TODAY’S TOP TEN ALBUMS OF THE ’80s (by Joe Fernando) 1. Scary Monsters And Super Creeps - David Bowie 2. The Black Album - The Damned 3. Human League - Dare 4. Kings Of The Wild Frontier - Adam And The Ants 5. Tattoo You - Rolling Stones 6. Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables - Dead Kennedys 7. Sound Affects - The Jam 8. Sandinista - The Clash 9. English Settlement - XTC 10. Back In Black - AC/DC ‘I chose Scary Monsters because for me it was Bowies last great album, not close to being matched until 2013s The Next Day,’ says Joe Fernando from Walthamstow. ‘It featured some wonderful musicians such as Pete Townshend, Robert Fripp, Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar to name a few. Its been credited with starting the whole new romantic era, although Im not sure about that. Perhaps having Steve Strange in the Ashes To Ashes video is to blame. ‘The album also, in my opinion, set the tone for Bowies 90s work, especially Its No Game (part 1) with its desperate guitars and even more desperate vocal. Then, to round off, It’s No Game (part 2) a much calmer reprise but just as enjoyable. The lyrics of Teenage Wildlife seem to be telling his imitators to stop looking to him for inspiration. Something most of them listened to.’ Joe nominates Kevin Flight, Dave Winter and Damien McGowan to do their Top Tens. Done your chart yet? Message, don’t post, your selection and if you could mention why you chose your No. 1 that would be great. If you want to promote anything – record, book, film, gig etc. – send the details at the same time. We guarantee to post every one we receive. Also, if you’d like to nominate anyone to do the Top Ten challenge, please be our guests. The aim is to produce the Ultimate Flexipop! Top 40 Albums Of The 80s Chart so please put your choices in order. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) was Bowie’s fourteenth studio released in September 1980. It made the Top Ten in nine countries and topped the charts in Australia, France, NZ, and UK.. In the US peaked at No. 12. The album was released with the promo line Often Copied, Never Equalled, seen as a direct reference to the New Wave acts Bowie had inspired over the years. Four tracks became singles - Ashes To Ashes, Fashion, the title track and Up The Hill Backwards, According to co-producer Tony Visconti, David Bowies method on Scary Monsters was somewhat less experimental and more concerned with achieving a commercially viable sound than had been the case with his recent releases. Bowie continued to develop songs using non-traditional methods: for Its No Game (No. 1), he challenged guitarist Fripp to imagine he was playing a guitar duel with B.B. King where he had to out-B.B. B.B., but do it in his own way. In 2000 Q magazine ranked Scary Monsters at No. 30 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. On Christmas Day 1980, Rolling Stone said, ‘In Nicholas Roegs movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, theres a scene in which David Bowie, playing a vulnerable extra-terrestrial visitor, intently watches the ritualized, larger-than-life violence of a Kabuki performance. That scene — the way Bowie is at first transfixed and then darts abruptly away, as if repulsed, satiated and sufficiently instructed — keeps coming to mind while listening to Scary Monsters. Like the character in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie has been continually fascinated by the use of stylized postures (i.e., tropisms ballooned to human scale) as a means of objectifying horror. On Scary Monsters, he deals with the greater horror of letting such postures pass for people. ‘On his early albums, Bowie changed ironic manifestations like a man running a magnifying glass through his own body — liver, genitals, spleen — in order to mimic the excesses of the body politic… Scary Monsters clarifies the David Bowie/Brian Eno Low-Heroes-Lodger experiments. They were re-educational projects: deliberate, short-term consolidations of the singers skills and audience. While the Devos of this world forged his dramas into dogma, lampooning and literalizing his heritage, Bowie toiled in the training camp of the musical avant-garde, acquiring yet another synthetic vocabulary and releasing miniaturistic exercises that, stripped of their pretensions, turned out to be some of his finest work. ‘On Scary Monsters, he comes out fighting. Fusing the sheet-metal textures of the Eno trilogy into something darker and more dense, Bowie focuses his attention on a world he helped create… Scary Monsters presents David Bowie riveted to lifes passing parade: streamlined moderns, trendies and sycophants in 360 degrees of stark, scarifying Panavision. With its nervous voyeurism, Scary Monsters is more like Aladdin Sane (probably Bowies best record) than anything else. ‘Throughout the album, the beat is so jackbooted, the pressure so intense, you find yourself casting about for relief. Yet each hint of help (the ice-crystal spacewalk of Ashes to Ashes, the crooners catch to Bowies vocal in Because Youre Young, his failed leaps at a romantic falsetto in Teenage Wildlife) pulls you back into the same grey night-mare.. ‘David Bowie has always utilized distance for self-preservation, but now hes shuddering at the results — at what happens when estrangement becomes not only an illustrative concept but a code to live by. The wraiths who inhabit Scary Monsters are all either running scared with their eyes closed or too wasted to notice whats in front of them. Theyre anti-romantic, half-dead, disposable. ‘Terse, rocky and often didactic, David Bowies compositions cut away all illusions of dignity in isolation, of comfort in crowds. No one breaks through on Scary Monsters. No one is saved. Major Tom is left unrescued. ‘Where do you go when hope is gone? Bowies enervated, meditative, half-speed reprise of Its No Game leaves the question — and the record — hanging. The artists next album may see him questing, but on Scary Monsters, hes settling old scores. Slowly, brutally and with a savage, satisfying crunch, David Bowie eats his young.’ Track List: Side One 1. Its No Game (Part 1) 2. Up The Hill Backwards 3. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) 4. Ashes To Ashes 5. Fashion Side Two 6. Teenage Wildlife 7. Scream Like A Baby 8. Kingdom Come 9. Because Youre Young 10.Its No Game (Part 2) Ashes To Ashes was released a month before Scary Monsters. The songs original title was People Are Turning To Gold. It hit the Top Ten in seven countries but only reached No. 1 in the UK. Amazingly, in the US it peaked at No. 101. The video was, at the time, the most expensive music ever made at £250,000. Here’s a nice HD version. ‘I’m happy, hope you’re happy too…’
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 15:52:21 +0000