I hibernated from David Bowie while we were at university. Let's Dance made him a cliché. And people think that's just the old snobbish distaste for success, but in my case it was distaste for the johnny-come-latelies who, in 1983, suddenly declared that they had "always" been Bowie fans. Barry from Crown Life Insurance in Woking, I'm talking about you.
Buying this record, circa 1987, signalled my emergence from hibernation. I got it on vinyl because RCA were offering Bowie's mid-period stuff for £3.99 — perhaps an early example of price experimentation to boost sales?
It would have had much more impact if I'd bought it ten years earlier, but my world didn't extend that far at the time.
I think it's the bold arrangements I like most in Bowie. Hunky Dory is full of them, but the cassette version I had of that didn't last into the '80s (it's only recently that I ripped Lucy's CD copy into iTunes and rediscovered it). On this album, it's the unexpected harmonica on A New Career in a New Town and all the really dirty synths that invade the songs on Side 1, halfway between Roxy's first and Pere Ubu's.
Side 2 must have seemed really brave at the time, but with hindsight I admire the intent more than the final result. It doesn't go quite far enough: Weeping Wall apes Steve Reich to begin with, but then layers too much extraneous stuff on top to turn it into minimalism-plus, which kind of defeats the point of minimalism.
That didn't stop Side 2 being arguably the more influential. I say "arguably" because you brand thousands of ambient albums as being descended from it. But what the descendants of Side 1? Not the New Romantics (I'm listening to Systems of Romance on Last.fm right now to check) because they never seemed so light on their feet, and gave the impression that they'd run a mile from a harmonica.
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