Why did David Bowie hate his debut album?
Towards the mid-1960s, rock and roll started progressing by leaps and bounds. In the wake of acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones expanding the palette of rock and roll, new acts were popping up left and right, bringing a new attitude towards rock and roll, from the blues griminess of The Yardbirds to the art rock terrors of The Velvet Underground. It sounds like David Bowie would fit right in, but his first attempt at rock music was far from Ziggy Stardust.
Originally playing acoustic guitar, David Bowie’s self-titled debut album was recorded around the same time as The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, and as such, sounds a bit more dated than his subsequent releases. Coming from the days of kaleidoscopic rock music, the first glimpse of ‘The Starman’ is closer to vaudeville music most of the time, relying on some outlandish arrangements to provide the hook on songs like ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’.
Although the album received a fair amount of praise from musical outlets at the time, Bowie quickly disowned the record when going through his back catalogue. When reminiscing about his early days, Bowie didn’t have much love for this era of his career, telling Q Magazine, “No, I haven’t much to say about that in its favour. Lyrically, I guess, it was striving to be something, the short storyteller. Musically it’s quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at. It seemed to have its roots all over the place, in rock, vaudeville, and music hall, and I don’t know what. I didn’t know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley.”
While there are more than a few head-scratching moments on the record, Bowie gives a glimpse of some of the strangeness that would go on later. On the final track, ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’, the uncomfortable sound design is quite foreboding, hinting at some off-the-wall genre experiments that he would get up to later in his career.
As Bowie grew as a songwriter, though, he found the perfect outlet for his musical personality on ‘Space Oddity’, which would become one of his first major hits. Although he kept working the folksy angle of his sound in the early days, he was slowly building towards something bigger before finally landing on Ziggy Stardust, drafting a lavish concept album about a rock and roll alien who fell to Earth to save the world.
By Bowie’s admission, though, his various roots became too much for one singular alien as well, reinventing himself with every subsequent record, from embracing krautrock as ‘The Thin White Duke’ to making the American equivalent of Ziggy on ‘Aladdin Sane’ to becoming a pin-up star in the ’80s with the release of albums like Let’s Dance.
Regardless of his rejection of the album, David Bowie still stands as a sturdy set of songs, being on par with the storytelling angle prevalent in the English rock scene at the time, like Ray Davies. Even in hindsight, Bowie had started to see what made his debut so strange, recalling to Uncut: “It was make-your-mind-up time… I felt: well, I don’t wanna be like this. I wanna keep my options open; there’s lots of things I like. So it was: ‘How can I do this so I can try everything? How can I be really greedy?'”.
