‘Let’s Dance’: Mick Jagger’s favourite David Bowie song
While David Bowie wasn’t necessarily the biggest fan of his own output in the 1980s, he still managed to maintain a reasonably healthy level of fame and notoriety during the decade. With four songs that reached the top of the UK charts during this supposedly dismal period, he clearly shouldn’t have much to complain about, but with Bowie having been more bothered by keeping his artistic integrity intact, it’s likely that the polished pop style he adopted during that time was more what he was concerned about.
You only have to look at the horrendous cover of ‘Dancing in the Street’ that Bowie performed alongside Mick Jagger as an example of a hugely successful song from this period that somehow managed to perform way beyond what it deserved to as an example of how many people were willing to turn a blind eye to the commercialisation of Bowie’s sound. Many people these days consider it to be one of the lowlights of Bowie and Jagger’s respective careers, but clearly enough people were willing to fawn over it at the time of its release so the duo could retain their respective positions in the limelight.
Bowie might have expressed a distaste for his own ‘80s pop digressions, but Jagger certainly didn’t think ill of his work during this period. The duo were already friendly prior to recording the hit together in 1985, regularly hanging out in New York together during the period and frequenting the local bars, and Jagger has fond memories of the period they spent becoming buddies.
In a Rolling Stone interview following Bowie’s death in 2016, Jagger looked back upon this period and said that despite having lost contact with the singer in his later years, the ‘80s provided them with great shared moments. “We’d hang out a lot and go out to dance clubs,” he told the publication. “We were very influenced by the New York downtown scene back then.”
As a result, Jagger went on to reveal that his favourite Bowie song of all time is another hit that came from this same period. “‘Let’s Dance’ is my favourite song of his,” The Rolling Stones frontman shared. “It reminds me of those times, and it has such a great groove. He had a chameleon-like ability to take on any genre, always with a unique take, musically and lyrically.”
While ‘Let’s Dance’ was a major hit on both sides of the Atlantic when it was released in 1983, it was this song in particular that irked Bowie the most about his transition to becoming a bona fide pop star. In a conversation with Interview Magazine, he revealed that the success of the hit transformed him from being an underground act to becoming mainstream – something that he struggled with the pressure of immensely.
“I pandered to that in my next few albums,” Bowie commented. “What I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did ‘Let’s Dance,’ and it was driving me mad because it took all my passion for experimenting away.”
It might be a far cry from anything that had made Bowie into a star on his glam records in the early ‘70s, or indeed from the revolutionary artistic shift he went through later on in the decade during his ‘Berlin period’, but there’s still plenty of merits to ‘Let’s Dance’. It’s a song that truly showcases Bowie’s versatility as a songwriter and the fact that he could so effortlessly succeed in the cutthroat pop sphere of the ‘80s, having moved from a very different artistic background, shows just how much of a talent he was.
