‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’: the song that ruined David Bowie’s perfect album
While David Bowie knew he had captured something special as he soaked up the glitter in the air during the tail end of 1971, his enduring glam Martian icon had yet to realise its flamboyant and alien splendour even as his breakthrough album was dropped the following year.
Snapped outside Ward’s Heddon Street studio just off London’s Regent Street, a remote, jumpsuited Bowie stands with a Droog-like boot atop a step with a Gibson Les Paul guitar strapped over his shoulder, dwarfed by the urban backdrop on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars‘ distinctive cover.
While engrossing in its own right, the concept of Ziggy Stardust swiftly ran apace beyond the extraterrestrial messiah’s pop debut packaging. ‘Starman’ would stand as his biggest hit since 1969’s ‘Space Oddity’. Then, a limp wrist suggestively slung over guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulder would set Top of the Pops alight, and after years of dabbling in everything from psych-folk to proto-heavy metal, Bowie swiftly defined the UK glam movement and found the fame he’d sorely been chasing. Now playing shows in America, he sought to score his ‘a lad insane’ with the USA’s terrible and intoxicating allure.
Released in April 1973, Aladdin Sane pursued a tougher strut of hard rock with the trusty Spiders From Mars backing band playing to Bowie’s rapid-fire songwriting while on the road, and also strove into further exotic terrain with the assistance of Mike Garson’s effortlessly majestic jazz piano.
It was a bolder and more audacious record, packaged with an arresting cover that had now caught up with the Ziggy look: Bowie’s meditative lightning-bolt portrait fronting a glowing white ether burned into the popular consciousness as his defining look of the glam era.
It’s a stunning album, equal to its predecessor but swapping anthemic licks with raunchier grooves and avant-garde curio and bristling with the energy of a musical auteur brimming with confidence. Yet, its perfection is held back by the stodgy and unremarkable take on The Rolling Stones‘ ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, a cut that feels destined for his Pin Ups covers album or a notable, at best, B-side.
Bowie’s raison d’être was to reach into music and art’s vault of pioneers and mavericks and artfully composite new song ideas or characters. Ziggy himself was a little of Vince Taylor, Iggy Pop, and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy—but his straight-up renditions are often never that interesting, a major exception was his stunning ‘Wild Is the Wind’ that closes 1976’s Station to Station.
While Aladdin Sane shimmers in evocative and alluring sonic character, Bowie’s stab on the ARP 2600 synthesizer for ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ lends a flavour foreign to the LP’s mood, a tacky galumph on an otherwise sophisticated rock record.
The original’s fantastic. Dropped in early 1967, The Rolling Stones’ suggestive track bottles the sexual revolution and hedonistic youth culture with electric urgency, a thrilling piano stomper oozing cool abandon and seductive swagger, strangely absent on Bowie’s novelty version. Remarkably, his take on the Stones would be released as Aladdin Sane‘s fourth and final single, issued with the dazzling ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ that closes the album as its mere B-side.
