1983 Singles - # 38 David Bowie

 

David Bowie had a big year in 1983. This was great news for him, but not necessarily for me in terms of my lifelong appreciation of him as an artist. It was the year he released the Let's Dance album which in retrospect sounds pretty much like his first and really only major statement of a decade which certainly wasn't very kind to him. Yes I do know the Scary Monsters record came out in 1980 but seems to me a full stop than a capital letter looking back. Superlative full stop that it is.

I didn't care for it much. I hadn't dived into his work as I should have  done and the albums I owned at this point were probably Ziggy, Hunky and the Greatest Hits. At a push I can find a couple of tracks on Let's Dance I really like, probably the title track and China Girl. Some of the lesser known songs. But mostly it sounds to me like a superlative artist responding to the changing times rather than dictating them as he'd done previously.

It's bright and shiny product, like the Eighties, it reminds me of Benetton, but you suspect it's Great Product rather than Great Art, without the nuance, intensity and depth that marked him out as an artist apart for so long, Ian McCulloch of the Bunnymen was asked by Smash Hits to go and see him play at the Milton Keynes bowl, such an iconic venue during those years. He was sniffy and dismissive which as a Bowie devotee since Starman was something of a surprise. It was really the start of the Mac the Mouth years as his confidence ballooned and became a hubris and arrogance that was increasingly  easy to shrug off or dismiss. Particularly as the quality of his own product declined. But McCulloch did seem to have more to say than Bowie at this point. 

I've come to like the album more with the passing of time. But the singles didn't do much for me at the time. It seemed to mark Bowie crossing to 'their'  camp where he regrettably chose to stay during the Live Aid years and even more regrettably throughout the Nineties. It took far too long for him to come back. In the meantime, I fully explored the back catalogue and it paid me back in diamonds.