[Archive] A Glimpse of 'Hunky Dory' by David Bowie
The sound of David finding his inner Bowie.
As a reminder, I’m revisiting (and lightly revising) some posts from my archive for the next few weeks while I complete a book project. All the posts I’m selecting are normally behind a paywall. I’ll post a new Gems playlist as usual on the weekend.
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Hunky Dory came in a golden moment for Bowie, and - wow - he took advantage of the opportunity. At this point - 1971 - in his career, it wasn’t yet clear what Bowie was.
He’d tried various styles, from sub-Anthony Newley novelty songs (‘Laughing Gnome’ anyone?) to folk-rock, weirded-out psychedelia, and almost everything else. Little did we know trying different styles was Bowie’s whole future career in a microcosm.
So, after a false start with an album called David Bowie, he went again with an entirely different album called … David Bowie. Except this time he was armed with a song called ‘Space Oddity’ (sometimes the album carries that title), and he persuaded NASA to stage the ultimate promo video.1
Via The Man Who Sold the World, he was ready to record Hunky Dory. Bowie had some degree of recognition but nothing was fixed in terms of genre, or even of image, which was the expectation of playing by the usual rules. He had a group also seeking to establish themselves in the industry, including Mick Ronson, Trevor Boulder, and Woody Woodmansey (collectively, they would become the Spiders from Mars for a while) and session keyboardist Rick Wakeman, soon to plough his own furrow with Yes.
Ken Scott was engineer and co-producer (with Bowie) and had ambitions to become a full-blown producer, so working on Hunky Dory was an opportunity for him too.
Ken Scott: The making of ‘Hunky Dory’
(YouTube should flow into the other two parts - bit, if not: Part 2 | Part 3)
Bowie had written a collection of songs that were about as wide-ranging as they could be, assuming no one was interested in revisiting the ‘Gnome’ years.2
The range of writing here is incredible: ‘Changes’ and ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (pop), ‘Eight Line Poem’ (country if there was a Bowie sub-genre), ‘Life on Mars’3 (a sort of prog rock pop song, although it’s one of those songs only Bowie could write), ‘Kooks’ (heart-warming pop), ‘Quicksand’ (folk rock), ‘Fill Your Heart’ (could be performed by a big band at a dance contest, perhaps it has been?), ‘Andy Warhol’ (folky sing-along),4 ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ (opening like a Mott the Hoople song, before going folk rock like something from Dylan’s own Basement Tapes), ‘Queen Bitch’ (Velvet Underground and another singable chorus), ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ (I’ll go for progressive folk rock if that means anything at all).
Throughout, Bowie’s unique approach to writing lyrics and, of course, his distinctive singing voice.
We should pause and think about Bowie’s vocals on this album because, as David Hepworth notes in his excellent book ‘1971’ (aff): “Most of the vocals were done in the first take, even the complicated ones. There was no use of ‘punching in’, the technique whereby vocal performances could be assembled line by line, word by word, let alone - as is quite common today - syllable by syllable. Imperfections were turned into features.”5
In many ways, this is my favourite Bowie album. Given all the classics to follow, this might seem a strange statement, but it’s important to recognise the effect personal history has on our appreciation of music, as much - if not more so - than any technical analysis of the songwriting, playing, or production.
I played Hunky Dory many, many times in the seventies, at a time when I was attempting to play a terrible acoustic guitar and write songs. My attempts were heavily influenced by ‘Quicksand’ and ‘The Bewley Brothers’ - the extended song structures, wordy verses leading to impactful choruses, and lyrics that might just work as poetry if separated from the music. Well, that’s what Bowie achieved. My efforts, not so much. Sadly, my ‘songs’ are now lost.6
My copy of ‘Hunky Dory’ was pressed on a new form of vinyl that - I think - only RCA, Bowie’s record label at the time, used - Dynaflex.
“Dynaflex was a trademark for a thin, lightweight vinyl LP record introduced by RCA Records in late 1969. Rather than using the stiff plastic material used by conventional vinyl pressings, Dynaflex records used a "flexible" formulation that allowed RCA to use less material, saving money and also making the record appear to lie flatter on turntables. At the time, many industry record pressing plants were using "reground" vinyl, taking old records, removing their paper labels, then melting them down and reusing the plastic components to make new records. Such "reground" vinyl records typically sounded much noisier than a record made from "virgin" vinyl; collectors noted that "reground" records sometimes had small remnants of paper embedded in the outer edge of the LP.” 7
I can support the comment about regrounding producing noisier records. At the time, we took what we were given, and many albums released in the early 1970s suffered from being pressed on inferior vinyl as a result of an oil shortage, but they were all we could buy (excluding cassettes and they had their own issues).
These days, vinyl has to be better (180g, half-speed mastering, and the rest) because we know how good music can sound; high-quality digital files, CD/SACD/BluRay, and the like. This isn’t a point about digital mastering (I discussed in a previous post how Kate Bush isn’t a fan of that) or ‘pure, perfect sound forever’,8 just that we can now reproduce music without an excess of snap, crackle, and pop, so naturally that’s what we demand.
Hunky Dory was an early template for one of the most innovative careers in rock music history. Finally, Bowie was successful and credible. He could invent and destroy characters, and move between Philly soul, German electronic music, jazz, metal,9 and back again. He could be enigmatic for most of his career and later give interviews as if he was everyone’s best mate.
With Pete Townshend (discussed in my Who’s Next post), Bowie saw the potential of the internet (for better or worse, at least as far as music is concerned) years before everyone else.
Hunky Dory isn’t always treated with the same reverence as Ziggy Stardust, Heroes, or Blackstar, to name but three. Yet it is accessible, groundbreaking, and is the sound of a songwriter discovering he’s much better than he’d been allowed to be until this point.
Hunky Dory is the sound of David Bowie becoming David Bowie.
The sound of Hunky Dory becoming Hunky Dory is documented in a box set featuring early versions, demos, remixes, and more, called Divine Symmetry.
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This may not be exactly what happened.
This may not be exactly what happened.
No one was.
‘Life on Mars’ sounds as if it should be on a different album, by a different artist, but it’s here and somehow it fits completely. Perhaps Bowie actually was an alien?
Exactly how you’d expect a song about Andy Warhol to sound. In an alternative universe.
Hepworth, D. (2017) 1971 - never a dull moment: Rock’s Golden Year. London: Black Swan pp 300 - 301. (Hepworth also notes, in the same paragraph, “The phone that can be heard ringing at the end of ‘Life on Mars?’ was from a payphone in the bathroom which the musicians could use to make outgoing calls. Nobody knew the number and consequently, it never rang. Until that day.” Spooky.)
Not sadly.
The tagline when CDs were first marketed.
Well, a Tin Machine
Such an important album and my favourite of his - it’s so essential and sets up all to come…