David Bowie’s Let’s Dance should prove to be the most commercial album he’s made yet, and justify the undisclosed, allegedly enormous sum that EMI, his new record company, paid for him. There must be considerable depression over at RCA, his former company.
Bowie told me that RCA had been unhappy with his last three, impressively experimental albums, Lodger, Low and even Scary Monsters, and that the company had offered to get him a flat in Philadelphia in the hope that he’d record another album like Young Americans. Instead, he’s made an even more fashion-conscious move: not back to a black Philly sound but to a contemporary black New York funk style, with help from his co-producer, Chic’s Nile Rodgers.
The album is highly impressive, yet mildly disappointing. This is partly because he is now working within an instantly recognisable, accessible field, as opposed to experimenting with Fripp or Eno, and partly because his brilliant single, Let’s Dance/Cat People, contributes the best two tracks on the album.
At first hearing it may seem like Bowie is playing a little commercial and safe (even if this is a new musical direction for him), but with continued listening the sheer quality of the playing, the arrangements, and – most of all – his skill as a singer, make it sound more and more like a classic.
Many of the songs mix a sparse, attacking, cool New York dance backing with melodies that have catchy, poppish hook lines. Modern Love, the plinky-plonk China Girl (a new treatment of the song he wrote with Iggy Pop) and Criminal World could all be good but common-place in lesser hands.
Bowie is in magnificent, confident voice and can transform the potentially trivial to the epic. One moment cool and rhythmic, then the growling grand balladeer and crooner, he emerges as a vocalist to last. That Christmas song he recorded with Bing Crosby was perhaps more important than it seemed at the time.
