He opened strange doors that we’d never close again…
The August edition of MOJO magazine has a free A5 supplementary booklet celebrating that often unfairly maligned of musical decades, the 1980s.
The 52-page booklet contains the above pages in relation to David Bowie’s 1980 masterpiece: Scary Monsters… And Super Creeps.
Here are the first couple of paragraphs from the piece…
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Scary Monsters still sparkles today. Its intense, churning grooves sound remarkably contemporary – in retrospect, it’s the obvious source of Blur’s angular rock attack from Park Life on – but despite the complexity of its arrangements, there are many moments of unaffected simplicity. Recorded mostly at New York’s Power Station, Scary Monsters moves on stylistically from its three Berlin-inspired predecessors, but also looks back, both at Bowie’s own career and at the new wave kids who were coming up behind him.
Popular folklore has it that Bowie, working in New York after his sojourn in Europe, was intent on scoring a hit record. Certainly Chuck Hammer, who had met Bowie via Lou Reed, observed a frighteningly intense work ethos when he arrived to add his cutting-edge guitar synthesizer to three songs. Bowie, mustachio’d, in full-length leather jacket and Japanese sandals, was armed with a clipboard to plan the recording, while producer Tony Visconti was almost scarily ‘on-it’; recording and planning ahead at the same time. “They were an absolutely unified team, impressively organised,” says Hammer. “There was no chaos – but it was very relaxed and creative, too.”
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So there you have it…The greatest album of the eighties made in the first year of the decade and not bettered in the nine that followed. IMHO.