Elvis Costello on the four David Bowie albums everyone should own
Did any other artist of the 1970s have such an impeccable run of essential, trend-setting albums? Finally finding fame with his Martian rock messiah following several years of creative taste testing from novelty jingles about laughing gnomes to dabbles with folk trio Feathers, by the time he was slinging his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulder on Top of the Pops, the cracked actor David Bowie was set to dominate the decade with his uncanny ability to absorb the musical underground and anticipate punk’s cataclysm with stark originality. As a 1977 marketing campaign boldly declared at the time, “There’s old wave, there’s new wave, and there’s David Bowie.”
When faced with the task of boiling his discography down to the core entries, typically one picks from each of Bowie’s eras and key alter-egos: a pre-Ziggy cut, a glam selection, a choice Berlin trilogy LP, and either one of his final bow twofer The Next Day or Blackstar. Curiously, the pub rock songsmith Elvis Costello largely honed in on one particular period of his disparate creative output for his four Bowie LPs.
Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2013 and presenting his “500 albums essential to a happy life”: “There are probably songs being composed right now that will eclipse every entry on this list in somebody’s heart or mind. It is my experience that music is more like water than a rhinoceros. It doesn’t charge madly down one path. It runs away in every direction.”
First up was 1971’s Hunk Dory. Retrospectively granted the classic status following the success of Ziggy, Bowie’s fourth LP is an art-pop toybox that throws a bit of everything into the mix, unconcerned with a unifying ‘character’ or anchoring aesthetic that’d define later records.
Inspired by his first tour of the USA, songs aimed at his heroes Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed all hover over the album’s exploration of the American cultural landscape and alone illustrate Hunk Dory‘s eclectic ambitions, jumping from experimental folk, anthemic ode, and glam foreshadowings across the fan triptych. Featuring the canonical ‘Changes’ and ‘Life on Mars?’, Hunk Dory serves as an excellent introductory to the uninitiated.
Wavering on a fine line between plastic soul and cocaine-hollowed alien, 1976’s Station to Station is an interesting choice in the “happy life” criteria, but an astonishing achievement considering it’s a record Bowie barely remembers producing. Presenting to the world his icy Thin White Duke aristocrat, the six-track LP incongruously fuses Young Americans‘ funk and R&B with the chilly bite of his growing immersion in German electronic music and krautrock, and closes with the greatest cover he ever cut, his take on Nina Simone’s rendition of ‘Wild is the Wind.’
With no time for his blonde-dyed MTV reinvention or slew of 1990s industrial dallying, Costello stays put in the synth-soaked introspection and rounds off his Bowie essentials with 1977’s Low and “Heroes”. The first two entries in the dubbed ‘Berlin trilogy’, Bowie’s electronically coated rehab albums with Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and longtime producer Tony Visconti triggered the following 15 years of post-punk pilgrimage to the city’s tense, Cold War divided energy and founding an enduring chapter of their collective mythos.
Amid the frozen ambience and instrumental fog that the two records are celebrated for, there are pop gems to be enjoyed. Aside from “Heroes”‘s monster title track, there’s the giddy piano stomp of ‘Joe the Lion’ and the deliciously exotic ‘The Secret Life of Arabia’, and Low is possessed with some spectacularly disjointed funk courtesy of Carlos Alamor on ‘Breaking Glass’ and ‘Sound and Vision. Costello’s picks highlight the buried treasures that reward the intrepid listener over the immediate impact of his classic, glam incarnation.
