The Man Who Sold the World (Enhanced, Original Recording Reissued)

by

David Bowie

Edit

From the cover, which shows a longhaired Bowie in a full-length dress, reclining on a chaise longue, it is clear that this is no ordinary record. "The Man Who Sold The World" is often cited as being Bowie's "heavy metal" album. It definitely marks a significant departure from the folk influenced sound of his previous album, and without question stands as his first great piece of work. Overall the sound is raw and rather under-produced. Mick Ronson's dazzling guitar work, combined with the eerie sound of a moog synthesiser, and Bowie's pronounced Cockney accent creates an atmosphere that is distinctly, and suitably macabre.

The album begins with "Width Of A Circle", a grotesque and disturbing psycho-neurotic fantasy. This eight-minute opener, with its religious and sexual imagery is as phantasmagoric as the works of Hieronymus Bosch or William Blake. Bowie's half brother Terry suffered mental illness and spent most of his life in psychiatric institutions. In "All The Madmen" Bowie provides a rather wry and sinister commentary on mental illness, a theme he would often return to in his career. "After All" with its quasi-music hall "Oh by jingo" refrain was intended to address a generation jaded hippies. 'I've borrowed your time and I'm sorry I called' sings Bowie. "Saviour Machine", a dark, prophetic tale of society's over-dependence on technology, tells of a machine that is bored with the utopia it has helped to create. In a Dostoyevskian act of disassociation, the narrator of "The Man Who Sold The World" meets his doppelganger on the stairs, where he announces "Oh no, not me/I never lost control". "The Supermen" with its overt reference to Neitzsche is almost Wagnerian in feel. On this track Bowie's strained vocals erupt over the ominous beating of drums and monastic chants to chilling effect.

With its surreal, stream of consciousness lyrics and wailing guitars, "The Man Who Sold The World" is an unnerving album that flows in places like a grotesque, existential nightmare. But in the end its pain and anguish is only human, all too human.

When this album was initially released at the start of the seventies, it was difficult to say if David Bowie was a chameleon or a lost soul. There was virtually no continuity from project to project, making it impossible for fans to get a hold on him. For this reason, The Man Who Sold the World disappeared from record store shelves rather quickly, sending it to cutout bins, at least until his Ziggy Stardust persona renewed interest in his previous careers and forced the reissue of this album. From a contemporary perspective, it's not at all hard to hear the `classic' elements of Bowie's style emerge in various places on this album, but at the time, it must have been a bit of a hoot.

Can you imagine a Bowie album that, stylistically speaking, would attempt to compete with Black Sabbath? Well, that pretty much explains the musical thrust of The Man Who Sold the World. With songs like "Running Gun Blues" ("I'll slash them cold, I'll kill them dead, I broke the gooks I cracked their heads, I'll slice them till they're running red...") and "She Shook Me Cold" ("I had no time to spare. I grabbed her golden hair and threw her to the ground. Father, she caved. Oh Lord, the things she said..."), Bowie manages to cover every early seventies heavy metal cliché without ever sounding quite so ordinary. "All the Madmen" enriches the stereotypical mix, by celebrating insanity as a means of uniqueness, something that Ozzy could have written a book about (OK, maybe somebody could have ghost-written it for him).

Still in all, The Man Who Sold the World rises above its most pedestrian pursuits with some songs that are not only artistically credible, but have since proven to have shelf-lives well beyond even their creator's expectations. Nirvana's cover of the title song is fine, but not any better than Bowie's original, and Width of a Circle is an eight minute travelogue of heavy rock weirdness, aided and abetted by the intense guitar and rhythm work of Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and Tony Visconti (the producer took the role of bass player for this record). For the most part, it's a solid four-piece unit that portrays these songs, and it is one of Bowie's most direct musical presentations ever. In coming years, Bowie would revisit this side of his creativity, albeit in a different manner, with his band Tin Machine. Much earlier, though, it is The Man Who Sold the World which captures Bowie and his bandmates helping to invent `hard' rock. B+ Tom Ryan