BOWIE WEEK: The Man Who Sold The World

The Man Who Sold the World is, to some, the album that triggered the whole glam phenomenon of the early to mid seventies.

Whilst it would be at least a year before the movement hit the high street and caused tabloid hysteria, the record's 1972 UK release switched on teenagers across the land, too young to give a damn about the naive rebellion of the hippie movement and too smart to be fooled by whatever passed for mainstream pop at the start of the decade.

Played to death in the common rooms of art schools across the land, word quickly spread about the heavy sounds of this cross-dressing cockney.

But it doesn’t feel glam. It’s not flash or overly self aware. The Man Who Sold the World is suburban psychedelia, with Bowie replacing the Tolkien inspired pastoral escapism of the late 1960s with a more industrial dystopia, indebted to the imagery of Orwell, Burgess and JG Ballard in equal measure.

Musically, The Man Who Sold The World kicks out the jams as hard as anything Hendrix conjured in the late '60s. The backbone of the recently formed Spiders from Mars proved their chops within minutes of opening track 'Width Of A Circle', its introductory feedback giving way to a descending riff which is simply destined to kick off. And when it does? Ouch.

For the most part, the record is a fairly straight and very effective take on blues rock and freak folk. But there's something in Bowie and Mick Ronson’s shared vision that steers the sound just the right side of the ‘head music’ played by those delusional jam bands that permeated through the rock scene of the surrounding years.

Their fret-wanking and noodling, their elongated suites of frankly dire instrumentals - they were all annihilated for the time being, by Bowie’s amphetamine-driven power pop.

When considered as part of Bowie’s formidable back catalogue, The Man Who Sold The World seems oddly distant from its follow up Hunky Dory - all street smarts and arty name dropping - and the record that launched a thousand cat-suited pub rock copyists, Ziggy Stardust.

It could be argued that this pre-Ziggy LP has more in common with later works like Low and Lodger; the cold ‘Metropolis’ like imagery of those records and the idea of individual alienation from a society that has begun to suffocate are, whilst clearly in their infancy, definitely audible here.

The record is thematically more undeveloped than the work which would emerge soon enough with 'The Spiders, but that’s what keeps it interesting after all these years. Bowie is feeling his way into new territory, and when it hits, as on the scorching 'Black Country Rock' and the infamous title track, he's clearly onto something.

Just what, would be revealed soon enough.