like a fanfare of joy. Ziggy has come down and only the kids know about it, keeping their treasurable knowledge to themselves as they end on the same fanfare as before but now it's sung across the teens of the world as they join the party.

It Ain't Easy was taken from the bin of Hunky Dory but you wouldn't know it. From the strident, protest march, strum of the acoustic and harpsichord and the bluesy vocal that give way to the giant chorus this piece is made of a lot of work. It's a cover, so while it might feel like a good side closer musically, its lyric has no purpose built through line. Then again, as a tale of grinding work to get to the top of the fame mountain it fits fine and works in the sequence. It's the end of side one and Ziggy is a real rock star glorying in his celebrity but not without a knowing wince of the temptations of corruption.

Flip to the old side two and we finally get to see Ziggy on stage. A gentle lilting piano figure gives way to a sweeping chord like a parting theatre curtain. It's being told in the third person. It's being told by a fan. Ziggy transfixes his small first audience into a collective swoon with songs of darkness and disgrace and dismay and disgrace again. There is a rushing climax before the final chorus where Bowie swoops down through a falsetto arc and sings: "how I sighed when they asked if I knew his name." Like other songs on this set, this one is repurposed from a grab bag of songs either unrecorded or unreleased (at least under his own name). Lady Stardust originally bore the title He was Alright (for Marc) and was Bowie's hymn to the pioneering star. Adding "lady" to the title and the character was Bowie's cheek but it is also central to the self-othering of the Ziggy persona. Is he a she a he or what? Do we care now? It's better that we don't care and instead celebrate the range and diversity. But fifty years ago under the overcast sky of the high street the ambiguity bore real power, power to disgust, certainly, to a culture that had turned fab pop into cock rock, but also power to defy every newsreader, columnist, mum, dad, and steel capped bovver boy outside the glittering walls of the venue. Once inside, the great ugly shrivels to invisibility.

Star begins with growling power chords and percussive piano that's less trad rock than Velvet Undergbround. It sounds like one of the Spiders rather than Ziggy as he lists earthly friends and their fates variously as joining the army, starving at home (as an artist, a junkie, both?), turning the the world or going into politics. But the narrator of the song knows that he wants to become a rock star. He could make a transformation or play a wild mutation, could do with the money and everything else a teenager in the '70s might dream is an achievable end. The urgent music of the stripped back rock band is cleanly lined and solid before the wistful finale where a big slide guitar figure comes back down on him. It might be the the bummer of reality or how seriously he's taking it as he ends with two bluesy repeats of the words "rock and roll star" and then as the post song fade he speaks: "just watch me now." At the end of an extremely busy '60s and the beginning of the stadium rock world of the '70s, the dream would have felt gigantic.

A fuel injected version of the Eddie Cochrane riff (bending from the fret below for one and half bars followed by two lashing chords, repeat). Things are getting fast. The band is playing and touring and reaping the wild booty o' the road. The stage whisper chorus is comes in close after the echoing tin of the verses and urges the band to hang on to themselves despite the sensual blitzkreig charging at them. This was another song Bowie wrote before the Ziggy project. Google Arnold Corns (there's stuff on YouTube, as well). The guitar figure's insistence creates drama from contemporary listeners who were also hearing the retooling of classic rock by glammers like Marc Bolan or The Sweet. It also unwittingly presages the barnstorming style of the punks four or so years later.

And then after the rise comes the fall. Ziggy Stardust begins with a fanfare figure played by Mick Ronson on his overdriven Gibson as it falls from a blod G chord to a trill on D and a loping downward motion back to G. It stops all the urgency of the last two tracks as Bowie takes the mic for the story of the star. "Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly and the Spiders from Mars...." After all that jamming he was the one bagging all the attention, the press, the groupies, the eyes and ears of the planet. Everyone else just got jealous. The grandeur is cut by a slashing descent as the others plot and grumble. Ziggy plays for time and jibes, knowing he's the star. But in the second darker passage it says "when the kids had killed the man they had to break up the band" while the chord descent thunders. Are the kids the rest of the band or the fans? To my mind the mass adoration kills the star's uniqueness, his glamour and mystique, so that he just becomes another strumming junkie sold on the packaging of pimple cream. The killing is told in the sour section of the song and always sounds dark and severe. We go out on the fanfare again, at least there was that, before it ends with an aching repeat of the first line: "Ziggy plaaaaaayed guitar." Whatever was great about it has gone.

After the elegy, if we are still following the story, the next one wrenches us from our silence with the same kind of rock as the early songs on this side except that now it's bigger, much bigger, stadium sized. Life as a superstar is a blur of the big three which are coming in floods (in more ways than one). "Hey man..." the nagging vocal won't leave him alone as the big guitar riff goes from A to a very cool F which is never where you expect before opening wide on a classic bluesrock chorus "don't lean on me, man..." Bowie's own quote about Suffragette City has to do with the opening apocalyptic prediction, the kids are post rock and roll and go on the rampage for everything they want. To me, it's the aftermath of the post-glamour star touring city after city, getting zonked on anything on offer, playing again, drowning in sex and attention, day after day after day, like the closing minutes of the song as the A-F progression goes on and on, joined by an insistent sax riff, comes to a false ending before gearing up again and rushing to big slipped stop with one last screech: "suffragette!"

The silence hasn't quite set in before the gentle strumming of Rock and Roll Suicide begins. "Time takes a cigarette. Puts it in your mouth." Bowie's voice has aged the way anyone does when they've lived a whole life in a year. As the song builds and Ziggy's thousand kilometre stare burns holes in the hotel wall, a jangling arpeggio on a clean guitar joined by a sax, the urgency of the pathos takes solid form until he can't even stand the thought of daylight (those lines about the day breaking and hurrying home always made me think of a movie vampire). As we build and rise the narrator who has been describing Ziggy's fragility starts talking straight to him, screaming for him to stand, hold his hands, and walk because he's (and a dark chorus appears behind him for it) he's won-der-ful. A string section we've hardly noticed appearing swells with the pleading voice until, after a thunderous climax, it has the last word in a quiet and short major chord. Has Ziggy made it? The brevity and suddenness of that last sound might mean either. Don't know? Well, you'll just have to go back to the start and listen to all of it again.

Which is what I did. August holidays 1977, hogging Dad's recliner in the family room, playing that tape over and over again. Sometimes I played along, with the nylon string piece of junk my sister had offloaded on to me when she got a better one, and learned the easier songs but mostly I just stretched back and took it in. Between about six of us at school we had the major records by Bowie and completed the list with some home taping. Ziggy was an oldie by this time, Bowie was already on to Station to Station and about to get weirder still. I didn't know much about that, yet, and in the meantime there was this mix of familiar, even homely, rock music and ideas and characters that felt yummy and dangerous.

From the grime and dust of the city streets of Five Years to the frail vampire of Suicide I followed Ziggy the Starman down to an earth that swallowed him up like dessert ... then crapped him out. The dread and the wonder weave an intriguing picture: rock stars get everything their fans want for themselves, the sex and the drugs and the rock and the roll. In the tropical winter of 1977, with punk already making it seem easier, anyone of us could get there. Bowie even looked punky on the cover when I finally got the LP; not bin bag and safety pins punky but of his own tribe and ready for whatever he could get.

Would there have been a punk rock without Ziggy Stardust? I think so. So much of it had to do with what happened when the boil of Britain's grinding fortunes in the '70s was popped and the rockstar dream looked fake. But I can say that the search and destroy of Ziggy paved the way for whatever we were calling (I'm) Stranded or Anarchy in the UK. It prepared me so that when punk turned up on the pages and the waves I knew it was where I was and I embraced it. And as I closed my eyes, held my breath and felt the world changing around me, even in this little, personal way, at that small and sluggish pace, the secrets that darted around in the sounds of a great record, the grinning whispers that grownups could never pick up, spoke to me directly and they said: welcome.

Then again, this is a record we're talking about. Yes, it's one of the greats from one of the greatest's extraordinary decade-long roll, but just a record. After that holiday fortnight, I had played it so often, rubbed its neuronal receptor so raw, that it takes conscious thought, even now, to play again. When I do it is with pleasure but the sense of thrill I still get from my very favourite records is not part of that. We all grow up and find our own special ways of being boring. It doesn't have to be anything imposing or even irritating to others but it always, when noticed, strikes anyone who has known any of us for years, as a choice towards comfort and safety. I can still hear the glide of the wink in these sounds today but I think I've chosen against the wink.

Listening notes: I strolled around with the flacs of the legit download of the Five Years set from early last decade and sat myself before the wide and beautiful surrounds of the multi-channel SACD from the decade before. I really will never regress to vinyl.

1971@50: HUNKY DORY - DAVID BOWIE

If you were, and you should have been, a music fan taking an interest in this David Bowie bloke, you might have approached the coming of this new album thinking you were in for something certain. If the last one was a hint at anything this would have to sound like full on Sabbath.Then, when you got it and saw the glamour doll cover photo on the front and the washed out black and white one on the back withthe handwritten tracklist with cute little notes you might have wondered about that. And if you did, the answer was in the opening song.

Changes didn't start with a power chord from Hell but a jazzy piano chord. A few more and you could smell the cigar smoke and scotch of a jazzy bar somewhere in the midwest of the US. This suddenly jumps to rhythm like a little goblin and plays an old school rockriff but then goes south to an unrock out of key experience. Pause for a smokey vocal with more self reflection that would have been decent in a Sinatra piece before lunching to the stars with a bright stuttering chorus of overlapping melodies. "I know that time may change me but I can't trace time." He's doing what he says on the tin.

Oh, You Pretty Things follows immediately and almost sounds like an extension of the last song but it has its own ideas. The narrator is having a bad morning, seeing a crack in the sky and a hand reaching out for him. Looks like the nightmares are here to stay. A slighty more jaunty piano gives way to a languid ballad arrangement. It's starting to look like the end of the common human as the soaring chorus tells us against thumping piano. "Oh, you pretty things, don't you know you're driving your mamas and pappas insane. Let me make it plain. Gotta make way for the homo superior." Bowie was always a deep reader and Nietzsche left him as wasted as it did most who read it to the end. He knew that ol' Friedrich wasn't a Nazi and knew that his ideas took him into transcendence. So, on David's most poppy sound record since his Cockney Psychedelia one four years before, he wrote a song about that.

This blends seamlessly into Eight Line Poem, a series of images set to a kind of stretched toffee country ballad or distorted reflection of one. A room with the breeze blowing at the curtains, a kind of  prairie with the city in the distance. Mick Ronson's lap steel style playing on his Les Paul provides a rich descant to the gentle piano. An elusive image of the city's spirit being as fleeting as seeing the sun behind a tree branch. If there are more personal details to this one I know not nor care. It's a beautiful dozey mooded observation.

The next song, as good as its predecessors are, is the moment where the Bowie of all the years he's been Bowie separate from all the years he will be. There has been nothing like Life on Mars to this point and it is one of his eternal moments and one in his own career that he needed to beat to progress. He knew its importance. The verses describe a descent through F to C, dropping to E to D etc and would have worked easily on his old acoustic twelve string. But here is a case of getting what you pay for as he hired Rick Wakeman for the piano part. Wakeman young but already a lifelong musician was classically trained but an inventive improviser. Between the Strawbs and prog rock titans Yes, he was doing sessions. His fluid enlivening playing around the basic descent has led some listeners to hear chord progressions that aren't there. It is a cinematic performance. Bowie starts softly over it in one of his most subtly complex melodies with words about a debutante makes a scene in front of her parents and wanders listlessly into numbness as the bowed basses start sternly below. The chorus soars to an octave above the starting range as the strings bloom around it. Images of news shows, movies, tv, a world weighed down by its own media and false impressions. A clean high and brief guitar solo gives way to the next verse where Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow and on to more torutured and unstoppable disasters which might as well be fiction as fact. Another massive chorus and the penny drops as to the title line. It's not about humanity's next great adventure but a question: is that all we can do, now?

There is nowhere to put this song easily. It starts like a ballad but its lyric and arragement are so cinematic and fantastical. Despite the orchestral swells there is nothing of prog rock about it. While its brightness and falvoursome melodics and harmonic structure make it instantly appealing it failed several times as a pop single. It's just Life on Mars. (Trivia: the piano that Wakeman plays on this album is the same one Paul McCartney used on Hey Jude.)

A gentle strum with a light rollicking piano heralds Kooks (for small Z.) It's a comfy singalong to his son Zowie and imagines the three-strong family going about a loving and kooky life in a kind of cartoon world. He can go to school as much as he wants and then they can just throw the homework on the fire and go for a drive. He promises the boy belief and love and it's worth noting in this winsome piece that the child is being invited, not instructed, to join them. You might already know but I love the notion that Zowie grew up to be film director Duncan Jones. If you haven't seen Moon or Source Code you should. Guess he took them up.

If Life on Mars was soaring Quicksand is tidal. We are lifted to the crests of waves, float weightless at the crests, slide down and rise again. The heartfelt vocal sings a lyric of imagery of philisophy, faith and belief all of which add up to change. The chorus could be a stadium singalong but when I think of thousands intoning,"knowledge comes with death's release" I see a cult and need to open my eyes again. Bowie is saying goodbye to an attic full of old mind experiments and pathways (there's a word beginning with 's' that I refuse to use here). His mind is on the future and more of those changes from track one in mind. The bulk of the arrangement is layered acoustic guitars. Bowie long favoured acoustic 12 strings and there are a few on show but also moments where a gentle arpeggio on a 6 string tells the story. It's a marvel of balancing near identical voices. Bowie's vocal melody has the epic quality of some of the old stuff like Cygnet Commitee and he is generally left with the guitars to sing it in bittersweet voice. But then the same ranting bowed basses from Life on Mars come in and are joined by a lush full string section and Rick Wakeman's sublime piano improv. The chorus warning against belief hovers between inspiration and exhaustion and is a marvel of much from simple means. You might find yourself welling up with this one without ever knowing why but the sense of farewell to a former self could be as universal as going from adolesence to adulthood. The fade has more dazzling piano and strings as the tide takes the old self away.

The old side two begins with a cover that sounds like it comes from a musical. Fill Your Heart is so light and boppy and sugary that it sounds like a parody but that would be too much at odds with this record. Bowie's vocal ranges from the earnest to the impish as he tells us that being nice and gentle will clear you and make you free. While it sounds like a number written for one character to cheer another up, in context here it sounds like Bowie finding a similar promise to the one in Qucksand and changes about breaking away from burdensome normal life. Tight reed sections, springy piano and self harmonising give it the tang of a song made from sorbet. It ends, curiously on a saxophone squawk that falls into tape echo on to the opening of the next track.

Andy Warhol comes out from under the beaky echo with a sinister chromatic ringing melody and an engineer announcing the take, and title. Bowie speaks in a voice so affected you can feel the lights of the makeup mirror and the press of the greasepaint. A short back and forth about the pronunication of the name Warhol and you understand what's happening but if you didn't the take proper begins with peals of self-directed laughter. A forceful two guitar attack with Bowie on his 12 string and Mick Ronson on the 6 and taking the lead with a Flamenco-style minor run. Bowie throws out images of the artist who made his persona as much his art as the art itself, who pushes to the edge with semen fixes and imagines being a cinema where people could pay to look into his brain. Warhol himself was offended by the song, thinking it was a pisstake but Bowie was describing what he saw when he thought of the artist. Bowie never pulled the punch, not considering it to have been one and the pair did make up in the course of history. The Song ends on an exended acoustic thrash with Ronson chiuming harmonics overhead. Studio applause at the end. Worth noting here that the studio environment sounds and opening dialogue are not just a tribute to the glitz of the art life but also a nod to another of Bowie's inspirations Syd Barrett. The track If It's In You on The Madcap Laughs has a very similar false start where Syd flubs the opening twice and chats to his producer before his statement, "if we could cut," is cut and the song begins. I remember hearing the Barrett album long after being familiar with the Bowie one and the closeness of it popped right out. It's a clear and lovely tribute.

Song for Bob Dylan begins with acoustic strumming and a bendy electric intro. Bowie, stretching himself to invoke the Zimmerman and call him from his then current hiatus. Bowie wasn't alone in going to the extent of using an album track to say, come back and tell everyone what's what. Some folk think the painted lady of the chorus was the Factory's Edie Sedgwick but it really doesn't have to be. While the title does state the addressee this, like any song that uses an archetypal figure this one really speaks most through metaphor. Of course, Dylan fans tend to be fanatical enough to be that earnest (and Bowie might have been) so ...

Queen Bitch is a self avowed tribute to The Velvet Underground. An acoustic strum is taken up by a much ruder amp distorted electric guitar crunch with a strident 1-5-4-1 progression. This calms temporarily for Bowie's Lou Reed style spoken verses. The verses are all Reed and co. about the antics of a trans figure. An extended prechorus takes us into a joyous descriptions of frou frou in darkened rooms, tatts and bippity boppy hats. This song is nothing but utterly enjoyable and forms its own meta bridge between Bowie's admiration for the group and his production the following year of Lou Reed's masterpiece Transformer. The sound of this arrangement played by the band Bowie would take on tour and record with for the next two years and albums is the sound of those years and albums, a hard edged acoutic/electric stride.

A gentle strum opens The Bewlay Brothers. It's joined by a muted electric guiar using amp tremolo which echoes the vibraphone on the side one closer Qucksand. Bowie's voice come in dry with images of intrigue, campaigns and secrets. The chorus is a hard strum with some lyrical electric licks that might be either recorded backwards or just played and treated as though they are. The song follows the verse chorus pattern, returning to the quiet verses and building up for each chorus the same way. The exploits of the brothers of the title take on more cinematic bredth. And then, abruptly at the end of the final chorus the song is interrupted with a chorus of cockneys: Lay me place and bake me pie, I'm starvin' for me gravy. Leave my shoes and door unlocked, I might just slip away. It's gone from the Bewlay Brothers to the Kray twins. But really, it's Bowie himself and, more prominently, his half brother Terry whose schizophrenia was still galloping away from the mention on the previous album (All the Madman on Man Who Sold the World). Bowie would return to writing songs that stated his motion to understand his brother's condition. The two chord tension strumming into the fade of this song is accompanied by those cockney voices and is augmented by increasingly meanacing voices intoning variations of the words "come away". The sadness of the song is not just in the contrast it depicts between the brother's imagination and creativity and his inability to express it and Bowie's own swiftly developing capacity to do so. David cannot reverse Terry's troubles, he can only describe them.

This brings us to the end of David Bowie's most enduring statements, an undeclared concept album about change. After the earnest singer songwriter of Space Oddity (really, his second LP to be brought out eponymously, the first one presumably swept under) and after the metaloid sci-fi black-rocker he came to this point where he was shedding much of his training and the notion of being in training. Change begins at home and Bowie straight up learned piano to write most of these songs which is a major reason why they aren't structured in quite the same way as the previous albums' songs. There is a clear intention to forge the music through greater discipline with arrangements and performance (there are no extended guitar solos like on the previous outing and the epics are kept to a minimum and then with greatly trimmed running times). This is the record more than any of the others that finds the artist ready to put the hours in and work for his place and sweat for his stardom. It's a statement of change and it would not be the last. And that's kind of it. I mean, what could he have possibly done next?

We'll take that up next year. On that, as I've found over the past two years of examining 50 year old albums the era has diminished in importance while some artists have risen to the top of my attention. So, instead of Year@50 it will be Ablum by Artist@50. If you've been reading so far, thank you, and let's take it higher and further. Happy NY.

1970@50: THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD - DAVID BOWIE

 

If his 1969 album (various titles: it's the one with Space Oddity) showed an artist emerging into definition as a songwriter his follow up was the first indication that he was going to make moves on his image and sound. With 2020 hindsight it looks like a bold game plan but the thing Bowie picked up between his eclectic 1967 eponymous debut and his rebooted eponymous debut two years later was that a committed record was a better bet. So, on the 1969 one he sounds like one singer songwriter with a band behind him and two sides of whatever he had that had srpouted out of the now tired folk rock genre. Then he made a metal album.

The Man Who Sold the World is the same kind of songs, if more brutal, arranged with even less variation than the previous platter. This album is also the first one on which Bowie worked with the great Mick Ronson, rock guitarist extraordinaire and deft arranger. With a folder bursting with dark themed lyrics and very finished songs the pair set to creating Bowie's blackest record until Diamond Dogs.

The epic Width of a Circle opens with tremulous feedback and a snakey descending guitar riff, joined in cruisey fashion by the band until it grunts into gear as a hard rock groove. Bowie's vocal is the high nasal rock shine he would affect well into the Ziggy Years before abandoning it from Young Americans onward. Immediately, we lose the whole metal goodness of the track and understand that this one doesn't want to play normal. The lyric itself is a kind of debauched pilgrim's progress, taking the narrator from a personal trek of self discovery and self-loathing to a S&M encounter with god or a demon (it's hard to tell) in a second section driven by a more conventional boogie rock growl. There's a kind of ascent into apotheosis in the wordless repeat of the opening figure. Someone's risen.

All the Madmen begins with a quiet fumble on the acoustic which soon articulates as a real chord figure. It's joined by an eerie low profile feedback. We're in Hammer Horror territory. Bowie's vocal is his "other" voice, the one he'd use on half of the next album and all of Ziggy; a kind of comb and tissue paper buzzing tone, kind of camp but also a real character each time. "Day after day, they send my friends away to mansions cold and gray to the far side of town where the thin men stalk the streets and the sane stay underground." The Paul McCartney of Eleanor Rigby would have maimed and killed for that compact narrative. Immediately, the landscape is grim and that's just a few lines. Add a loopy recorder and some robust Les Paul chording and then a shreiking synthesiser and you have a nightmare to beat the band. Except that you can sing along to it because this is Bowie and he never forgets to bring a tune. A horror movie in a song. It wont' be the last. Important to note, this was inspired by Bowie (maybe we should say David Jones for this) visiting his half brother Terry, who was confined in care with schizophrenia. Bowie took his frustration out in song and here it is, pounding at us as we join in the chorus. Getting a vibe yet? "Zane zane zane, ouvre le chien!" Nor do I but I am getting the vibe.

Black Country Rock might seem to those of us who read biographies to refer to the twin hard rock influencers of 1970, Led Zep and Sabbath but the odd thing here is that the vocal is a strangely bitchy take on his friend and rival Marc Bolan. The song might conceivably have been a T-Rex number but Bowie's mordant vibrato and boomy rock revival chords tell of a curious jab. Good song, though.

After All is the song I played the same hour I heard of Bowie's death. How many times had I lain in a teenage dark listening to its earthward dragging waltz with the bowster whispering his Nietzschean lines and demented cockney choirs intoning: Oh By Jingo! Countless. The end of the first side in the old money was a sharp left turn from the arrogance of the hard rock of the rest of the side. It's like we stopped in the middle of the wake and remembered the corpse on the table. There in the great dark that bore this song's idea is the line: won't someone invite them, they're just taller children. It cut me to my ashen blood. A kind of sea dirge for the funeral march of all time. I love it every time I listen and it never gets old.

Side two starts with a simple three chord strum that ends in a surprise tympanum boom. A sinister feedback lingers in the background. Bowie's buzzy voice comes in with a tale about a war veteran who is so used to killing that he can't tell the difference between war and civilian life. Running Gun Blues. It snaps to the moment the tympanum is replaced by the crispest snare drum in recording history. The song doesn't go much further than that but doesn't have to. Why? because Bowie has learned something.

He's learned, since the often complex stories of the first album lost him an audience and the more searching narratives of the second did the same, that with music it's better if you don't sing the whole story. It's better if you let the music help out. Between the last and this, apart from anything else, the mighty Tommy was released which did just that. Townshend understood that opera is a mesh of meaning, one piece in the words, another in the tune and the orchestration and another still in the implied action. The Man Who Sold the World is Bowie's post-Tommy record. and it remains one of his most tightly coherent. 

Take the next one. Saviour Machine. It's pretty much the story of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Computer goes mad. Bowie narrates a little exposition and then it's over to the computer cam for the rest. It comes from the dark of the vinyl between the tracks in a busy 5/4 gallop but settles into a 6/8 canter as we hear about President Joe and his dream of a digital King Solomon who then finds its life is too easy and decides to rustle up some spice with social chaos. A big spitting synthesiser solo in the middle tells you all you need to know. It might ruin the mood to say that the melody of the break is the same as the opening of the Cilla Black chestnut You're My World but life's tough.

She Shook Me Cold starts with a few grimacing Hendrix style wah wah twirls before the dam bursts into a world of tritonal grunge as Bowie almost vomits his vocal about a debauchee who meets his hedonistic match and can't quite recover. A middle section breaks out the back story but he's met his match and the point at which he admits his defeat and servitude is the moment that takes this way out of a Sabbath soundalike. "She don't know I crave her so" is a screech of anguish that ends in a few seconds of tight breathing before the final verse kicks in like the first. As I've pointed out in the articles on Sabbath's first two platters in this series, they were far from a metal chug machine but Bowie's take adds a moment of tension that is pure cinema that they never got to.

The title track begins with a pleasant Latin shuffle which is taken over by a phased-out Bowie who tells a weird tale of meeting a stranger on the stair who tells him that his life has left him spare. Has he sold the world in the literal sense, to an alien race? Or has he sold his potential, his reality for the fury of the chase to sex, drugs, rock and roll, power, fame, expertise....? It's hard to tell but we are left as spooked as the narrator, especially in the fade which keeps the Latin side-to-side going but adds an epic wordless choir as the song seems to sink slowly into a vortex. If you speak to a later X-er you'll hear them think of it as a Nirvana song. I wonder, though, did Cobain find something familiar in its brief depths that his fans could only guess at, something lightless and endless that he saw in awe and sought to touch, at least once?

The Supermen is a closing track that will surprise no one who reads a Bowie biography but spooked me. It's earth-bowel drums and prehistoric male choirs mixed with a crunchy Les Paul and Bowie's buzzy voice tell of rites and conflicts of the ubermensch. Extremely effective use of limited resources turn this song which might have come off as petulant and silly into a tiny epic of imagination. the final words are in the Ziggy voice and reach to the dark heights: "So Softly a supergod dies."

This is the second Bowie album I owned on vinyl. It disappointed me. I bought it the same day as I bought the Who compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy which also disappointed me. I wanted the Who to have been stadium-ready deafening rockers from the start but they sounded like The Beatles. I had read that this Bowie album was a "real explosion into heavy metal" but it seemed so noncey. It was months before, listening to both, that I came to understand how writers found things in music that were hard to sing to and defied all dancing but cut through the packaging plastic and into the sharp and jolting electricity within. I came to that and finally felt reverence. And then punk happened and I woke up in the late '70s.

Listening notes: for this article I listened to the incredible 2015 remaster as a hi-res download. Vinyl can never compete. My late '70s copy had the RCA packaging with the NME article on the back and the Ziggy era front cover. It created a very different impression from the original one.

1980@40: SCARY MONSTERS - DAVID BOWIE

 

So much had happened. The great morphing wave had taken us from the barre chording slaughter of punk through the sourcandy Brighton rock of post punk, industrial, ska, dub on the mainstream that it looked like nothing in particular was in fashion. As I headed to eighteen and nominal adulthood I started thinking that all that was just as well as it might be time to ditch the idea of fashion altogether. Fact was I wasn't good at playing it to begin with and it wasn't for years before I could look back and understand that that was fashion. There would soon be clubs where the punters dressed like 18th century Venetian court jesters and bands that got on stage in the plainest drab they could get from the supermarket. We didn't even have a patois; there was no rad or cool or square or gnarly to us and we called what we liked good. Then the clip for Ashes to Ashes was played on Countdown and I thought for the first time in at least a year: I wonder what David Bowie will do now?

The last one, Lodger, was a track by track departure from the big sci-fi landscapes of Low and the harsh and sharded night of Heroes. It even had some fun along the grooves. And it was eclectic but it was eclectic in a Bowie way, unlike when Billy Joel tried to get all new wave that year and only made himself look older than everyone. And then in 1980 he turns up again in a clip that looked like a hard sci-fi tv show and music that didn't try to be anything but good. And because he always knew how to cast, nascent star of the London Blitz Steve Strange was there beside him in surrealistic costume. Bowie was trying and trying hard but in his case it worked. The video and song were thrilling.

We get to the start of the opener It's No Game with the sound of someone fast winding a cassette, turning it over and winding it more. A messy count-in and we plunge into a big noise of Robert Fripp guitar which sounds like a synthesiser here but a rhinoceros there. A sassy woman speaks something in Japanese before Bowie comes in with a vocal that sounds like he's been in the drunk tank for three hours. Desperate screams and imagery of street conflict. Where? Kabul? Iran? U.K.? Anywhere and everywhere. It's as though he spent a day with wall to wall news broadcasts and forced his way out of a locked door. In the end as it's coming to a crashing stop Fripp keeps up his metal monster noodling until Bowie yells at him twice to shut up.

Up the Hill Backwards comes from a highly ordered opposite. Lower key vocals sing the lyric in unison. I always think of lines of athletes in uniform tracksuits singing this with hands on hearts. No major breaks, just a few verses of everyone in line and agreeing. After a decade of great dynamism as an artist and celebrating the disruption of punk while providing his own appropriately different one Bowie watched this settle into genre, into homogeneity which is the point at which any youth revolt is absorbed by the mainstream. So, it sounds healthy and could sell boxes of cereal or flavoured milk. He met the new brash mainstream with subtlety.

The title track bashes to after a brief electronic drone with screaming guitar and oafish glottal gulps. Bowie comes in multitracked and in low Cockney. The chorus adds a microsecond delay giving it an unnerving plastic sound. A long but screaming guitar noodle ends satisfyingly with a double chorus. We leave on a wordless hum-along to the fade. It's rock and roll but it doesn't even have slogans anymore just impulses. 

Ashes to Ashes opens with arpeggios that could be keyboards or guitar or both, warbling through chorus pedals. We hear the sound before the notes but when we hear them we hear a deeply melancholy fanfare. Bowie starts in falsetto: "Do you remember a guy that's been, in such an early song?" References to his first significant hit song Space Oddity and its lead character Major Tom are woven deeply through the lyric but as we relax into a descending progression and a series of stream of consciousness images, backed by a spoken choral vocal, we are lowered into the hole in the ground as the funeral rites are murmured above. This song is a floating wilderness that drifts from gentle reminiscence to distant operatic roars against an arrangement that's very hard to pin down beyond its narcosis. It's sleepy, it's dreamy and second by second it just seems to get sadder. But it's transient, less an end than a farewell. Bowie's using the turn of a nine to a zero as a chance to reboot. The gentle chant "My mother said to get things done you better not mess with Major Tom" steers us slowly out of the melancholy, through the sci-fi landscape of the the video. R.I.P. Let's get this party started.

So we do. Fashion. A few bars of something undefined turns into another thick rock song with a deep funk ground. The vocals again are multitracked, striding through images of political strong arm tactics and style identity. Lots of warping Fripp guitar. The modal oohs of the verse bring back Golden Years but the looseness of that one has been clipped into uniformity. The easy trip of the mid '70s is now the tightly wrought kit of the New Romantic and the New Right. Bowie's not taking sides, here, not even to the extent of a Thin White Duke, he's just watching and reporting. Fashion is fun but it's also deadly serious. By now it's clear he's not giving us another persona, the music itself is doing that, but preparing for an ascension elsewhere. Where? Far above this organising leisure politics, for one thing. He keeps climbing as the voices below chant the sounds of style: fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fashion.

A little feedback gives way to a sweeter Fripp guitar line and a descant. Bowie's in gymnastic mode but the feel of it is the kind of rolling ballad he's been doing since Aladdin Sane, with a forward pushing momentum. But instead of romantic tales of love and travel Teenage Wildlife is more like a celebration of seeing genuine style and individuality in the kind of herd that Fashion was describing. The noodly guitar stretches into Heroes-like legato wails as the calls to the teenage wildlife ascend to jungle howls like fanfares.

Scream Like a Baby opens in strength, telling of hospitals and paddy wagons, life under arrest and in restraints. If the previous song toasted individuality this is aggrieved to see it punished with force. The hard beats and low-mixed rock arrangement push the notion of fun from our minds as Bowie's pained vocal seems to ask us what we would do.

Kingdom Come is a cover of a Tom Verlaine song. Narrator is a prisoner, confused which is how he got there but he just needs a day far away and then a night and he just keeps breaking the rocks in hard labour until the end of the world. Like Sam in the previous song, he's defiant and determined to get to relief and freedom when (in a twist) the kingdom comes. Why this as a cover, especially when Bowie was on such a roll? I think it's a gesture of generosity and an admission that the rising generation might well be getting it right. The arrangement is very little changed form Verlaine's solo album original (it wasn't a Televsion number) in another gesture of solidarity.

Because You're Young begins in the muted chords of the era with a pinched urgent riff. Bowie's vocal falls to the cod operatic he started with the 1969 self titled album and this is one of the few songs on the set that sounds like it could have been on an earlier platter like Diamond Dogs or Station to Station. Not to denigrate it for that but the call back feels strange in this record of newness. The words are intriguing, though. "It's love back to front and no sides." Like the severely short haircuts of the electronic musicians this seems to leave no mystique to the face but rather a taunt to question its contrast. Psychodelicate girls and metal faced boys. Is it about one of his own encounters? Bowie is seldom if ever that straight up but there is a real yearning to the screaming litany of millions of starts, dreams and everything else.

The closer is the opener but without the screaming. Everything is clean. His vocal feels resigned, the old master debaucher on his throne, more like Lou Reed than Bowie he reaches for the snifter of cognac at the table, gives it a swirl with a look in and puts it back without drinking. He's tired and and can't tell drunkenness from inspiration at this time of night but he's ready to go and will be fine when he gets there. Where? Not here, for one thing.

A frantic clicking like typing or something. It fades. End.

November 1980 and I'm studying for exams in the room downstairs, away from the tension of the troubled marriage in the main house. That marriage began with trouble and never got through it so it just repeats there, blow and counter blow. Down here I've got a good big coffee and my texts, and the radio has three or so stations on the AM band I can switch between to hear any of three high rotation numbers. One is Don't Stand So Close, by the Police because I like the movement and the harmonies. Two is Psycho Chicken by the Fools, a clunking parody of Talking Heads' Psycho Killer that I find funny no matter how many times I hear it. And three is Ashes to Ashes. I manage over hours to hear each one about three times and I never forget a fact that I read that night which is just as well as the next day I'll be sitting in the big bright cavern of Cloudland answering questions about Economics. By the time I get to bed I'm hearing an ersatz David Byrne talk about supply and demand of chicken meat and then I dream of white faced clowns on posterised seashores.

Then exams, breathe out, Schoolie's Week, good stuff, bad stuff, and then it's up to Townsville where I finally can't hear my brother and his wife. School friend Wayne visits in the afternoon with a copy of the album. We smoke, chat, drink rum and listen. We were too young to be into Bowie at the start and had to catch up through the jungle drum market of home cassettes. He was a hero for more than one day. Everything was changing. We were legally adults which took the burr off the alcohol a little but it still worked. And, as neither of us were looking, we missed seeing Bowie climb up to the stage of the biggest stadium he could find where he pumped out hits that were ready for the turntables of the most brutal AM playlists. For a bit, at least, though, he was still down here with us, letting us know we were fine. And then he was gone.

1967 at 50: DAVID BOWIE

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.