Often Copied, Never Equalled: David Bowie unleashes Scary Monsters

David Bowie : It's No Game (Part 1)

[Purchase]

Scary Monsters for me has always been some kind of purge. It was me eradicating the feelings within myself that I was uncomfortable with… You have to accommodate your pasts within your persona. You have to understand why you went through them. That’s the major thing. You cannot just ignore them or put them out of your mind or pretend they didn’t happen or just say ‘Oh I was different then.’
-David Bowie

On September 12, 1980 David Bowie released Scary Monsters...(And Super Freaks), his first #1 UK album since Diamond Dogs. Recorded in New York City without Brian Eno, the album is a departure from the Berlin Trilogy. Producer Tony Visconti says Bowie, perhaps inspired by the success of Gary Numan, wanted to make a commercial album. The tag line for album promotions would be "Often Copied, Never Equalled".

At 33, Bowie had become an elder statesman of the rock scene and like most of us older fellows, he thought less of the current strain of music. In "Teenage Wildlife" he is almost certainly targeting Gary Numan in the lines

Same old thing in brand new drag
Comes sweeping into view
As ugly as a teenage millionaire
Pretending it's a whiz-kid world

Numan's reaction:

"I was quite proud about it at the time, to be honest. Even though I'd fallen out with him it still made me feel, Wahey!I'm in a Bowie song. That's cool."

Sessions began in March of 1980. Although Adrian Belew had been paid for the sessions Robert Fripp did most of the guitar work. Both Pete Townshend ("Because You're Young") and Tom Verlaine, whose "Kingdom Come" is the only cover, made appearances at sessions, but Verlaine, like Belew, is absent from the recording.

 The original songs took months to evolve. "People Are Turning to Gold" would become "Ashes to Ashes" (previously discussed) ; "It Happens Everyday" became "Teenage Wildlife" and "Jamaica" became the second single "Fashion". ( Bowie's acting skills would come in handy during the video age. Here he plays both an iconic star and his biggest fan).

  Bowie took the New York tapes with him and eventually came up with the lyrics. The vocals were recorded in London at Good Earth where actress Michi Hirota added forceful Japanese narration to the title track.

Sean Mayes, the pianist on Lodger and the Stage tour, later recalled listening to Scary Monsters with Bowie. " David was depressed – as he always is after completing a project. He was sure it was terrible and would be a failure. But then he laughed and said this was how he always felt!”

That's not how critics felt. Record Mirror's Simon Ludgate awarded it seven stars out of a maximum five. Robert Christgau gave the album a B+ writing

 No concepts, no stylistic excursions, no avant collaborations--this songbook may be the most conventional album he's ever put his name on. Vocally it can be hard to take--if "Teenage Wildlife" parodies his chanteur mode on purpose the joke's not worth the pain, and if you think Tom Verlaine can't sing, check out "Kingdom Come"--though anyone vaguely interested has already made peace with that. Lyrically it's too facile as usual, though the one about Major Tom's jones gets me every time. And musically, it apotheosizes his checkered past, bringing you up short with a tune you'd forgotten you remembered or a sonic that scrunches your shoulders or a beat that keeps you on your feet when your coccyx is moaning sit down.

Scott Isler, writing for Trouser Press:

Bowie's current high-relief music may not be to everyone's taste, but Scary Monsters represents a plateau in a career made up of plateaus. Its songs are quirky, intriguing and meticulously presented; musically, only Fripp has any leeway, and his solos total about a minute and a half for the whole album...Bowie continues to amaze. 

And from Smash Hits:

 Scary Monsters doesn't have the consistency of my favorite Bowie albums. Not all of the songs are up to the standard I associate with Bowie. Apparently critics felt this was a high water mark because every album of the 90's would be called the "best Bowie album since Scary Monsters". He wouldn't top it until his final years.

Bowie's Ashes To Ashes is a UK#1 nursery rhyme about spacemen junkies

David Bowie : Ashes To Ashes

[Purchase]

On August 8, 1980 David Bowie released his UK#1 single "Ashes To Ashes". Right from the start it sounds like nothing else, combining the funky bass playing of George Davis with a piano played through an Eventide Instant Flanger. Session guitarist Chuck Hamer came in with a newly invented guitar synthesizer.

"He gave us a quick demonstration of how he would pick a note, and out of his amplifier would come a symphonic string section.” co-producer Tony Visconti recalled.  “The sound was glorious. It’s the warm string choir you hear on the part that goes, ‘I’ve never done good things, I’ve never done bad things...’”  

The song revisits Major Tom from 1969's "Space Oddity" (“Do you remember a guy that’s been/ In such an early song.” ) and he is not doing well.

 Bowie has said that the song has elements of autobiography. The case is made by Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie:

The “Action Man” who has fallen so low might well parallel the former “Main Man” whose music went from “funk to funky” in 1975 as he became “a junkie” in the City of Angels (“strung out in heaven’s high”), before hit- ting the depths during The Man Who Fell To Earth (“I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair”), and relocating to Europe for creative and spiritual rebirth (“hitting an all-time Low”), but still yearning to demolish the frozen emotions and paranoiac isolation to which he had fallen victim (“Want an axe to break the ice, I wanna come down right now”). If ‘Space Oddity’ was in part a metaphor of space travel as celebrity as drug-taking as sensory isolation, then ‘Ashes To Ashes’ represents the pay-off.

The song ends with a nursery rhyme:

My mother said
To get things done 
You better not mess with Major Tom

"It really is an ode to childhood," Bowie told NME in 1980. " If you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It's about space men becoming junkies (laughs)."

Smash Hits: "Not a hit"

  In an interview with Performing Songwriter in 2003, Bowie explained the influence of Danny Kaye's performance in Hans Christian Anderson: 

“Something like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for ‘Inchworm,’” he said. “There’s a child’s nursery rhyme element in it, and there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult.”

The music video was shot at Beachy Head and Hastings in May 1980 on a budget of £25,000, making it the most expensive pop video of its day. It uses the new-fangled Paint- box technique to turn skies black and seas pink, and premiered one of his best-remembered looks, the sad-faced clown . 

Bowie storyboarded the video for director David Mallet and recruited some of the nattily dressed new romantics from The Blitz.

 Future Visage frontman Steve Strange is one of the four following Bowie, pursued by a menacing bulldozer

“My robe kept catching in the bulldozer,” Strange later told biographer Marc Spitz. “That’s why I kept doing that move where I pull my arm down. So I wouldn’t be crushed. Bowie liked the move and used it later.”