Hunky Dory [Remastered] - David Bowie > Reviews > Stalking Time for the Moon Boy

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Groundbreaking
Lyrics	Sublime
Quality and consistency of tracks	Flawless
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Outstanding
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Wonderful, classic Bowie album
Disadvantages:	Song for Bob Dylan

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Stalking Time for the Moon Boy...

Ch-Ch-Changes

Those who have been waiting for David Bowie's follow-up to his last album, Reality, are having their patience severely tested. It's over four years now since his 2003/2004 Reality world tour came to an abrupt end due to Bowie's health problem but although he reportedly made a swift recovery his output since has been limited to some fairly small screen parts and a few appearances with other artists as a guest vocalist. He's 61, rich beyond most people's dreams, apparently happily married with a young daughter and he received a sharp reminder of his mortality a few years ago; just a sample of the reasons he might be finding not to work too hard.

Roll back to 1971 and it's a very different story. The 24 year old Bowie had already fronted several bands, been through numerous relationships, got married and fathered a child. He'd run an arts laboratory; been a painter, a mod, a hippie, a singer-songwriter, a mime artist and an inchoate Buddhist monk. He'd made TV commercials and been groomed by his manager as a musical comedy performer as well as making his first film appearance. His third album, The Man Who sold the World, was released early in 1971 and by the time the fourth, Hunky Dory, was released later that year he had all but completed his fifth.

Hunky Dory came about, then, in the midst of a period of intense activity and creativity on Bowie's part. It was the first album to bring him serious critical acclaim and the last he would record as a relatively unknown performer, for his next project was to be The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the album that would set him up for stardom.

With Your Long Blonde Hair and Your Intellectual Trousers

I wouldn't normally attach much importance to an album cover but in Bowie's case it can usually throw up a few clues to the particular music that lies within. The front cover of a Bowie album is always dominated by a picture of him, revealing the current image he wants to project. For many years Bowie famously changed his appearance regularly by way of clothes, hairstyle, makeup and body language and any particular look would generally last only until the next album was released. The front cover of many of his albums suggests a particular style of art, so that we can see a Gilbert and George flavour in the cover of Tonight or a Japanese manga style on Reality, for example. On Hunky Dory the style is that of an old movie poster.

The front cover of Hunky Dory is a picture of a feminine-looking Bowie pulling back his long blonde hair in a pose reminiscent of a 1930s Hollywood starlet. The picture looks like a hand-coloured photograph in keeping with that era and suggestive of a theme that crops up from time to time in the album - the silver screen.

The back cover has a full-length sepia portrait of Bowie in a white shirt and Oxford bags, a style that he later said he associated with Evelyn Waugh novels and 1930s Oxbridge. The track listings and credits are in Bowie's handwriting, complete with crossings-out and bracketed notes. The 1999 reissue CD that most shops sell now has a silly little picture of the original back cover about an inch square alongside the track listing - completely pointless, as none of the text can be read.

So the clues to the music within are there on the cover: the movie theme suggested by the artwork on the front; the intellectual pretensions hinted at by the photograph on the back; the handwritten sleeve notes proclaiming Bowie's credibility as an intelligent crafter of songs. And then there's the faintly camp air of it all… was he gay or wasn't he? The gay theme crops up in an overt fashion on the song "Queen Bitch" but only a few tracks earlier in "Kooks" he'd been singing to his son about romancing with his wife. It wasn't until the promotional interviews for his next album, Ziggy Stardust, that Bowie would proclaim "I'm gay" but there are some heavy hints of a sexuality that's not entirely straight in Hunky Dory, not to mention the fact that Bowie had appeared in a dress on the cover of his previous album, The Man Who Sold the World.

A great cover then? Well, not really. In fact I've never liked it much at all. Bowie was still in his hippyish phase at the time but at heart he was never a spaced-out, love-and-peace dreamer; no, here was a sharp mind, a lively humour and a fearsome ambition for stardom. The cover photo is frankly a little soppy to my mind, conveying neither the joy of songs like "Kooks" and "Fill Your Heart" nor the dramatic power of "Quicksand" and "The Bewlay Brothers". Even those intellectual trousers on the back don't work for me.

I think the soft image was deliberate though; an Aunt Sally set up to be smashed down by the iconoclastic Ziggy Stardust. Drabness was to be replaced by glitter; long, flowing hair would become short and spiky; baggy trousers were to give way to skin-tight satin. Hunky Dory was the calm before the storm; David Bowie was stalking fame.

Spiders in Waiting

David Bowie: Vocals, saxophones, guitar, piano
Mick Ronson: Guitar
Trevor Bolder: Bass guitar, trumpets
Woody Woodmansey: Drums
Rick Wakeman: Piano
Production: Ken Scott & David Bowie
Songwriting: All music and lyrics by David Bowie except "Fill Your Heart" by Biff Rose and Paul Williams

Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey made a solid and competent set of backing musicians for Bowie. But over and above this they gelled perfectly as a band, deserving to be thought of as just that, rather than as a collection of backing musicians in my view. And indeed they were soon to become collectively known as the Spiders from Mars in preparation for Bowie's Ziggy outing. Mick Ronson, who had received some classical training, was not only a stunningly good lead guitarist but was also responsible for the string arrangements on five of the songs, including "Life on Mars?". I think Bowie and Ronson made a superb partnership; Ronson allowing his guitar and string arrangements to flow round and through Bowie's songs without compromising his skills in any way, yet never threatening to undermine the vocals and thereby taking a suitably subservient role in the proceedings.

Rick Wakeman, who had played piano on David's "Space Oddity" a couple of years earlier, was a member of The Strawbs and also joined the dire but popular prog-rock band Yes in the same year that Hunky Dory was made. He's possibly better known these days for his TV appearances on Grumpy Old Men and guest spots in Countdown's "dictionary corner". Old Rick may have made an unlikely rock star but 37 years ago he had some mighty nimble fingers and he gives some virtuoso performances here, particularly on "Changes" and "Fill Your Heart". Beatles fans may be interested to know that the piano played by Wakeman is the very one played on "Hey Jude".

As for David himself, despite the self-effacing comment on the sleeve notes ("I played the less complicated piano parts (inability)"), for me he's a good enough pianist and guitarist and he actually plays a mean saxophone.

Track by Track

1. Changes (3.37)

Bowie seems to me to be exorcising a lot of demons on this album and it starts right here. Grumpy Old Rick's piano and Trevor's trumpet lend a playful jazziness to the intro as David begins to sing:

"Still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets"

It's dawning on him that he's destined for greater things as he wonders "how others must see the faker" but he knows that "I'm much too fast to take that test". A lot of reviewers have singled this song out as a pointer to the many changes of style (in both appearance and music) that Bowie was to undergo but I don't think he was looking much beyond what was happening at the time. What I read into it is that he was loosely comparing the change in attitudes of young people at the time with his own metamorphosis into someone more daring and adventurous.

The rousing chorus with its Who-style stutter (as in "My Generation") made this song catchy enough to warrant its release as a single although it wasn't much of a chart success. Perhaps its distinct changes of tempo made it a little inaccessible to some listeners at the time. To me it's very much a part of this album, with the feeling that he's putting something behind him and starting afresh; a fine song and an absolutely appropriate, upbeat opening to Hunky Dory.

2. Oh! You Pretty Things (3.12)

Peter Noone, let me introduce Friedrich Nietzsche. Yes, curiously, David Bowie gave this foreboding song with its philosophical promotion of the Homo Superior to Peter "Herman" Noone, the snaggle-toothed, boy-next-door vocalist from the Hermits, to release as a single. Sanitized for radio airing by replacing the word "bitch" with "beast" (what innocent days those must have been), it managed a respectable number 12 in the UK chart.

Ignore the words and this is a bouncy, if slightly edgy, piece of pop music. It's a jolly-sounding song with a killer chorus that any self-respecting drunk would find it hard to avoid joining in with; but all the jaunty piano work and good-time vibe belie a sinister message in the lyrics, telling of a "coming race", as "Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use".

Some Bowie albums make obvious pairs (Low and Heroes, Outside and Earthling, Heathen and Reality) and I tend to think of The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory in this way. Themes of Nietzschean philosophy, Buddhism and insanity ripple through both these albums and "Oh! You Pretty Things" is where Bowie picks them up and begins to run with them on Hunky Dory.

3. Eight Line Poem (2.55)

The tempo slows for this little song, which is a sort of adjunct to the previous track; they are sometimes listed together with the running time being the total time of the two songs. Bowie's voice deepens for this song and he sings it beautifully. The title says it all here: it is indeed just eight lines long and even its closing lines alone…

"But the key to the city
Is in the sun that pins the branches to the sky"

…would justify the "poem" of the title. It seems to be a distillation of a few moments in someone's room, where a mobile "spins to its collision" and a pet reacts by putting its head between its paws. I can't be sure (can Bowie, I wonder) but I think it's about his concern at the spread of urban development. Could I have put it more prosaically than that?

4. Life on Mars? (3.54)

"In the music world, David Bowie inspired his fans to question whether the planet could support organic life in 'Life on Mars', although the song itself did little to answer the question." (Jack Malvern, writing about images of the planet Mars in The Times, 27 May 2008)

An astute observation there, Jack, but let me tell you what I think is going on in this song. A young girl has an argument with her over-reacting parents about some trivial matter. She storms off to the cinema to watch a movie with a friend. The friend doesn't show up. The film that she watches alone is awful. Life is a bitch and in her exasperation she fantasises about being able to escape from the whole damned planet. Maybe you should listen to it again, Jack.

Mick Ronson's soaring string arrangements, Rick Wakeman's dexterous piano-playing and Bowie's impeccable vocals combine to make this a tour de force. The simple story of the young girl develops into something more universal as the song progresses and the images become slightly surreal. It's a superb piece of song writing and its dramatic impact remains as strong as ever for me.

Incidentally, Bowie's note beside this song on the track listing is "Inspired by Frankie", generally acknowledged to be a reference to Frank Sinatra because Bowie had started to write the song using the chord sequence from "My Way".

5. Kooks (2.53)

The sleeve notes give the game away again here; Bowie's note beside the track listing reading "for small Z". The song is shamelessly dedicated to David's son, Zowie (now known as Duncan), who was born shortly before Hunky Dory was recorded.

All the ingredients for an unmitigated disaster are here: a doting father of his first child writing a song for him; a trumpet section that recalls Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass and a plinky piano that comes straight out of a Western saloon bar. This song could have ruined the album but mercifully it doesn't. How does Bowie pull this off? I think it's the combination of honest enthusiasm, humour and a tune that's just full of joy; it's a song that makes me feel happy and what can be wrong with that? And who can resist lines like

"And if the homework brings you down
Then we'll throw it on the fire
And take the car down town"

6. Quicksand (5.08)

In the days when albums came on vinyl, there were effectively two opening songs and two closing songs, one for each side. Quicksand is a majestic closer for the first half of Hunky Dory, bringing together the album's themes of movies ("I'm living in a silent film"), Nietzsche ("Just a mortal with potential of a superman"), Buddhism ("You can tell me all about it on the next Bardo") and insanity ("I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought"). There's a slow tempo to this dramatic ballad as Bowie's strong, clear voice relates the maelstrom of his political, philosophical and religious thoughts breaking down into confusion and fear, as "I ain't got the power anymore". The swirl of Ronson's string arrangement sweeps the song into its desperate chorus:

"Don't believe in yourself
Don't deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death's release"

It's moving, beautifully sung and surprisingly I don't find it in the least depressing. I never tire of this song and for me it hasn't lost one bit of its force after listening countless times.

7. Fill Your Heart (3.07)

A bit of light relief after the emotionally-draining Quicksand, this is a cover of a song written by Biff Rose, an American singer-songwriter and comedian. It had been recorded a few years earlier by the wildly eccentric Tiny Tim as the B-side to his single "Tiptoe through the Tulips" and is firmly rooted in flower power:

"Gentleness clears the soul
Love cleans the mind
And makes it free!"

Fill Your Heart is a piece of happy, hippy whimsy that Bowie enters into with obvious and infectious enthusiasm, hamming it up with a lingering falsetto on the word "free". It gives Wakeman another chance to show off his skills at the piano, tinkling jazzily from one end of the scale to the other, while Bowie proves that he really can play the saxophone.

Slightly loopy it may be, but I think it's an exhilarating joy of a song and I love it.

8. Andy Warhol (3.56)

The mood stays upbeat as the final notes of Fill Your Heart fade over the opening dialogue of Andy Warhol, in which Bowie corrects producer Ken Scott's pronunciation of "Warhol" before dissolving in laughter. Surprisingly, that laughter doesn't irritate me after listening to the song many times. This was the first song I heard from Hunky Dory and I found the tune played by Bowie's acoustic guitar stayed in my head for days afterwards. I wondered for a long time how the unusually full guitar sound with its flamenco flavour could have been created before concluding that either there are two guitars or an extra track was overlaid in the studio; I still don't know which.

Legend has it that Bowie played this song to Andy Warhol in New York before the release of Hunky Dory and that Warhol's reaction was to get up and walk out of the room without saying a word. I'm hardly surprised that it offended him, as the lyrics sound like an undisguised put-down. The chorus, for example, goes:

"Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all"

And it gets worse. With a reference to the children's TV programme "Andy Pandy", the final verse starts:

"Andy walking, Andy tired,
Andy take a little snooze
Tie him up when he's fast asleep
Send him on a pleasant cruise"

Bowie claimed, however, that it was an "ironic homage" to Warhol. Maybe so, but it sounds to me like a laugh at Warhol's expense… and it's a brilliant one too.

9. Song for Bob Dylan (4.12)

I would pick this song without any hesitation as my least favourite on Hunky Dory. Mick Ronson's guitar intro sounds decidedly melancholy and Bowie's vocal has a weary air to it. I can see the point of this as the song is addressed to Robert Zimmerman (Dylan's real name) as a message of regret at his change of musical direction and is basically a plea to him to go back to the old style of Dylan songs.

"You gave your soul to every bedsit room", Bowie tells him, before suggesting he might "ask your good friend Dylan if he'd gaze a while down the old street".

The lyrics are clever but I have a problem with the song as a whole. It's done in a folk style, much along the lines of one of the old Dylan protest songs whose demise he's ruing and that's entirely appropriate; but musically it just seems a little dull and pedestrian to me, especially when it's surrounded by the brilliance of the rest of Hunky Dory's songs.

10. Queen Bitch (3.18)

This is the only track on the album that could be called a rock song. With Mick Ronson's electric guitar dominant for the first and only time, it's quite different from anything else on Hunky Dory but I think it sits very well between the down-tempo songs either side of it. Bowie's note beside the track listing is "Some V.U., White Light returned with thanks", revealing that this is a homage to the American band the Velvet Underground, whose song "White Light, White Heat" Bowie often performed live in concert.

The song is a snapshot of the moment when a lover is lost to a rival on whom Bowie vents his scorn and derision:

"She's so swishy in her satin and tat
In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat
Oh God, I could do better than that"

The song's little story is openly gay-themed and it is well documented that Bowie had spent some considerable time in the company of the gay crowd surrounding Andy Warhol in the USA as well as people back in Britain such as the mime artist Lindsay Kemp and his own one-time manager Ken Pitt. Is Bowie gay? Many people still seem to think so but he famously enjoyed teasing the press and despite his "I'm gay" revelation in 1972 I don't believe that he was ever anything but heterosexual. He has had two marriages, two children and numerous relationships with women but, apart from his own press statements and some wishful thinking from a few of the gay scene he used to associate with, I can find no compelling evidence of any sexual relationship with a man.

Queen Bitch drives along on guitar and drums in the classic Velvets style, with Bowie's vocal like a higher-pitched version of Lou Reed's, half way between singing and speaking. I think it could comfortably fit in with the songs on Bowie's next album, Ziggy Stardust. It's a taste of what's to come.

11. The Bewlay Brothers (5.26)

The closing song on Hunky Dory returns to a folk music style with a guitar backing, beginning with a quiet and gentle menace that builds into something increasingly emotional and harrowing. The lyrics are peppered with complex, surreal and nightmarish images. Some reviews have claimed it's all about drugs or gay sex but I think there is little doubt that the song is essentially about Bowie's relationship with his half-brother, Terry, who was schizophrenic and eventually committed suicide in 1985.

To me the song is about Bowie's wish for a closer relationship with his brother, frustrated by Terry's mental condition. There is a dream-like vision of the crazed brothers on the prowl at night - "it was stalking time for the moon boys"…"and we frightened the small children away".

But those adventures could only be imagined, never reality:

"Now my brother lays upon the rocks
He could be dead, he could be not,
He could be you
He's chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature"

The song ends with a pathetic plea from a poor, institutionalised soul like a character from a Beckett play:

"Lay me place and bake me pie
I'm starving for me gravy
Leave my shoes, and door unlocked
I might just slip away
Just for the day"

The Bewlay Brothers has no hint of self-pity or sentimentality but to my mind it's the most emotional and heart-felt song Bowie has ever written. The best song on the album for me: it's simply magnificent.

Bringing it all Together

I have no difficulty in choosing The Bewlay Brothers as the best song on the album and Song for Bob Dylan as the worst (but not bad enough to reduce the Ciao quality rating from "flawless"). All the other songs are terrific but Life on Mars?, Quicksand and Andy Warhol vie with each other for my second place selection. But Hunky Dory is more than a collection of songs; it hangs together beautifully as an album and the order of the songs is exactly right. Bowie comes as close as he ever has to baring his soul; sharing his joy, sorrow and anger with us as he shakes off his hang-ups. The final demon is sent packing in the last song. And Ziggy is waiting in the wings.

Buying Hunky Dory

Amazon, HMV and Play are all charging £9.99 for Hunky Dory at the time of writing but I saw it on sale at Fopp the other day (yes, Fopp has risen from the ashes) for just a fiver.

There have been a number of reissues of this CD, including a cute LP replica version released in 2007 and available as a Japanese import at around £15.

The 1999 reissue (still on sale) is the "remastered" version but, apart from more volume, I'm hard pressed to find any real difference in the sound.

Those lucky enough to get their hands on the 1990 reissue will find four bonus tracks on it. These comprise a demo version of Quicksand with a much-simplified acoustic guitar backing and a less polished vocal; an alternative mix of The Bewlay Brothers; a different recording of The Supermen from The Man Who Sold the World album; and a previously-unreleased track called Bombers. Bombers is an anti-war song with Bowie frantically rattling off the very wordy lyrics over an ironic bom-bom-bom backing vocal, working up to a high-pitched climax. It reminds me of some of his pre-1970 material and I'm not too surprised that it became a Hunky Dory outtake.

© copyright 2008 David (Mitsudan on Ciao)