How ‘Hunky Dory’ saved David Bowie’s career: “A fabulous groundswell”
If you had asked anyone who had heard David Bowie‘s self-titled 1967 debut album at the time of its release whether they thought this man would be capable of producing a masterpiece in less than five years’ time, they’d have scoffed at the idea.
Even as someone who will defend the whimsy and music-hall references of this rookie release to a degree, there are plenty of faults in the album that feel like they’ll require a lot of ironing out. Lyrics about peculiar uncles and garden gnomes with distinctively shrill chuckles were seen as tawdry guff by the general public, and to even so much as suggest that Bowie had a career ahead of him off the back of these curiosities would have been instantly dismissed.
Even on subsequent albums such as Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold The World, which showed signs of gradual improvement from the last, it was still difficult to identify Bowie as someone who would set the world alight with his music as early as 1971.
Of course, we all know him now as this alien shapeshifter of an artist who was capable of churning out project after project while taking a completely novel approach on every occasion, and so with retrospect, it’s no surprise that this is the case.
Yet it was a surprise, and even though the title tracks from the two albums that saw out the 1960s and ushered in the ‘70s respectively, were promising on their own, his next move into fully-formed glam rock masterpieces would be frankly game-changing, not just for Bowie himself, but for the entire musical landscape at the time.
Nobody could have foreseen that an album as polished and faultless as Hunky Dory would have been next, let alone to have strength in numbers in terms of its singles. Bowie’s fourth album possesses tracks like ‘Changes’, ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Kooks’ for a start, and even without some of the stunning album tracks, having those four on there is the sign of a dramatic improvement already.
However, nobody was more surprised than Bowie himself, it would seem, and in a 1999 interview with Uncut, he reflected on the seismic shift that his career experienced overnight with the release of Hunky Dory.
“Hunky Dory gave me a fabulous groundswell,” he recalled of its immediate impact. “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. I’m starting to communicate what I want to do. Now: what is it I want to do?’ There was always a double whammy there.”
To this day, the album remains a true masterpiece, and the record that changed everything for Bowie, and while his majestic contributions to the world of music afterwards were numerous, it’s perhaps the one record he would never quite match the quality of.
