Let's dance, to the song they're playin' on the radio...
David Bowie's astonishingly successful world-wide #1 album, Let's Dance, was released through EMI on Friday April 14 1983, twenty five years ago today, which was almost ten years to the day since the release of 1973's Aladdin Sane. (04.13.2008 NEWS: ALADDIN SANE IS THIRTY FIVE TODAY)
Let's Dance was almost as shocking in it's departure from what had gone before as any of the previous Bowie albums, except this time the whole planet wanted a piece of the action.
While this release divided fans that had been with Bowie for more than ten years already, it attracted a far larger audience than that which had enjoyed his music in the preceding years.
Let's Dance also spawned three huge hit singles in Let's Dance (#1 on both sides of the Atlantic), China Girl and Modern Love. Without You was the fourth single in some territories, but it didn't enjoy the kind of sales of the previous three hits.
Such was the success of the album and attendant world tour, The Serious Moonlight Tour, that Bowie ended up as the cover feature for Time magazine in July 1983.
You can read the whole feature on the TIME website by clicking on the image above where you can also buy a print of the cover.
With the success of Let's Dance, David Bowie ultimately created a monster every bit as big as Ziggy Stardust and its chains were just as hard to throw off.
Here's David in an interview for GQ, in January 1997: "The three or four years that followed 'Let's Dance' were for me particularly tough about re-evaluating what I wanted. I thought, 'Who are these people? They kind of look like a Phil Collins audience.' Suddenly, I had all these people for whom the songs on the radio--'China Girl', 'Modern Love' and 'Let's Dance'--had become my oeuvre. That was all they knew of me, and it was MOR [middle of the road] enough that it encouraged this enormous audience. And I started thinking, What kind of music would they like? I was bastardising who and what I am and didn't know how to break out of it."
Well, break out of it he did, and the cavalry came in the shape of Tin Machine, but that's a whole other story.