Released - November 1970
Genre - Hard Rock
Producer - Tony Visconti
Selected Personnel - David Bowie (Vocals/Guitar/Stylophone); Mick Ronson (Guitar); Tony Visconti (Bass/Piano/Guitar); Mick "Woody" Woodmansey (Drums/Percussion)
Standout Track - The Width Of A Circle
Much as it frustrates me to hear David Bowie's second self-titled album so often dismissed by people who insist that the Bowie story doesn't start until The Man Who Sold The World, it probably is fair to say that it's not until this outing that we begin to get an accurate picture of the David Bowie who would go on to achieve immortality and to take the world by storm after manifesting himself as the universe-hopping, messianic alien Ziggy Stardust in 1972. On that earlier album (generally referred to as Space Oddity to avoid confusion with his thoroughly charming but best-forgotten debut), Bowie was a psychedelic folk singer, mining the likes of Dylan for influence. Here, things have changed, but we're still not quite at the birth of glam rock that would follow on from the release of T. Rex's "Ride A White Swan" at around the same time and would see Bowie in fierce competition with T. Rex's Marc Bolan over the ensuing years for the glam rock crown. Rather, the style here is closest to hard rock and even to the heavy metal sound which bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were beginning to pioneer. The songs themselves are a long way from the studied anarchy and histrionic wail of the likes of Sabbath at the time, with Bowie's compositional skills still in a similar place to where they were the year before, but there's something about the musical performances themselves, particularly those of lead guitarist Mick Ronson, that lends a kind of dark, unpredictable rawness to this album, and it would be a while before Bowie sounded so genuinely unhinged again on record (though madness was never that far away in his work).
Speaking of Ronson introduces the other thing that makes this album so significant - it introduces the notion of Bowie as collaborator, and Bowie as magpie. The Man Who Sold The World sees Bowie working for the first time with the band that would become the Spiders From Mars during his incarnation as Ziggy - guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, though bassist Trevor Bolder was yet to be recruited, his role taken here by producer Tony Visconti. Ronson's guitar lends an edge and a directness to Bowie's songwriting that was perhaps lacking on Space Oddity, and is in fact pretty much the main thing that lends this album its most distinctive qualities. There are whole segments of this album where Bowie himself is more or less absent, lost in a maelstrom of guitar virtuosity from Ronson, with Visconti and Woodmansey keeping a steady and infectious rhythm. Various reports from the likes of Visconti at the time claim that a number of songs actually emerged from full band jam sessions rather than from Bowie's own solo compositions. Quite what we feel about Bowie taking credit for the contributions of his bandmates is down to interpretation, but what it reveals is the true nature the man's genius - throughout his career, the carefully cultivated myth of David Bowie has been built around fragments snatched from the different people and styles and stories he surrounded himself with. It's always the particular influence of a particular collaborator that unlocks something new in him that he hadn't tapped into yet, and here the energy of having a full band behind him, and a great one at that, unlocks a vitality and a wicked streak in his music that he might perhaps have never found had he continued writing starry-eyed folk music ad infinitum.
Not only that, Bowie seems here to be more comfortable with the idea of coming across as somewhat alien or other. The folk singer on Space Oddity was unusual, but never markably different from his contemporaries. Here, the madness and the shrill bleating of Bowie's vocals are genuinely strange-sounding and in places unsettling, while his blanked-out stare on the album cover as he reclines in a "man's dress" marks him out as a figure worthy of paying attention to, a figure who's prepared to do things differently. As for the songs themselves, the album opens with its crowning achievement, one of the very greatest Bowie songs to always remain hidden as an album-only track. "The Width Of A Circle" shows him at his surreal, poetic best, narrating a story of an erotic encounter with God - "His nebulous body swayed above, his tongue swollen with devil's love" is one of the best couplets in his discography. Musically, it builds from a portentous, even mythic opening into a "Jean Genie"-esque stomp and guitar freakout, only to conclude with a thunderous roll of timpani. It's the most shockingly brilliant Bowie had been up to this point, and segues into the surreal weirdness of "All The Madmen," a chilling exploration of isolation influenced by Bowie's half-brother Terry, who had recently been committed to the Cane Hill mental institution. The spoken, child-like vocals halfway through ("He followed me home, mum, can I keep him?") and the simplistic recorder parts included by Visconti are genuinely chilling in their simple menace, while the ghostly fairground sinisterness of "After All" brings just as little comfort, great though it is.
In general, in fact, it's a pretty bleak journey as albums go, and a world away from the psychedelic pop songs of Hunky Dory the next year, or the crowd-pleasing "Let the children boogie" of Ziggy Stardust the year after that. The other songs include a deliriously jingoistic paean to slaughter in Vietnam in "Running Gun Blues" and a dystopian tale about a computer that comes to rule society in "Saviour Machine," then there's the closing Nietzchean screams of "The Supermen," which, along with "Running Gun Blues," actually just tips things over into bleating irritation rather than unsettling menace. The only potential respite comes from the song everybody knows, the title track "The Man Who Sold The World." It's the first time Bowie truly confronted the issue of split personalities, narrating an encounter with himself on a staircase. It's hardly the most uplifting song ever, but it's catchy melody and memorable, Latin-tinged guitar riff makes it the only handshake of familiarity amid the generally challenging and alien material on offer here.
Don't let its weirdness put you off, though - this album presents us, for the first time, with the phenomenon of just what David Bowie would go on to be, with all the weirdness, madness, strangeness and brilliance that that entails. It's not always a perfect journey, with some of the songs losing themselves or disappearing into unhinged self-indulgence, but when it works, as on the title track or "The Width Of A Circle," it's a phenomenal thing. Sadly, it didn't provide Bowie with any notable degree of success or critical acclaim, and it would be over a year of continually playing second fiddle to Marc Bolan in the charts before he finally became just what he was destined to become.
Track Listing:
All songs written by David Bowie.
1. The Width Of A Circle
2. All The Madmen
3. Black Country Rock
4. After All
5. Running Gun Blues
6. Saviour Machine
7. She Shook Me Cold
8. The Man Who Sold The World
9. The Supermen
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