| Let's Dance | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio album by David Bowie | ||||
| Released | 14 April 1983 | |||
| Recorded | Power Station, New York, December 1982[1] | |||
| Genre | Dance, rock | |||
| Length | 39:41 | |||
| Label | EMI America Records (1983) Virgin Records (1995) EMI (1999) |
|||
| Producer | David Bowie and Nile Rodgers | |||
| David Bowie chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | [2] |
| Blender | [3] |
| Robert Christgau | (B) [4] |
| l Rolling Stone | [5] |
Let's Dance is an album by David Bowie, released in 1983, with co-production by Chic's Nile Rodgers. The title track of the album became one of Bowie's biggest hit singles, reaching number 1 in the UK, the US and various other countries. Further singles included "Modern Love" and "China Girl", which both reached number 2 in the UK. "China Girl" was actually a new version of a song which Bowie had co-written with Iggy Pop for the latter's 1977 album The Idiot. The album also contains a rerecorded version of the song "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" which had been a minor hit for Bowie a year earlier. Let's Dance is also notable as a stepping stone for the career of the late Texas blues guitar virtuoso Stevie Ray Vaughan, who played on the album.[1] The album was also released as a limited edition picture disc in 1983.
Contents |
Bowie, having just signed with EMI records for a reported $17.5m (in 1983 currency), worked with Nile Rodgers to release a "commercially bouyant" new album that was described as "original party-funk cum big bass drum sound greater than the sum of its influences."[1] The album's influences were described as Louis Jordan, the Asbury Jukes horn section, Bill Doggett, Earl Bostic and James Brown.[1] Bowie spent a mere three days making demos for the album in New York before cutting the album, a rarity for Bowie who, for the previous few albums, usually showed up with little more than "a few ideas."[6] Despite this, the album "was recorded, start to finish, including mixing, in 17 days" according to Rodgers.[7]
Stevie Ray Vaughan, who met Bowie at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival, when discussing the album, said "to tell you the truth, I was not very familiar with David's music when he asked me to play on the sessions. ... David and I talked for hours and hours about our music, about funky Texas blues and its roots - I was amazed at how interested he was. At Montreux, he said something about being in touch and then tracked me down in California, months and months later."[1]
Unusually, Bowie played no instruments on the album. "I don't play a damned thing. This was a singer's album."[1]
A few years later, Bowie discussed his feelings on the track "Ricochet" (which Musician magazine called an "incendiary ballroom raveup")[1] from this album:
| “ | I thought it was a great song, and the beat wasn't quite right. It didn't roll the way it should have, the syncopation was wrong. It had an ungainly gait; it should have flowed. ... Nile [Rodgers] did his own thing to it, but it wasn't quite what I'd had in mind when I wrote the thing.[8] | ” |
|
—David Bowie, 1987 |
||
Long-time collaborator Carlos Alomar, who had worked with Bowie since the mid-70's and would continue to work with Bowie into the mid-'90's, was offered an "embarrassing" fee to play on the album, and refused to do so,[9] although a year later (when working on Bowie's follow-up album, Tonight), he claimed that he didn't play on the album because Bowie only gave him two weeks' notice, and he was already booked with other work.[6] Carlos did however play on the accompanying tour.
Bowie's studio follow-up to this album was 1984's Tonight.
The album was generally positively reviewed by critics,[2][3][4][5] and well received by fans, with at least one reviewer calling it "Bowie at his best."[6]
The success of the album surprised Bowie. In 1997, he said "at the time, Let's Dance was not mainstream. It was virtually a new kind of hybrid, using blues-rock guitar against a dance format. There wasn't anything else that really quite sounded like that at the time. So it only seems commercial in hindsight because it sold so many [copies]. It was great in its way, but it put me in a real corner in that it fucked with my integrity."[10]
In fact, Bowie would later state that the success of the album caused him to hit a creative low-point in his career which lasted the next few years.[10][11][12] "I remember looking out over these waves of people [who were coming to hear this record played live] and thinking, 'I wonder how many Velvet Underground albums these people have in their record collections?' I suddenly felt very apart from my audience. And it was depressing, because I didn't know what they wanted."[10]
All tracks written by David Bowie except as noted.
In 1995 Virgin Records re-released the album on CD with "Under Pressure" as a bonus track. EMI did the second re-release in 1999 (featuring 24-bit digitally remastered sound and no bonus tracks).
In 1998 there was a reissue in the UK which was similar to the 1995 re-release but did not include the bonus track.
The Canadian version of the 1999 EMI release includes a data track, so that when the CD is loaded on a Windows PC, the user is presented with a promotion of internet access services and other premium content from the davidbowie.com website. This marks one of the earliest attempts by a mainstream artist to combine internet and normal promotion and distribution methods.
There was a further reissue in 2003 when EMI released the album as a hybrid stereo SACD/PCM CD.
Album
| Year | Chart | Peak Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1983 | UK Albums Chart | 1 [14] |
| 1983 | US Billboard Top LPs & Tapes | 4 [15] |
| 1983 | Norway's album chart | 1 |
| 1983 | Australian Kent Music Report Albums Chart | 1 |
Single
| Year | Single | Chart | Peak Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)"[13] | UK Singles Chart | 26 [14] |
| 1983 | "Let's Dance" | UK Singles Chart | 1 [14] |
| 1983 | "China Girl" | UK Singles Chart | 2 [14] |
| 1983 | "Modern Love" | UK Singles Chart | 2 [14] |
| 1983 | "Let's Dance" | US Billboard Hot 100 | 1 |
| 1982 | "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" | Norway's single chart | 1 (8) |
| 1983 | "Let's Dance" | Norway's single chart | 1 (5) |
| 1983 | "China Girl" | Norway's single chart | 7 |
| Preceded by Faster Than the Speed of Night by Bonnie Tyler |
UK Albums Chart number one album 23 April 1983 – 13 May 1983 |
Succeeded by True by Spandau Ballet |
| Preceded by Go for It by Various artists |
Australian Kent Music Report number-one album 25 April 1983 – 1 May 1983 |
Succeeded by Cargo by Men at Work |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||