MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - The Man Who Sold The World by David Bowie - 1970

When it comes to David Bowie there really ought to be more than one much loved album. I've selected The Man Who Sold The World because I have always had a particular fondness for how contrary and odd it is. It was way out of step with the singer songwriter vibe he'd been doing prior to it. It has a grungy hard rock and doom ridden feel, with its dystopian, ever prevalent madness theme. At the time folk wondered what the hell was he doing. His record label must have been tearing their hair out.

It is clear, in retrospect, that The Man Who Spld The World builds on a thematic vein that Bowie starts with Space Oddity and takes all the way through his career, of the alienated, and often alien, outsider, disconnected from ordinary human life. The original cover photo was the infamous one of Bowie wearing a dress, that looks like it was run up from a pair of his Grandma's old curtains. I mean a man wearing a dress - gender fluidity in 1970? Way ahead of its time, certainly. The whole thing felt, at the time of release, like career suicide.

The Man Who Sold The World, released two years before Ziggy Stardust, is undoubtedly its precursor. It has a central saviour figure, with a sci-fi story arc running through it. These sorts of dystopian worlds kept reappearing throughout Bowie's career right up to Blackstar 2016 his last album before he died. This played most significantly on the mournful 'end of times' echoes that it shared with The Man Who Sold The World. I wasn't really aware of The Man Who Sold The World until after Ziggy Stardust's huge success. Re-released, with a black and white photo of Bowie in a sparkly Ziggy costume.The original album cover, nor this Ziggy inflected replacement, really reflected the darkly somber nature of its regret filled melancholy - the authoritarian implosion of a messiah like figure. 

Bowie, and Marc Bolan to a degree, brought sexual ambiguity to the fore in the short lived feverish sugar rush that was seventies Glam Rock. And the opening obliqueness of Width of a Circle, that begins the album, contains the classic sexually subversive Bowie lyric - 

He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips And showed me the leather belt round his hips. My knees were shaking my cheeks aflame. He said "You'll never go down to the Gods again"  

If you were a teenager just discovering what his sexual orientation was, living in the cultural backwoods of the Isle of Axholme, this was a beacon, brazen and alluring. I doubt I fully understood at the time exactly what he was referring to, though I undoubtedly sensed its transgressive intent. He gave a whole misfit generation a voice, a vehicle for their individuality to express itself through, and a dress sense to go with it. He gave me hope and the confidence to move towards living my life fully, as who I really was. 

Of the numerous Bowie songs I love, Man Who Sold The World is one from the very top shelf, its just so immaculately written. The opening thrill of it is beguiling, from the moment that melancholic cyclical riff from Mick Ronson's guitar strikes up. And when it reaches the chorus there is that jagged staggered ascending riff that runs counterpoint to -

' Oh no, not me, I never lost control. You're face to face  with the man who sold the world'  

I've always found the structure and production of this song, perfectly executed, yet so completely and delightfully off kilter simultaneously. I mean, what was he actually on about here? Whatever you do, do not listen to the Lulu version of this. Though produced by Bowie, it is a bizarre choice of singer, singing a quite inappropriate choice of song for her

At the time, this album had a strong influence upon my sense of aesthetic and my writing adopted some  of its themes. Bowie never wrote more explicitly about madness and mental instability than here. The crazy little voices whispering 'Can I keep him' in the background of All The Madmen. In the song  After All it appears like its a lament for the consequences of late sixties hippy idealism, but it also paints a picture of a people who lost to a world of drugs and vacant stares.

'I sing with impertinence Shading impermanent chords with my words I've borrowed your time and I'm sorry I called. But the thought just occurred That we're nobody's children. At all, after all'

Looking back through my teenage poems, always an embarrassing thing to do, you'll find lots of tortured and tortuous verses about losing ones sanity. Something I actually had no lived experience of, but its amazing what teenage angst can be mistaken for.  And that, was all Bowie's fault.
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