The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Features / 12 Bowie Albums in 12 Months – Part 2

12 Bowie Albums in 12 Months – Part 2

by 51 Comments

Stan Deely on Lets Dance

April 1983. A new contract with EMI and his first album in nearly 3 years. I am quite well informed about this album, having read various books (Buckley, Doggett, Trynka and others) as well as the Uncut, Mojo Bowie album magazine specials and know half the songs quite well due to their ubiquity at the time and their continued presence on generic dull format radio stations.

However, I haven’t actually listened the album in full more than on a couple of occasions and certainly not in the last 35 years. I am attempting a ‘blind’ review and to review track by track. I will try to be objective and not too opinionated at this stage, although it may be a struggle to stop prejudices from 40 years ago coming in. Hopefully the review will invite some comment and debate. I might then follow up by doing a bit of research, throwing in a few facts, theories and comments – or not. Not sure what my method will be on future releases but that’s the plan for Lets Dance.

MODERN LOVE
Welcome to the new decade and a new Bowie, powder blue and coiffured with a blowy Blonde hairdo that puts me in mind of a Yorkshire terrrier. The productions is very 1980’s featuring the loud gated synthetic drum sound that arguable Bowie set the template for on Low. An up-beat pop song for an opener. Lots of keyboards, a horn section and doo wop style backing vocals. It brings me in mind of those latter day rock’n’roll tunes on the American Graffiti soundtrack updated with an 80’s production. Its what we now call a ‘ banger.’ Simple, hooky, memorable and catchy. As a statement of intent its quite impressive but as a song I find it a bit formulaic and a bit characterless.

CHINA GIRL
Second single from the album and a Number 2 chart hit, propelled there by a ‘controversial’ video. The Iggy Pop version is for me a standout track on one of the best albums ever so I need to try to transcend the slight horror I felt on first hearing this.

Its another pop song replacing Iggy’s swampy reverby sound with a clean production and well enunciated almost operatic vocals. Whilst Iggy’s version is murky and plodding (in a good way) Bowie’s is quite sprightly which doesn’t quite suit the doomed, nihilistic lyrics. It features a guitar solo – the first appearance of blues wunderkind Stevie Ray Vaughn in an ‘Eric Clapton goes a little bit Hendrix’ style which gives a sense of Oblique Strategies/kitchen sink/shit at a wall approach. I don’t mind hearing this on the radio but when actually giving it my attention I remain baffled by his approach and what he was trying to achieve.

LETS DANCE
Bowie’s best known song? Number one for about a month in the spring of 1983. Its another weird combination of disparate elements. The verse with its almost turgid late period Chic rhythm and jazzy funk chords overlaid by the now familiar Bowie croon, then switching into a more straightforward pre chorus second verse and the uplifting Twist and Shout homage/steal. The backing vocals are a bit cheesy but for me Bowies vocal makes the song, giving it his best histrionic/tender Heroes croon. The album version carries on for a full seven minutes and has a bit of an Aladdin Sane on horns wig out feel. A kind of glorious mess. One of the weirdest number one hit singles ever? Or was Ashes to Ashes weirder?

WITHOUT YOU
After three belters in a row he dials it down. It puts me in mind of the souly, understated torch songs of Station to Station. Nice keyboards and relatively understated guitar. I’m liking this. Almost like a gentler Depeche Mode, 3 minutes and it’s over. I think it’s rather lovely in an unassuming way and dare, I say it, possibly my favourite track on the album. The vocal works well, managing the trick he seemed to pull off quite often of being both understated and showy.

SIDE TWO

RICOCHET

Opening like something off of Heroes using the patented operatic Cockney declamatory croon he developed around that time. This comes on like a total mish mash of three or four totally disconnected songs, jumping from one to another in a kind of crazy cut up style. Its a bit like all the styles of Lodger showcased in five minutes. Is it art rock or a ‘Will this do?’ mash up of various offcuts and riffs. I’m reminded of his imitators and successors. I’m hearing 1981 Brit Funk and the Clash amongst others there. Ends with a bit of a horn and guitar work out. I’m still a bit confused by this one, nice bits and catchy but doesn’t really hang together. I wonder what the casual record buyer of 1983 made of this? I’m guessing side two didn’t get played half as much as side one.

CRIMINAL WORLD

An obscure cover of the band Metro (No, me, neither!) from 1978. With its pretty generic 80’s production it comes on like those American rock bands that were trying to stay hip to the modern new wave music at the time. I’m thinking of the Cars or Foreigner produced by Thomas Dolby (Yes it happened). Like an anaemic update of the Motown sound it’s not unpleasant but a little bland and non-descript. Once again the word polite comes to mind with Bowie giving a more restrained vocal delivery than usual. To me, it sounds like a prototype for the sound and production style that Nile Rodgers would use to conquer the world with Madonna’s Like a Virgin album.

CAT PEOPLE
Arguably a cover as its Bowie’s words to Giorgio Moroder’s music. I reckon the melody is Bowies as it features some of his tropes but its quite rocky or for him, more so than the single version released the year before. I’m in mind of Foreigner again and its also got Stevie Ray Vaughn’s guitar all over it. Starting off with another Motownesque intro it then becomes a generic rock song tamed by a pop production. It aims for epic but to me feels empty. I can’t say the guitar does anything much for me. I don’t really get ‘tasteful’ blues guitar having always preferred Andy Gill to Eric Clapton.

On a sidebar, it makes you wonder what Bowie could have come up had he hooked up with some of the younger more edgy bands around at the time. Human League? Gang of Four? After all he was a fan of the Mekons! And on this subject can I point you in the direction of Mick Ronson’s cover of the Johnny Moped song ‘Darling Let’s Have Another Baby’ and no I’m not hallucinating – check it out on YouTube.

SHAKE IT

This comes on as Lets Dance part two. Mid paced rhythm,jazz funk chording and what sounds like female backing vocals although as far as I can make out, only male vocalists are credited on the sleeve. It appears to be a song about chatting up girls to make oneself feel alive and banish the blues. Pretty throwaway, quite oddball and ending the album on a “Will this do?” “WTF” “Is that it?” kind of vibe. Which I find quite endearing.

IN SUMMARY
For me at the time, familiar with Bowie’s singles and most of the albums up to Low, this album or at least the singles and the image that went with it seemed like a massive sell-out and it pained me that Bowie who was my hero 1972 – 1975 (when he started changing a bit fast for this 11 year old to keep up with) had found his largest audience with lesser quality music ie ‘I prefer the early work’ syndrome.

Nowadays with hindsight and trying to be objective, it strikes me as an unevenly paced album with all the banger/singles on side one and side two relatively subdued. If he had put Cat People on side one and moved Without You to side two we could have had an extrovert/introvert split album in the style of Low and Heroes.

Hindsight and now being familiar with the 1976 – 1980 albums also makes me to realise just what an experimental and revolutionary genius he was at this time and there could be an argument made for this record as an almost logical next step on that trajectory.

I could say more about my history with Bowie, pop theories etc but I’ve got the next 12 months for all that so I invite your thoughts on the album. Selling out big time or sneaking art rock/pop into the mainstream?

9

Comments

  1. Triffic piece, Stan, well held! I “returned” to Bowie here, having got off the bus at Aladdin Sane and, yup, at the time, I thought it wonderful, especially the opening triple whammy of the 3 now all overly ubiquitous and, latterly, slightly ridiculous singles. I doubt I have heard any of the other tracks much since then. And I now want to!

  2. Nice one Stan. Starting an album with the three singles feels like a really unBowie thing to do. Bands like Go West did that. Does it say more about the 80s or Bowie that the track listing, the videos, the whole feel screams Radio 1 and Top of the Pops. I still hate China Girl, it challenges Queen’s I Want To Break Free as the song most likely to make my teeth hurt.

    • Odd, isn’t it? – I love the Bowie version of China Girl, and I can’t stand the ghastly mess of Iggy’s attempt, which sounds like he was recorded slumped in the corner of the studio with his eyes propped open and a copy of the lyrics held in a shaky, sweaty grasp. Someone jabs him in the ribs with a drumstick just before the third verse and he wakes up a little to scream a few lines before rolling his eyes back into his head and disappearing into a brown fog. Only bearable If you have a sad liking for heroin chic, if you ask me!

        • Your comments have made me try to reconsider my harsh judgement of Bowie and play the two versions togetther, back to back, to compare. It’s weird to me that Iggy’s China Girl which sounds like a magnificent opus in the context of the Idiot album with his vocal making me feel 10 feet tall and like punching walls (In a good way)., when played after Bowie’s version, sounds muffled, badly produced and as if Iggy is singing through a sock. The power of context

  3. I was all set to have an opinion on your opinion, but then, having read it, I realised that I’ve never actually heard the album. I know the singles so well that I assumed I’d got to know them from the album, but evidently not!

    This was the second album in a row where all the singles were on side one. If you think of It’s No Game as more an intro/outro thing to the album as a whole, side one of Scary Monsters is 100% singles.

  4. Metro were the band that Duncan Browne formed in the late 70s when he fancied a go at the charts using a group format, having previously been a singer songwriter with some success via his eponymous second album (bizarrely, it’s on RAK) that delivered the lovely acoustic guitar driven single ‘Journey’ with it’s atmospheric B side called ‘In A Mist’. A talented guitarist not a million miles from the Jansch end of things acoustic, there were suggestions within the album’s tracks of where he might go with a band to work with – and the first Metro album (Criminal World is the opening track) was its early fruition. It has a few kitchen sink moments, but offers an interesting listen with some great highlights.

    • For reasons nobody can fathom, my dad has the Metro album from the time – I think it was one of the many things that somehow found its way into the house when he used to work in a record shop (like, er, a few other things…) It’s an interesting record and now both sounds and looks like a band doing 70s revival in the 90s or later… even though it was actually made in the 70s. (I know what I mean by this)

      Kudos to Bowie for choosing, not for the first or last time, an intriguing obscurity to cover. Sadly this kudos is almost completely expunged in this case by his heinous tinkering with the lyric in order to erase any suggestion of gayness… remember this is the time of his notorious interview with Rolling Stone in which he said “I’m not a iron hoof, that was all made up! See the bears game last night? what a game!” (I’m paraphrasing)

  5. Let’s Dance is deliberately commercial. The hooks are bigger, the choruses simpler and the rhythms more straightforward. As such, it is a lot of fun, a great party record. Bowie achieved his goal, a global smash that earned him tens of millions of pounds. Remember, 90% of listeners will not have known who Iggy Pop or Georgio Moroder were. I like both China Girls, Bowie’s being lighter and more tender. If you swap its position with Cat People on side two, I think it the album better balanced. I also prefer the extended version of Shake It, which is somewhat more substantial. You right to highlight his singing. I think, for the first time in his career, he plays no instruments on an album.

    Criminal World is a typically obscure song to cover. Metro’s original 1977 single was banned by the BBC because of its homoerotic lyrics. You’d think it to be catnip for Bowie but he changed a pronoun and rewrote an entire verse to make it heterosexual. In 1983, Bowie had a new image, cleancut, bleached hair, deep tan, gleaming teeth and straight. In interviews at the time, he downplayed his sexual adventurousness of the seventies, much to the disgust of the gay community who felt betrayed. In that context, one wonders why cover this song at all. It seemed to be a deliberate move to rewrite his leftfield, outsider persona.

    I’m really looking forward to the rest in this series. What a great start! Well done.

  6. I love China Girl, much prefer the compact 7 inch single version of Let’s Dance than the overblown effort here (the 12 inch version). In general agree Side 1 is pretty great, side 2 runs out of steam, he was clearly having some form of writer’s block at the time (which continued), but I always liked the album. It is his best of the decade, apart from the 1st one.

  7. Now that the SD juggernaut is back on, has anyone bagged doing a review of the worst film ever made? Could be another tricky inconvenience (see above) to explain away!

  8. I don’t think Let’s Dance has been fully accepted by fans. It’s a good album but, as others have said, very top-heavy with those giant hit singles and the rest of it sounding like a collection of odds and sods. Cat People doesn’t sit easily with the rest of the album – we already knew it and preferred the previous version. But Let’s Dance wasn’t for established Bowie fans, it was a conscious decision to go big and play stadiums. He needed those big singles to attract the masses because without the healthy new look and the brash Let’s Dance singles the mainstream audience might not have been too keen. I feel sure that this gave permission for other bands to do the same – U2, Simple Minds, Echo & the Bunnymen, even Depeche Mode and The Cure later on. Before the Serious Moonlight tour, such gigs were a bit Aerosmith/Stones/Kiss and therefore a bit shit.

    But Ricochet is awful. Just awful.

    • I think they were also a bit surprised by the demand for tickets after Let’s Dance was such a big hit. When it was first announced, the Serious Moonlight tour was a bit more modest – the London bit was originally supposed to be two nights at Wembley and one at Hammersmith Odeon. I remember sending off – as you did in those days – for Hammersmith tickets and not getting them but instead being sent a ticket for one of the Milton Keynes shows they added after everything else sold out straight away.

      I didn’t really fancy the idea of Milton Keynes – I don’t think I even knew where it was – so flogged my ticket to a mate.

  9. As part of my ‘research’ I asked a friend or two what they thought of the album. Here’s one opinion of a friend a couple of years younger than me when I asked him if he had a copy I could borrow and what he thought about the album.

    “Yes, I’ve got it on CD. I can’t remember if its mine or my wife’s copy. I also have it on vinyl if you’ve got something to play it on.” Sounding slightly embarrassed he continued. “I love it. It was the first studio album by Bowie i bought. Before that I just had ‘Changesonebowie’ album and I love the singles, Modern Love, Lets Dance, they were all being played at all the teenage house parties when I was 17. It’s got lots of singles on hasn’t it. And China Girl – didn’t he co-write that with Iggy Pop. And has it got Cat People, the song from the film. Although thinking about it, isn’t it one of those albums with only one good side. I think there’s some dodgy stuff on the second side. And it was the first time I heard the name Niles Rodger. I’d heard Chic before but not his name and I think I read somewhere that he’s pissed off at Bowie for not giving him the credit for what he put into the songs.

    He then goes to locate the CD

    “Oh I can’t find it. I don’t know if its misfiled or got lost. Okay I have the vinyl” He thinks a bit and then says “Oh, I think I may have sold it”

    This response, I would suspect, may be quite typical. Is it that the album was either loved or loathed at the time according to what one’s history with DB was and now is largely neglected or forgotten in its album format? What’s your personal history with Lets Dance?

    • First Bowie album I bought (except ChangesOneBowie maybe), I had previously bought singles from Lodger and Scary Monsters. Loved it, played it a lot and then started picking up more of his back catalogue and probably realising he had done better stuff previously

    • I was already a long-term Bowie fan. I loved his experimentation and saw Let’s Dance as yet another (after a long long gap – three years was an age back then). Here was his dance album and I loved dancing as did my then girlfriend. There had been Bowie dancefloor gems before: Fashion, Boys Keep Swinging, Secret Life Of Arabia, Sound and Vision, Golden Years, Fame, 1984: but not a whole album (pretty much). It helped that Chic were one of our favourites. Bernard Edwards’ bass on Without You is beautiful. Let’s Dance sounds nothing like any of his other albums (you can say that about quite a few) and it was a joy to witness one of my musical heroes become a global success. It also triggered a wonderful opportunity to see him live again. I was lucky enough to get to Milton Keynes.

      My vinyl went a long time ago. I just opened my CD jewel case and there is no CD there. The Loving The Alien box is present and correct.

      I look on the album very fondly and revisit it regularly.

    • I belonged to a record club and would receive the record of the month without ordering. I liked the album and felt a bit hip that after having played catch up with music, I owned a record that actually had contemporary hits on it. For this reason I feel great affection for this record. Because my taste is not particularly edgy ( I sometimes try My Life in the Bush of Ghosts but don’t get very far) I quite like Let’s Dance still and have an appreciation for what Bowie was wanting to achieve. I think he front loads the hits and on the second song gives Iggy Pop a bit promotion. I liked Scary Monsters but I find it not much different really; in fact, there a couple of songs on that are tough to listen to.

  10. It’s a quintessential 80s pop album – 4 bangers that were the singles with videos, and filler. In this he was as ever on the zeitgiest. Madonna, The Spands, Culture Club, Duran and a load of others saw this as the way to get an album shifting millions. (interesting points that Scary Monsters was almost a dry run for this format of monster singles on side one etc).

  11. Let’s Dance was when the near “20 year music veteran” became a global superstar.

    According to George Tremlett’s estimates, Bowie made $50 million in 1983 alone. His management company had provided business profiles of the six main companies “detailing their commercial strengths and weaknesses their key personnel and their willingness to invest in promotion”
    EMI America reportedly paid an advance of £10m ($17m) in cash for a five year contract & 2 further albums – The pop years (That’ll take us to March!)

    Bowie’s music reached a far wider mainstream audience and are still mainstays of 80s radio stations. The producer of Lizzo’s “Juice” Ricky Reed, said that he was going for that “Prince, Bowie sound” and for many, this pop sound is what they associate him with.

    Tremlett estimates $25m touring revenue, plus royalties from his back catalogue etc. Bowie was set for life, with the financial freedom to follow whatever musical path he liked.

  12. I mentioned possible writer’s block above, to perhaps emphasize without jumping the gun too much. As far as completely self written songs by Bowie in the 80s after Scary Monsters.

    Let’s Dance 4
    Tonight 3
    Labyrinth/Absolute Beginners/When the Wind Blows soundtracks 8 (total)
    Never Let Me Down 8
    Tin Machine 5 (plus a few co-writes)

    I may be missing the odd B side or soundtrack contribution but I make that 28 songs in nearly a decade, in the 70s it must be more than a hundred. Quite a change. I know he was also doing various acting roles, but pretty slim pickings.

    I would say less than 10 of these are really great songs.

    • A few co-writes on Iggy’s Blah Blah Blah. He put a helluva lot more effort into that than he did into Tonight. It paid off too – Iggy became a sort pop star, even appearing on Roland Rat’s show.

  13. I’ve just started on next month’s album ‘Tonight’, by having a listen to a couple of tracks last night and I think I may find it a challenge to be positive about it. I don’t want to do a hatchet job or cheap comical takedown (Or at least, not at this stage. I might feel different a few albums down the line) so I wonder, Afterword massive, if any of you could give me some pointers of what you enjoy in Tonight or any tips of what I should be listening out for or paying attention to.

Leave a Reply