He'd like to come and meet us
Oh, he was a thing of wonder. So noble in reason, so infinite in faculty, in form and moving so express and admirable. An angel in action, a god in apprehension. The paragon of rock stars. While there were certainly other artists in the 1970s, from Bob Dylan to the Clash, who made records as good as Bowie's best work, no one (with the possible exception of Neil Young) comes close to matching his overall achievement during that decade- its breadth and variety, its daring and ingenuity. He didn't think he'd blow our minds. He knew.
He recognized no barriers. He simply shattered them when he didn't disregard them entirely. Small, petty things that could not possibly contain him. It was one thing to be a rock'n'roll star before Bowie. It was something very different afterwards. Lennon and McCartney had set out the initial terms of the discussion. McCartney's conception of stardom was more traditional, rooted in the role the entertainer in general and that of the musician in particular. It was Lennon who pointed the way toward something more ambitious - the rock'n'roll star as complete social icon, relevant to politics and morality as well as art, a full cultural representation. It was Bowie, even more than Mick Jagger, that took these possibilities further. Bowie took them as far as they could go, unburdened by Jagger's irony and cynicism (and free as well of Jagger's deep, deep roots in a specific musical tradition.) Bowie changed everything. Look out, you rock and rollers.
As a matter of social import, Bowie's claim in Melody Maker way back in 1972 that he was "gay and always had been" needs to be noted. It probably slowed his acceptance into the American mainstream, but it was both very brave (Elton John, who really is gay, didn't come out officially until the late 1980s) and very meaningful. Granted, it wasn't particularly true in Bowie's case, but that's not what matters. It was part of his positioning himself as something alien, as some kind of freak - and it is impossible to overestimate how much that meant to every young misfit adrift in a world that didn't seem too welcoming. You're not alone, no matter what or who you've been. His fans recognized Bowie as a fellow misfit, a kindred spirit, but one who was clearly fully comfortable in his own weird skin. Quite aware of what he was going through. It was a crucial part of his appeal to so many. All this went right past me, a very different kind of misfit. But he had the songs to back it all up. Oh, he had the songs. And his songs came from a place like no other.
Bowie was not someone who dealt in truths. That's what seems especially important to me. The early 1970s had seen a glut of singer-songwriters baring their souls, providing slices of their real lives, expressing themselves. Bowie was not baring his soul and he didn't have much to say about real life. He was not interested in authenticity, not one little bit. In the rock music world of the day, this was almost revolutionary. Bowie was interested in concepts, and in role-playing, and he moved from one to the next as easily as he changed costume or hairstyle, much faster than anyone could keep up.
He was always very aware of how much he owed, as a musician, and he was extraordinarily generous in paying it back. As he was finishing Ziggy Stardust, the record that would catapult him to international stardom, he learned that Mott the Hoople, a band he admired, were on the verge of breaking up. Bowie donated a great song - "All the Young Dudes" - and then produced the album that saved their career. He promptly moved on to work with that most difficult and irascible of his idols, Lou Reed. Bowie produced Transformer, and actually succeeded in getting Lou Reed a hit song, played on the radio and everything. And after that he rescued Iggy Pop, who was living on the streets and shooting heroin. Bowie produced Raw Power, Iggy's comeback, and a few years later, he would help Iggy write two albums and do service as his bandleader and keyboard player.
He was a Londoner, born David Jones in January 1947, and he kept his birth name all his life. It's what he signed on his contracts, it's the name of the man who married Iman. He had only adopted the stage name of David Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees. He had begun his musical career in the usual way, playing in a succession of London bands. Like all the other UK musicians of his day, he was playing music based on American models - he played in a blues band (the mind boggles) and his infatuation with modern jazz led him to take up the saxophone, which he would toot on at various points throughout his career. But he was also a huge fan of Anthony Newley, who was a bit of a strange one himself. Newley's largely forgotten in North America today, although he was for a time a big success on Broadway and several of his songs have found their way into the Great American Songbook.
One of the things that was especially distinctive about Newley, and would prove to be distinctive about Bowie as well, was the simple act of retaining his London accent as he sang. Mick Jagger certainly did no such thing. Newley did it because he was playing a London character on stage - Bowie, one has to assume, did it mainly because he admired Newley. The only other significant UK rock singer allowing his native accent to be heard was Ray Davies of the Kinks - but the Kinks were literally locked out of America at the time, and Davies was also intensely interested in a specifically English type of nostalgia, as well as some specifically English musical styles.
Bowie, of course, was different. He never had much use for nostalgia - nostalgia is always personal and Bowie was seldom personal. And while Bowie occasionally dabbled in the English music hall tradition, his music always owed more to American (later continental) musical forms. Retaining his accent while singing rock'n'roll, which had always been an American musical form, placed an inevitable distance between the music and the performer. As if he were an alien. It's something he managed simply by being himself, which is a very neat trick indeed. It made his work a performance rather than an expression.
Because his work so often has little relation to real life, it's left him with a strange musical legacy. The greatness of his music, which is considerable, is almost unmusical in important ways. His songs, great as so many of them are, still seldom stand apart from the context and the concept that Bowie provided for them (very few of them have prompted cover versions.) He was an effective enough singer, he always found outstanding players to work with, but his work always depends on the concept of the moment. It's not whether the concept is clever, or if it even makes any sense, but rather the use the artist makes of it. Does this particular mask - because it was almost always a mask - work for him? It didn't always work, but when it did there was nothing else like it. He broke through somehow, he communicated things, in ways and on levels simply not available to other artists. Well, if he says he can do it, he can do it. He don't make false claims.
In the end, sometimes it seems it's as if there is no real David Bowie, no central self to fall back on, no artist presiding over this wild and mutable canvas. There is instead a magpie-like creature roaming the rock universe like a cuckoo, alighting here and there, planting its eggs in the oddest places, singing songs first heard by other creatures, making them his own.
Except that's not really true, either. In fact, every conclusion one arrives at with regard to David Bowie ends up stumbling in the face of his infinite variety. Every time you think he was like this... you have to acknowledge that no, he wasn't, not really. He confounds any attempt to categorize, or even describe him. He really did contain multitudes.
And lots of hazy cosmic jive, too. We'd be nowhere without that.
25. David Bowie (June 1967)
He was barely 20 years old when his debut album was released. This isn't rock'n'roll, not even close. It 's more like a cross between Anthony Newley and the traditional music hall, with some fairy tale whimsy tossed in. Most of this sounds so conventional, so positively old-fashioned that it's a little startling to hear that voice delivering it all. The Brits have a word for this sort of thing - it's twee. The concluding "Please Mr Gravedigger" does provide a touch of the bizarre. But this is of historical interest only. He didn't really know who or what he was, or what he would be capable of.
Look who sits outside
Little me is waiting
24. Never Let Me Down (April 1987)
Bowie wasn't the only great artist to lose his way in the 1980s, the decade that music forgot. Bob Dylan sends his greetings! Neil Young and Paul McCartney would also like a word. Bowie had already had enough interesting ideas for several lifetimes, but by this time the well had run quite dry. All that was left were some not-very-interesting songs. Bowie mounted the notorious Glass Spider tour in support, an enormously elaborate undertaking -dancers, spoken word segments, videos, all manner of stage props. It made for an impressive show, but it all laboured under the burden of the 1980s music that made up the bulk of the setlist. At this point, Bowie put his career on hold and joined a band.
That lasted three long years
And the pills that I took
Made my fingers disappear
23. Tonight (September 1984)
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Bowie was running out of ideas by this time. This has just two new songs, although both of them are quite good. The rest of the record is made of covers. He's practically covering himself in some cases, as two of the songs, including the title duet with Tina Turner, were first heard on his second record with Iggy Pop. One suspects that most of his imagination, energy, and effort went into the 20 minute film he devised for "Blue Jean," but it's a pretty cool film and the song is by far the best thing on the record. OK, it's really just an insubstantial piece of fluff, but it's a really great piece of fluff.
they always let you down when you need 'em
22. Earthling (February 1997)
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After the commercial failure of Outside (his poorest sales since his 1966 debut), this was perceived to be Bowie trying to find a way back into the contemporary music world. Twenty years earlier, he had simply carved out his own place, armed only with his considerable talent and his infinite audacity. The best tracks - the opening "Looking For Satellites" and "I'm Afraid of Americans" would have been solid deep cuts on a better record. The rest simply isn't very interesting. He's trying. He's just not getting anywhere. It is, in fact, just a little dull and there's an adjective that has seldom fitted Bowie.
Misty and far away
21. David Bowie (November 1969)
His second solo album, with the same title as his first, but a very different piece of work. This is the album best known for "Space Oddity," and why wouldn't it be? It towers far above everything else here. Bowie had written the song some months earlier, and someone had the bright idea of putting it out to coincide with the first moon landing. The BBC, despite the unhappy fate of Major Tom, actually adopted the tune as theme music to their coverage of the great event. It gave Bowie his first UK hit. The song was essentially banned by US radio stations, but three years later, after Ziggy Stardust had made him famous, an RCA reissue made it his first US hit as well. The album sank without a trace, but it definitely has its moments - the disheveled rock of "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" is kind of fun, the sprawling, epic "Cygnet Committee" is fascinating and "Memory of a Free Festival" casts a desperately cold eye on the failures of hippiedom. The writing is improving, getting much more interesting indeed, but it's all very much hit-or-miss. At least we're done with the music hall whimsy of his debut. This music is all based on Bowie's own acoustic 12-string and his always eccentric chord selections, which imposes quite a few limitations on where he could go musically. He's supported by a rhythm section and occasional electric guitars. What he really needed was a band. And some better songs. His next album would have both, and then some.
And we can force you to believe
20. Black Tie White Noise (April 1993)
In the six years since his last record, Bowie had formed a band (Tin Machine) and made a couple of dull records with them. He'd met and married Iman Abdulmajid, and after a lifetime of endless sexual adventure, settled happily into married life. His next move was - to get back. He dissolved Tin Machine, and attempted to find a place between the commercial dance music of his 1980s records and the genre experiments that had preceded them. A couple of his oldest collaborators joined in one track apiece - Mike Garson, whose piano had been such a large part of Aladdin Sane, and Mick Ronson, who hadn't played with Bowie in almost two decades. Two of the tracks are instrumental, and much of the music is generally driven by Bowie's own saxophone and the far more adept trumpet of Lester Bowie (no relation.) Four of the songs are covers, and eccentric selections they are - a track from Morrissey's latest album, an old Walker Brothers tune (Bowie admired Scott Walker every bit as much as he admired Anthony Newley), an old Cream tune, and a translation of an Arabic piece he found in Iman's music collection (the singer turned out to be a friend of hers.) He recorded it as a wedding gift (and indeed, several of his songs sound like additional wedding gifts.) It's a pretty lively record, one that sounds like a serious attempt to rediscover his voice as an artist, but he hadn't quite settled on how and where he wanted to go. The good news is that he sounds like he's trying at least. Even if he isn't really succeeding.
They say 'jump'
Got to believe somebody
19. Outside (September 1995)
Back to the scene of the crime - a sprawling (75 minutes) concept record set in a post-apocalyptic, technological society. It builds upon a Bowie short story set in the near future and having something to do with "art crimes." Six of the tracks are brief (two minutes or less) segues helping to advance what passes for a plot, leaving 13 pieces we might regard as "songs" of a sort. It continues his collaboration with guitarist Reeves Gabrels of Tin Machine and reunites him with both Mike Garson and Brian Eno. It's defiantly experimental, defiantly non-commercial, and something of a mixed bag - a little bit like the Berlin era soundscapes colliding with industrial noise. I think it's one of those records that's a little easier to admire than to enjoy, but I don't think it's ever dull. And if nothing else, this certainly brings back the old weirdness.
Like an old hell
18. Let's Dance (April 1983)
A new career in a new town? After a decade with RCA, Bowie switched labels and did his best to give EMI/America a hit. He teamed up with an American hitmaker, Nile Rodgers of Chic, and delivered this extremely slick piece of product. The role he's playing here is David Bowie, Big Pop Star. It landed somewhere between dance music and the New Romanticism that was emerging as the next big thing in the UK. "China Girl" was Bowie, for the first time, remaking one of the songs he'd written with Iggy Pop (it had first appeared in 1977 on The Idiot.) Bowie added some cute backup vocals that took a lot of the edge out of the song, which he sang with rather cool detachment (Iggy gets positively frightening in the second half of the original record;) Bowie also remade his own theme song for the film "Cat People" and managed to take a lot of the menace out of that as well. But people bought it. He got three huge hit singles, and the Serious Moonlight Tour was very well received - Bowie with a shock of blond hair, in exquisitely tailored suits, belting out his hits like any other big pop star.
It's just the power to charm
I'm still standing in the wind
17. Hours (September 1999)
This would be the final installment of Bowie's long partnership with guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who has always struck me as a kind of low-budget Robert Fripp (i.e., all of Fripp's skill and weirdness but lacking Fripp's inspired, unpredictable, genius.) The album's emphasis on songs rather than sound may itself indicate how the two men were heading different directions, although all ten songs are Bowie-Gabrels co-writes. The songs themselves aren't up to the standards of Bowie's best past work, but most of them are quite likeable and the whole thing seems like a step in the right direction. As if the artist is beginning to remember what he's good at doing.
My patience never tried
16. Pin Ups (October 1973)
Bowie clearly liked covering songs by other people - fully half his albums of original music contain at least one cover, and he was even willing to cover himself on more than one occasion, remaking songs he'd originally recorded with Iggy Pop. Strangely enough though, he didn't really have much of a gift for it. His covers are regularly the least interesting tracks on the albums on which they appear. Pin Ups was Bowie's third album release in sixteen months, and it's composed entirely of favourite 1960s tunes from various UK bands. The Spiders play them with admirable ferocity, but much of the time one doesn't quite see the point. The songs are too famous, the original versions are too iconic. Try as they might, Bowie and the Spiders aren't going to improve on the Who, the Kinks, Yardbirds, the Easybeats, Them, or Pink Floyd. They don't even bring much of anything new to it all. The album is worthwhile mainly for its take on forgotten obscurities by the Pretty Things and the Merseys.
Where have all the good times gone?
15. Heathen (June 2002)
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Bowie was living mostly in New York by now. Reeves Gabrels was no longer part of his musical support group, but a figure from his past had returned to the fold. Tony Visconti hadn't worked with Bowie since Scary Monsters and the two men had barely spoken in twenty years. Reconciled at last, they marvelled over how the other had grown and changed over the years before Visconti took up both his original job as bass player as well as his longtime role as co-producer, positions he would maintain for the rest of Bowie's life. The two men were joined in the core band by the progressive jazz guitarist David Torn and veteran session drummer Matt Chamberlain. The material is a little uneven. I definitely don't see the point of two of the covers (especially Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting For You") and I've always found Bowie's deep-voiced crooner an irritating vocal tic that spoils "Sunday," the otherwise fine opening track. On the other hand, the good tracks are really freaking good - I would single out "A Better Future," and the back-to-back punches of "Slow Burn" and "Afraid" where we hear Bowie rocking harder than he's ever done without the participation of Mick Ronson, now ten years in his grave (and not part of Bowie's musical crew for more than twenty-five years.) Yeah, I think we all forgot Bowie could do that, too. I'd credit the special guest star on guitar on "Slow Burn" - none other then Pete Townshend - but Townshend hasn't played like this in twenty-five years either. The record gets stronger the deeper you go into it, and the second half of it is - yup - the best thing he'd done since Scary Monsters.
These are the strangest of all
These are the nights
These are the darkest to fall
14. Young Americans (Mar 1975)
No 1970s rock star had a greater mystique, inspired more actual reverence among his peers, than John Lennon. Not even Bowie could resist the spell. It was doubtless Lennon's presence and willingness to play guitar that prompted the quite lamentable cover of "Across the Universe" we get here. This album in its time seemed like the most radical change of direction possible - the weirdo from outer space crooning Philadelphia soul music? Really? He hadn't demonstrated any interest in this type of music before, and doesn't reveal much affinity for it here. Bowie also seems to have assumed that writing an interesting lyric somehow violated the spirit of this type of music, and so did his best not to violate that rule. A key reason the record doesn't really work is because Bowie simply isn't the type of singer that fits this kind of material. Bowie always approaches a song as an actor playing a role. This is just about the exact opposite of what soul singers usually do. And after a while, David Sanborn's extremely distinctive style on the sax gets pretty tiresome. But the album did produce two triumphs - the closing "Fame," dreamed up in the studio by Bowie, Lennon, and Carlos Alomar was a piece of funk so irresistible that James Brown himself would copy it. Yes, folks - James Brown copying David Bowie's funk move. The mind reels in disbelief. And finally, the opening title track is absolutely stunning. Every now and then - not very often, maybe once every few years or so - Bowie would peel away his masks to reveal a heart so full of compassion and sympathy that it compels awe. This was one of those times. One of his very greatest songs.
Do we have to die for the fifty more?
13. Reality (September 2003)
Continuing to work with Tony Visconti, Reality sounds like the work of a man who knows he has fully recovered his form and is beginning to get a little cocky about it. He sounds downright frisky, delivering what is mostly a set of energetic rock music with the vigour of a man half his age - highlights are the opening "New Killer Star" and "Looking For Water." The one ballad, "The Loneliest Guy" is probably the least effective track but the extremely twisted finale "Bring Me the Disco King" more than makes up for it. Both tracks feature Mike Garson's unique piano stylings. And wonder of wonders, even the two cover songs sound great and don't get in the way of the proceedings. But on the European tour in support of this album, Bowie had a major health scare, and went quietly - very quietly, there was no announcement, he still turned up in public on occasion - into semi-retirement. And after a while, we all came to the conclusion that this would turn out to be his swan song. We should have known better. For one thing, this sounds nothing at all like an artist saying goodbye, and Bowie would never (as he would ultimately prove) pass up the opportunity afforded by such an occasion.
I discovered a star
12. Low (January 1977)
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Bowie's immediate priority in the moment was personal rather than musical - he wanted to escape Los Angeles and free himself of the drug addiction that he knew to be destroying his sanity. He had moved to France with Iggy Pop, who was in much the same predicament, and the two wrote and recorded Iggy's first solo album, The Idiot. With Iggy's record completed, the sessions continued, moving on to Bowie's next project. (That's right, the first installment of Bowie's famous "Berlin trilogy" was mostly recorded in France.) Side one has five short, quirky songs bookended by a pair of rather cheerful instrumentals. Brian Eno arrived about halfway through the proceedings and helped shape the ambient instrumentals that make up all of the second side. Bowie would make use of Eno's famed Oblique Strategies over the next couple of years, as a way of forcing a decision and identifying a path to follow. (The Strategies are a deck of cards each of which bears a cryptic suggestion, such as "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." or "Work at a different speed" that one may adopt, or not, as a way to move forward.) There are people who have suggested that Low, which is certainly a very fine record, represents the peak of Bowie's achievement. That goes much too far. It's been an enormously influential work, but it's a fairly minor piece of the Bowie canon. It's still quite a bit more than a likeable detour - it's the search in real time for his next new direction, one that would be explored in much more depth on the two records that followed. It would all eventually position the artist for the revisionist reboot of Scary Monsters, which now functions as a kind of summary of his decade.
11. Diamond Dogs (May 1974)
This is an album stranded between two concepts. Bowie had wanted to make a musical based on Orwell's 1984 but couldn't get permission from the author's estate, so he simply incorporated some of his song ideas for that project into the bleak, dystopian, post-apocalyptic nightmare that was his other big idea. Bowie had ditched the Spiders From Mars, and assigned himself guitar duties. On the one hand, this was tragic - the late great Mick Ronson was the best lieutenant he would ever have. On the other hand, Bowie himself came up with the fabulous lick that drives "Rebel Rebel," one of his very greatest songs. Decadence and decay is very much the theme of the record, and Bowie's ragged electric guitar is actually a pretty good fit. Side one is superb from start to finish and if Bowie had been able to maintain that level all the way through this record would rank much higher. Alas, the back half of the record loses its way most of the time, although "1984" is pretty great.
We'll buy some drugs and watch a band
Then jump in the river holding hands
10. Lodger (May 1979)
More than eighteen months had passed since "Heroes," his last record of original music - an enormous interval by the standards of 1970s Bowie, although he had issued a live placeholder in the meantime. Bowie does a bit of recycling here - he'd had "Boys Keep Swinging" around for years before recording this version, and "Red Money" actually uses the backing track of "Sister Midnight" he'd recorded years earlier with Iggy Pop on The Idiot. It's a transitional record, perched between the new song forms developed on the Berlin albums and the forthcoming summing-up that is Scary Monsters. Bowie is moving back towards more conventional rock music and away from the experiments in pure sound and noise - but just a little. These are very weird songs, and suggest a very twisted vision of pop music indeed.
Drifting like a leaf
9. The Next Day (March 2013)
Out of a clear blue sky, after almost ten years of silence, Bowie dropped this on a world that was not expecting to ever hear from him again. As if he'd never been away, picking up right where he left off. Because this album feels quite a bit like Reality, its predecessor. It too is an album of energetic rock music - it's just better. The songs are easily his strongest bunch in decades - well, he did take almost a full decade assembling them - and the production is quite a bit cleaner. Bowie's fondness for noise had often got in the way to some extent on much his post-Tin Machine output, which can often sound a bit cluttered. The songs could occasionally get lost beneath all the stuff that was happening around them. I have to single out the gorgeous "Where Are We Now" and the storming hard rock of "Set the World on Fire," which wouldn't have been out of place on the next album in this list.
But I hope they live forever
8. The Man Who Sold the World (November 1970)
He needed a band, and did he ever get one. Drummer John Cambridge and bassist Tony Visconti had both played on Bowie's second album, which Visconti had co-produced. Now Cambridge went up to Hull to recruit a guitar player he knew, a chap named Mick Ronson. (This crucial work achieved, Cambridge drops out, replaced by Mick Woodmansey.) Ronson, of course, was a miracle - a marvellously inventive and powerful guitar player who could also fill in on keyboards, and schooled enough to sit down and compose the perfect string arrangement if one was needed. They formed a ferocious rock'n'roll unit, and Bowie's songwriting took a quantum leap with these players able to give life and energy to his weird concoctions. After his lightweight debut, and the folk-rock stylings of his second album, he burst forth with some of the hardest and heaviest rock he would ever play. Kurt Cobain would one day make the title track famous, but the real great stuff is on the other side, especially the opening epic "Width of a Circle" in which Ronson instantly stakes his claim to being a legend himself. This is Bowie's first great record, although in its day it mostly sank without a trace. For some weird reason it was issued in the US - where Bowie had no commercial presence whatsoever - six months ahead of its UK release. The interval did give Bowie a chance to replace the original US artwork seen above (that's the one I had!), which he hated, with a picture of himself reclining on a couch wearing a full-length dress.
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me
7. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (September 1980)
Why... this is just a collection of songs, with nothing in the way of an idea behind it. It doesn't represent any stylistic change, it doesn't serve some particular concept. That might be standard operating procedure for other artists, but not this one. Bowie without a concept is Bowie working without a net. It's held together by a kind of conjuror's trick - not the force of the artist's personality so much as the force of the artist's image. What was rather shocking is how much it sounded like the same old Bowie - it didn't seem to chart any new and different musical directions, it just provided a nice sampling of the sort of things we'd already heard from this artist. And that's the trick - it's Bowie music. And it's a really strong collection of songs. Bowie even got two hits out of it and it had been a while since he'd had an actual hit. Both tracks are exceptional. "Fashion" is an irresistibly catchy and truly weird goof of a song and "Ashes to Ashes" is utterly chilling and extremely hummable.
I'll stay clean tonight
We should take a moment here to note a one-off single Bowie did with Queen the summer after this was released. Both artists happened to be working in the same Swiss studio, and they put together a song based on a demo by Queen drummer Roger Taylor, anchored on a bass riff from Queen's John Deacon (who always credited Bowie with the riff - what seems to have happened is Deacon forgot the original riff, and Bowie refreshed his memory.) Queen was an interesting band, and they definitely made some memorable music but I don't believe anything they did, ever, or anything else Bowie did in the 1980s, can even approach "Under Pressure."
and love dares you to care for
the people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way
Of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
6. "Heroes" (October 1977)
The second album in his Berlin trilogy, and in one important way it resembles his second album - one song is so great that it seems to tower above everything else here. That would of course be the title track, led by Robert Fripp's indelible, unforgettable guitar part (played without an E-bow!) and what might be the most passionate vocal of Bowie's entire career. But this is an exceptionally strong album as a whole, taking the template set out by Low and simply doing it better. The songs on the first side are not just more developed musically than those on the preceding album - they're quite a bit more substantial as well. I also like the experiments and soundscapes on the second side better - they also seem more fully developed than their predecessors on Low. It's a little unfortunate that such great tracks as "Sons of the Silent Age" and "Beauty and the Beast" aren't better known, but the title track does have a magnificence that overwhelms everything in its vicinity. It's hard to even think of anything else after standing by that wall.
And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall
And the shame was on the other side
5. Aladdin Sane (April 1973)
In retrospect, I think the frantic pace of the previous eighteen months was beginning to tell. In the ten months since the release of Ziggy Stardust in June 1972, Bowie had produced Lou Reed's Transformer, and then Iggy and the Stooges Raw Power. Both albums were recorded in London while Bowie was also performing numerous shows with the Spiders all up and down the UK. In September, he set out on his first extended US tour, with the band augmented by the avant-garde jazz pianist Mike Garson. Bowie wrote most of the songs for this next album during that American trek. It was his first close-up experience of America, and it's where he picked up the beginnings of what would soon become a heavy cocaine habit. Garson's very distinctive keyboard stylings drive two of the better tracks, the title cut and "Time." The songs vary quite a bit in quality, meaning the record isn't as consistent overall as its two brilliant predecessors. But that general sense of being frayed was somehow the point. No one knew except the artist, but it was the sound of something ending. When his tour wrapped up at London's Hammersmith Odeon a few months later, he announced from the stage (to the shock and surprise of most of the band) that it was the last show they would ever do. And it was. The Spiders were gone forever. He had to break up the band.
Smiling through this darkness
But all I had to give was guilt for dreaming
4. Blackstar (January 2016)
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Bowie died two days after issuing this album - I remember spending those two days listening to the record and thinking how fully intact, how perfectly preserved his voice and his abilities still seemed as he approached his 70th year. I had no idea, of course. No one did. His death created a whole new context for the world to hear this record, but the record deserved that context. Bowie knew he was dying while he created this music. It's an almost unprecedented situation for an artist. Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash both knew the end was coming for them sooner than later, but they didn't actually know much more than that. Only Warren Zevon's The Wind truly comes from an artist in a similar circumstance, and Zevon's record feels like one last roundup, of the old themes and haunts, one last walk around the park before the lights go out. Bowie's farewell is something else entirely. He turned his death sentence into an opportunity to go where no one had gone before. It gave him one last, great concept to build his music around and he didn't miss his chance. Bowie was always most himself when he was not being himself, and he knew himself to be a dying man - but here he was, still living, still breathing, still working. Still strong enough to play at being a dying man. While he was dying. It was cold and it rained and he felt like an actor. Structurally, the album very much resembles Station to Station - both albums open with the lengthy, sprawling title track, which turns out to be very unlike the rest of the music. The songs here are dominated by the very busy drums of Mark Guiliana and Denny McCaslin's honking saxophone - jazz players not really to my taste, but the songs are quite good anyway. The title track is fabulous indeed - an epic in two parts, beginning like some strange invocation to the far beyond and turning round completely into a strangely tuneful, strangely mournful statement of... something or other. But the emotional centre of the record is the awesome "Lazarus", spooky, relentless, and overwhelming. And then he was gone, king of oblivion.
Spirit rose a metre then stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
3. Station to Station (January 1976)
It's probably not really the side effects of the cocaine we get here, but certainly the white powder had quite taken over Bowie's life. It hadn't slowed him down, but cocaine doesn't slow you down. It does lots of other things, but it doesn't slow you down. This music is situated somewhere between where he had been - the Philly soul stylings of Young Americans - and where he was going - the synth based Krautrock and ambient sounds of the "Berlin trilogy." There are only six tracks - each vinyl side closed with a melodramatic, sweeping ballad. Three tracks, including the hit single "Golden Years" and the wonderfully bizarre "TVC-15" are a kind of soul music played by androids. And the sprawling title track is one of Bowie's greatest achievements, beginning with a full two minutes of machine noise, forcing itself into forward motion like the slow and uncertain steps of some grotesque monster awkardly coming to life, but ultimately achieving the headlong momentum of a runaway train completely out of control. An amazing piece of work. Bowie would later confess he had no memory at all of about two whole years there in the mid 1970s, including the making of this album.
Does my face show some kind of glow?
2. Hunky Dory (December 1971)
An absolute, wall-to-wall masterpiece. There were minor changes to the band - Tony Visconti was gone for the moment, replaced on bass by Trevor Bolder. Rick Wakeman, then with the Strawbs but moonlighting as a session player, played keyboards. Bowie had written many of the songs on piano. and a truly remarkable batch of songs they were. The songs of the first side of the vinyl were mostly based on Wakeman's piano - as well as the eternal Bowie anthem "Changes" we should mention the misfit's anthem "Oh You Pretty Things" and the magnificent, sweeping "Life on Mars?" with Mick Ronson's brilliant orchestral score (and some very fine guitar licks as well.) The guitars come more to the fore on the second side, in which Bowie pays homage to several key heroes - Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed - before closing with the spooky, harrowing "Bewlay Brothers." Just an awesome, lasting achievement, a record that sounds every bit as fresh, as wonderful, and as original today, more than fifty years after it was made.
As they try to change their worlds
They're immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through
1. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (June 1972)
There's always been a temptation, I think, to settle on some other Bowie record as his greatest work. For no good reason that I can see- just because. Probably because nominating Ziggy simply seems too obvious or something. But resistance is futile. This is the one, folks. It's the one that made him a star, the one that made him immortal, the one that made him unforgettable. Ziggy is undeniable, the way the end of the world is undeniable. There's nothing you can do about it. There's a concept (of course), and it's batshit crazy (of course) - humanity is doomed to extinction, with a fixed expiry date just five years away - and a rock star swoops down from outer space to... it's not clear, besides be a star and be destroyed by it all. No matter. It's startling to find so many great songs in one place. From the haunted, shell-shocked opening of "Five Years" to the numb desperation of "Rock'n'Roll Suicide." The brute power, and wild humour of "Moonage Daydream" and "Suffragette City." And oh my heaven - the timeless, glittering, inspiring "Starman" (added at the last moment, with the octave jump in the chorus deliberately pinched from "Over the Rainbow.") Simply glorious. An amazing collection of songs, played with passion and purpose by an artist and band at the peak of their powers, and all beautifully recorded to boot. And nothing would ever be the same afterwards. One of the greatest records ever made. Then, now, forever.
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