The first album that gace David Bowie an audience: “I’m finding my feet”
David Bowie was never going to apologise to follow his muse whenever he made a record.
He never made music with the charts in mind, and even if his songs were a little bit odd for the time, there was always that piece of magic that kept people coming back for more whenever he came out with a new record. Even though the mainstream came to him every time he made a record, it was going to take a little bit more than a few good songs to get everyone to pay attention when he was starting out.
Because, despite Bowie’s very first record being a good album, it’s not exactly a good BOWIE album. It would have been a perfectly acceptable piece of baroque pop by some no-name psychedelic outfit from around the time, but after Bowie completely disowned it, the release of ‘Space Oddity’ was a much better introduction to the man who would one day change the entire world of rock and roll.
Even by Bowie’s ever-evolving standards, ‘Space Oddity’ has everything that his fans would have wanted years before he became ‘Ziggy Stardust’. There’s already the folksy slant indebted to people like Bob Dylan, but once Bowie starts singing about voyaging off to new lands as Major Tom, he never bothered coming back down to Earth for the rest of his career. It was a perfect tune; it’s just a shame that no one actually bothered to listen to anything else beyond that.
While all the pieces were there, it wasn’t clear whether ‘Space Oddity’ was a novelty record or a new emerging talent when it was released. For all the public knew, Bowie was a kid who found a good way to cash in on the 1969 moon landing, and since his next record flirted with hard rock and heavy metal, the general public wasn’t exactly in love with the twists and turns he started making.
But after visiting America, Bowie seemed like a completely different person when he released Hunky Dory. From front to back, there is not one song out of place, and even if not all of them are the most commercially-friendly songs in the world, it’s hard to resist everything from ‘Changes’ to ‘Life on Mars?’ to ‘Queen Bitch’, if only for how strange they were compared to the bigger names in rock and roll.
Glitter rock had only been around for a little while, but Bowie credited Hunky Dory for being the reason why his career took off, saying, “Hunky Dory gave me a fabulous groundswell. I guess it provided me, for the first time in my life, with an actual audience – I mean, people actually coming up to me and saying, ‘Good album, good songs.’ That hadn’t happened to me before. It was like, ‘Ah, I’m getting it, I’m finding my feet.’”
Even though the world was wide open for Bowie to become a star, seeing him spend the rest of his career draped in characters was the perfect answer to Hunky Dory. Everything that he did had a certain element of pageantry to it, and when Ziggy Stardust first crashlanded on Earth one album later, it seemed like all of his earlier material got a kick in the ass when he played them live as well, even managing to give ‘The Width of A Circle’ the swagger that it needed live.
Hunky Dory may have given Bowie firm ground to stand on at the start of his career, but looking back at what he would do after, it was practically a warning to the rest of the world. Anyone else would have been happy to call this album their masterpiece, but it was only a quick teaser of what Bowie had planned for the 1970s and beyond.
