100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Changes

02 Oh! You Pretty Things

03 Eight Line Poem

04 Life on Mars?

05 Kooks

06 Quicksand

07 Fill Your Heart

08 Andy Warhol

09 Song for Bob Dylan

10 Queen Bitch

11 The Bewlay Brothers

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars made David Bowie a superstar but, before that, Hunky Dory had made him an artist.

‘Hunky Dory gave me a fabulous groundswell,’ said Bowie. ‘First, with the sense of “Wow, you can do anything!” You can borrow the luggage of the past, you can amalgamate it with things that you’ve conceived could be in the future and you can set it in the now. Then, the record 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.’

David Bowie, then 24, had already tried on a number of guises – a mod, a folk singer, a jazz buff. He’d made three albums and had one hit, ‘Space Oddity’. He had just lost his father, his brother was in an asylum and he was about to become a father himself. Talk about changes. The song ‘Changes’ opens Hunky Dory with a manifesto that Bowie has carried ever since.

As the ’60s closed, music was undergoing tectonic shifts and Bowie, as the song said, ‘turned to face the strange’. ‘I found that I couldn’t easily adopt brand loyalty, or genre loyalty,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t an R&B artist, I wasn’t a folk artist, and I didn’t see the point in trying to be that purist about it. What my true style was is that I loved the idea of putting Little Richard with Jacques Brel and the Velvet Underground backing them. What would that sound like? Nobody was doing that.’

Side one of Hunky Dory sees Bowie flexing his muscles as a songwriter. ‘Life on Mars?’ recalls the theme of Bowie’s signature tune ‘Space Oddity’, but here it tells the story of a girl in suburbia hoping that there is life elsewhere because it sure isn’t here. In between her musings Bowie describes the decadence of the West: ‘It’s on Amerika’s tortured brow/That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow/Now the workers have struck for fame/’Cause Lennon’s on sale again’.

‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ was a nod to the British ’60s beat group and was originally given to Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits. Here Bowie reclaims it. ‘Kooks’ was a letter welcoming the arrival of his newborn son and Bowie’s attempt to explain to the boy about his kooky parents. It’s probably the happiest Bowie has ever been on record.

The second half of the album has the hero songs: ‘Andy Warhol’ (‘He hated it,’ said Bowie. ‘Loathed it.’), ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ and ‘Queen Bitch’ (which were unabashed fan letters, the latter to Lou Reed), and ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ (written about his relationship with his first idol – his bipolar brother Terry).

Bowie turned to Ken Scott to co-produce, whose pedigree was having engineered much of the later Beatles work. The album was recorded in two weeks at Trident Studios in London, working from lunchtime to midnight. The backing was provided by the band – guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey – who would soon become the Spiders from Mars. Session pianist Rick Wakeman was told to play ‘as much as possible’ on the piano that produced ‘Hey Jude’.

His previous album cover had been banned in the US and for Hunky Dory he struck a pose based on a photo of Marlene Dietrich, which was no less challenging and a good deal more subversive. ‘I was looking to create a profligate world that could have been inhabited by characters from Kurt Weill or John Rechy – that sort of atmosphere,’ Bowie wrote. ‘A bridge between Enid Blyton’s Beckenham and the Velvet Underground’s New York. Without Noddy, though.’