David Bowie :: Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) CD Album

DAVID BOWIE
Scary Monsters
(And Super Creeps) (1980)

CD
1 9 8 0

All images © RCA.

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David Bowie ~ Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) CD Album

Type: Audio CD (20 Sept. 1999)
Number of Discs: 1
Format: Enhanced, Original recording reissued
Label: EMI

Item Details

This is the album where I really started getting into David Bowie. As a kid in the late 1970s in the UK there was the emergence of some extraordinary music. Punk had been and gone and from its ashes had come some kind of 'otherness'. That 'other' was no more striking than seeing Gary Numan (aka Tubeway Army) for the first time on Top of the Pops singing Are Friends Electric? What a performance. Garbed in black, heavy white make up, Numan did a kind of moody intensity not seen since Marlon Brando was young. And then there was that song. Stunningly catchy, hooking you in with its electronic might, it remains undated to this day - just one of those great songs you find, occasionally, and file in the soundtrack of your lives.

Once you saw Numan you couldn't forget him. You wanted to find out more about this stranger, this alien, and in his interviews he mentioned Bowie as a major influence.

Then Scary Monsters came along and you were hooked. The artwork, the typography, and that video, Ashes To Ashes. Isn't that Steve Strange? He's in Visage, doncha know. Wow, he's going to be massive. Bigger than Bowie'. How little we knew.

Funny to read that back, but there was a time in the UK when you thought that the New Romantics would conquer all that had gone before them, and that included Bowie as well as the Beatles and the Stones who, to us, were just not revelant to 1980. And, to be fair, for a time bands such as Duran Duran, Spandau, Japan and Tears For Fears were huge not fogetting the aforementioned Mr. Gary Webb. But it was only for a time, a brief time, when their fame could be mentioned in the same breath as Bowie's. They soon faded into the comforting nostalgic backwaters of our pasts whereas Bowie constantly remained famous, 'there' and revelant, or tried to be revelant. Scary Monsters is still cool art and Bowie has made a career out of making cool art better than anyone.

But I digress: it's the music, stupid. Ashes To Ashes, Fashion etc. etc.. Hearing Robert Fripp's discord for the first, the abrasive discord, and Bowie cockneying it on the title track, as memorable as Michael Caine's 'You're only suppose to blow the bloody doors off' in The Italian Job. These are the memories. Visconti still there. Carlos Alomar but no Eno. An axtraordinary piece of work but like all great albums a piece you had to listen to many times to truly value its worth.

With the Berlin trilogy it remains one of his most influential albums. From the New Romantics who, at the time, took pieces of Bowie and copied it almost to the point of flogging their Muse to death, to anything of interest that came from the British music scene right up to the end of the 1980s...

For many Bowie fans who got into him at the time it was kind of a 'Hello, Goodbye', for he went down the route of stadium rock and the masses with Let's Dance (his next album) and didn't really hit form (cult artistic form, I mean) until Outside some 15 years or so later.

Still, it's an album worth revisiting just to make you realise just how influentital Bowie was to the generation that came after him.

More importantly, it's just an great, innovative album.

It was huge in the UK at the time it was released with both the album and single going to the top of the charts.

This 1999 UK 10-track 24-bit digitally remastered CD album comes with a picture sleeve booklet including lyrics.

Track Listing:

1. It's No Game [Part 1]
2. Up The Hill Backwards
3. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)
4. Ashes To Ashes
5. Fashion
6. Teenage Wildlife
7. Scream Like A Baby
8. Kingdom Come
9. Because You're Young
10. It's No Game [Part 2]