“Strange fascination, fascinating me”
This week we’re looking at 1971’s Hunky Dory album ahead of the release of the David Bowie (Five Years 1969 – 1973) box set (due September 25th).
Though the public may have been slow to pick up on Hunky Dory, this is the album that united critics in their praise of Bowie and his music.
Here follows a couple of excerpts from reviews published at the time.
Hunky Dory review for Changes magazine by Henry Edwards, December 15, 1971
Mr David Bowie is not just another pretty face. And that’s saying something in an age in which beauty is only skin deep, and more than enough to get anybody almost anything. David’s flaxen hair, his piercing blue eyes, his blush red lips, have made him the inevitable envy of the of the world’s aspiring Starlets. Happily, however, these purely physical traits are attached to a sensibility, and that special Essence of David makes Hunky Dory a special record indeed.
I am sure that, one day, the fist of the Almighty invaded the boy’s skull, plucked his brain from his cranium, and after gingerly admiring and caressing it, decided it was too precious to share, and smashed it to smithereens. The result is much like the outpouring of a gaily coloured, kaleidoscope, fragmented but dazzling, jagged bits and pieces of unusually shaped objects, incessantly changing patterns with every gust of wind, each one a very special Bowie song.
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Hunky Dory review for Rolling Stone, by John Mendelsohn, 6 January 1972
DAVID BOWIE, the swinging/mod Garbo, male femme fatale, confidante to and darling of the avant-garde on both sides of the Atlantic, and shameless outrage, is back, and with a bang, although bearing little resemblance to the dangerous loony of The Man Who Sold The World from earlier this year.
For the most part, Dave is back, after an affair with heavy! high-energy killer techniques, back into his 1966-ish, Tony Newley/pop-rock thang, and happily so. Hunky Dory is his most easily accessible, and thus most readily enjoyable work since his Man Of Words/Man of Music album of 1969.
Hunky Dory not only represents Bowie’s most engaging album musically, but also finds him once more writing literally enough to let the listener examine his ideas comfortably, without having to withstand a barrage of seemingly impregnable verbiage before getting at an idea.
Listen to Hunky Dory here now.
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