Hunky Dory

Today marks the 52nd anniversary of the release of Bowie's fourth (and first really Bowiesque) album Hunky Dory! It's such a great record, and one of the few Bowie long players I have on vinyl, albeit a reissue. There's a special place in my heart for this one, as the Wesleys along with keyboard whiz Kim Siragusa performed this album in its entirety for the Newport Record Club in April 2016. I would place Hunky Dory in my Top 5 Bowie Albums, possibly at the coveted position of number five.

Kicking off with the 1-2 punch of Changes and Oh! You Pretty Things, this record sees Bowie successfully finding his voice, and coming up with some pretty profound lyrics, considering his 24 years on the planet. Both of these songs are fairly well known, with the latter becoming more renowned in recent years. It is a quintessential Bowie track from 1970s, and a little bit of Ziggy creeps into this one, I reckon. Some of the lines from Quicksand are deeply introspective as he searches for identity and ponders his place in the world. Check this out:

"Don't believe in yourself,

Don't deceive with belief,

Knowledge comes with death's release..."

Fairly heavy stuff, huh? This is also the album that gifts us the wondrous Life on Mars? which isn't short of its own profundities either. 

Assembling the band that would go to be his Spiders From Mars, Bowie enlisted Mick Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass and drummer Mick 'Woody' Woodmansey to start recording a new album in mid 1971. Interestingly, Tony Visconti is not involved in this record, having not only played bass on Bowie's previous album The Man Who Sold the World, but he also produced it. For Hunky Dory, Bowie himself co-produces alongside Ken Scott. Visconti and Bowie would work together again on numerous occasions in the future. 

As well as bass, Bolder also contributes a lovely bit of trumpet to the exquisite Kooks, an ode to Bowie's newborn son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones. Yes, THAT Duncan Jones, the filmmaker. There's quite a bit of piano on this record, which is played by Bowie himself on Oh! You Pretty Things and Eight Line Poem. However, elsewhere the keys are courtesy of the legendary Rick Wakeman before he joined up with prog rockers Yes. Apparently he was offered a regular spot in Bowie's touring band, but declined in favour of Yes. One wonders how those legendary Ziggy concerts would have gone if he was involved.

After an amazingly strong first side, which includes all six songs I have mentioned, the record flip kicks off with a whimsical cover of Fill Your Heart. The song was penned by a performer called Biff Rose and Paul Williams, a songwriter who would go on to have his hand in many classic songs including Rainy Days and Mondays (the Carpenters), Evergreen (Barbra Streisand) and The Rainbow Connection (Kermit the Frog). The album just stops dead here. It has some nifty piano work, but it's not much of a song. The most exciting thing happens at the track's end when the saxophone jumps in and out of the speaker as the spooky sound effects announce the arrival of Andy Warhol, which features an off-the-cuff introduction from Bowie clarifying the name of the sound, to presumably, the sound crew. Like the song before it, Andy Warhol features no drums, only percussion with two acoustic guitar parts. This wouldn't have sounded out of place on the Space Oddity album, I reckon. I quite like it, as it has some kind of weird Bowie quality, but it's a novelty track really.

Thankfully, the record gets really good again, with two more highlights hitting one after the other, with the excellent Song for Bob Dylan and the rollicking Queen Bitch. The opening lines of Song for Bob Dylan are probably my favourite lyrics on the album:

"Oh, hear this, Robert Zimmerman/

I wrote a song for you/

About a strange young man named Dylan/

With a voice like sand and glue..."

Dylan wasn't even a decade into the biz, but this track seemingly ponders his impact and how his audience will be affected in the future. Have they been deserted, or are they content with what has been left to them? I imagine most people at the time would not have expected the man to still be active fifty years later, let alone still producing excellent work. His last studio album (number 39, if you're counting), 2020's Rough and Rowdy Ways is one of his best efforts, for mine.

An early prototype for what would become glam rock, the aforementioned Queen Bitch is a clear homage to The Velvet Underground in both production and content. As the narrator searches through clubs for romantic encounters of an ambiguous nature, it feels like something Lou Reed could sing about and the crunch of Ronson's guitar landing on the introductory acoustic sets the track on fire. Like Fill Your Heart, this track is not indicative of the rest of the album, but in a good way. It's a big highlight for me, and is a big jump towards the creation of Ziggy Stardust and the sound of the next two Bowie albums. 

The final track is another interesting one, The Bewlay Brothers. Loosely based on Bowie himself and his half-brother Terry, the lyrics are quite nonsensical. Although it feels like a ballad or story, you're not really given much of a plotline. These are merely random images and expressions of feeling, with some of the densest lyrics Bowie ever penned. I like it, but I'm not sure what he means when sings "He's chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature". The final moments of the song change tack when numerous overdubbed voices of Bowie combine to deliver the perplexing denouement:

"Lay me place and bake me pie/

I'm starving for me gravy/

Leave my shoes, and door unlocked/

I might just slip away, hey/

Just for the day, hey!.."

Yeah, no idea there. I think Bowie just liked the sound of the words. It feels a bit like the random imagery of The Beatles' I Am the Walrus. As the voices of Bowie fade out we are left with the memories of an album unlike any other in his canon. So many different feels, and moods, but somehow, undeniably Bowie. It's a good one. Heck, it's a great one, but a couple of missteps prevent this from being absolutely classic. 

NEXT UP: ☆ - 8th Jan, 2025 (last one!)