“He opened strange doors that we'd never close again...”
Today is the 45th anniversary of the UK release of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) album.
Keep reading after this brief interruption for ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ at 45: A Track-by-Track Guide to David Bowie’s Uncompromising Art-Rock Masterpiece by Jason Draper.
SCARY MONSTERS FACT FILE:
Producers: David Bowie, Tony Visconti
Illustration/Artwork: Edward Bell
Photography: Brian Duffy
Released in the UK as RCA BOWLP 2 (PL 13647) on 12th September, 1980.
Peak UK chart position: #1
Peak US chart position: #12
SIDE 1
1. IT’S NO GAME (PART 1)
2. UP THE HILL BACKWARDS
3. SCARY MONSTERS (AND SUPER CREEPS)
4. ASHES TO ASHES
5. FASHION
SIDE 2
1. TEENAGE WILDLIFE
2. SCREAM LIKE A BABY
3. KINGDOM COME
4. BECAUSE YOU’RE YOUNG
5. IT’S NO GAME (PART 2)
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‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ at 45: A Track-by-Track Guide to David Bowie’s Uncompromising Art-Rock Masterpiece
An art-rock manifesto for a new era, ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ was the benchmark album against which all future David Bowie records would be compared.
By Jason Draper
After spending the latter half of the 1970s traversing Europe, recording the ‘Low’, ‘“Heroes”’ and ‘Lodger’ albums in France, Germany and Switzerland, respectively, Bowie settled into New York City’s Power Station studio to lay down his first long-player of the 1980s. Angsty and hard-edged, ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ was, he said, “some kind of purge. It was me eradicating the feelings within myself that I was uncomfortable with.”
Bookended by two different versions of what Bowie described as a “protesty song, that showed that feelings of anxiousness about society are expressed on different levels and with different intensities”, the album unspooled across a tightly packed 45 minutes in which Bowie and his charges set the pace for the decade to come. Released on 12 September 1980, it also took Bowie back to the top of the UK album charts, asserting his place in the rock pantheon and rewarding a renewed outlook on life.
“I felt very positive about the future,” he said of the sessions that produced the record, “and I think I just got down to writing a really comprehensive and well-crafted album.”
‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’: A Track-by-Track Guide to Every Song
‘It’s No Game (No.1)’
A tape is wound into place, a Play button is pressed, and ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ opens with a churning art-rock groove and the dramatic intonations of Michi Hirota, reading a Japanese translation of the lyrics Bowie will soon start singing. As a creative bit of wrong-footing, it’s up there with the three minutes of controlled tension that open ‘Station to Station’, setting the scene for Bowie to enter with a deceptively ragged vocal. Almost screaming his words, the 1970s’ greatest trend-setter looks ahead to a new decade and, perhaps, wonders where he’ll fit (“I am barred from the event/I really don’t understand the situation”). Ten years earlier, he’d hit upon the melodic hook for ‘It’s No Game (No.1)’, in an acoustic demo titled ‘Tired of My Life’, and here he recycles a standout verse from that earlier song, delivering the lines “Put a bullet in my brain/And I’ll make all the papers” as a spiky riposte to tabloid sensationalism, rather than the weary summation of a quick route to fame that the younger songwriter presented them as. As ‘It’s No Game (No.1)’ devolves into atonal guitar and Bowie’s yells for the player – Robert Fripp, reprising his role from the ‘“Heroes”’ sessions – to “Shut up!”, the album has set out its stall: Bowie isn’t playing around.
‘Up the Hill Backwards’
Bowie proved he could put the Bo Diddley beat to new use on ‘Aladdin Sane’’s ‘Panic in Detroit’, and on ‘Up the Hill Backwards’ he has drummer Dennis Davis toy with the classic rock’n’roll-era rhythm before the song opens up into its spacious verses, complete with group vocals, in which Bowie seems to meditate on the creative act (“The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom/And the possibilities it seems to offer”), affirm the artist’s right to privacy (“It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it”) and nod to the fate that awaits us all (“Earth keeps on rolling, witnesses falling”). And yet, he seems to conclude, our worldly travails can be surmounted (“Yeah, yeah, yeah/Up the hill backwards/It’ll be alright”). Fripp is again on hand to rough up the outro, while producer Tony Visconti adds a ‘Low’-like reverb to Davis’s drums as the short but effective track wanders towards its fade out.
‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’
No such space to roam here: ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ speeds into view on screaming guitar, a barking-like keyboard sound effect and one of the finest exaggerated mockney vocals Bowie ever committed to tape. Urban paranoia collides with psychological uncertainty in a song that takes no prisoners, Bowie’s protagonist offering “a dangerous mind” in the place of love, and seemingly kicking his partner out of her own home before “running scared” himself from the monstrosities – real or imagined – that plague him. A closing chant gives ‘Scary Monsters’ a curiously upbeat ending, as if all this chaos is to be revelled in – and why not? Bowie, Visconti and his rhythm section of Carlos Alomar (guitar), George Murray (bass) and Dennis Davis consolidate everything they learned from the “Berlin trilogy” into five minutes of organised anarchy that grabs listeners by the throat and refuses to let go.
‘Ashes to Ashes’
Murray’s popped bass sits at the centre of this slice of zero-gravity space-funk, as Bowie fires the starting gun on the 1980s, earning himself his second UK No.1 single and handing the fledgling New Romantics a roadmap for their own art-pop aspirations. In a masterfully meta move, he opens the song by referencing his breakthrough hit and belated first UK chart-topper, ‘Space Oddity’, re-introducing to the world protagonist Major Tom, the one-time heroic “Action Man” of the late-1960s’ space race. Last seen “floating in my tin can”, Tom is now “a junkie/Strung out in heaven’s high/Hitting an all-time low”. A cautionary tale, a cry for help and a crash course in avant-pop perfection, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ would have remained a masterpiece on its own terms, however Bowie chose to present it. That he gave it a cutting-edge promo video that singlehandedly ushered in the MTV era was just a bonus. Shot on Pett Level Beach, on the Sussex coast, and featuring appearances from London’s Blitz Club scenesters Steve Strange, Darla-Jane Gilroy, Judi Frankland and Elise Brazier, the clip’s jump cuts, post-production effects and oblique narrative enhanced Bowie’s world-building lyrics, proving that Bowie had mastered the art of the pop promo before anyone really knew what a pop promo was.
‘Fashion’
If ‘Ashes to Ashes’ revealed what had become of Bowie’s once hopeful alter ego, ‘Fashion’ sneered at all those who would look to the former Starman for inspiration, copying his mannerisms and adopting his stances as if it were so much mindless gameplay. Early lyrics such as “Hell up ahead, burn a flag/Shake a fist, start a fight” have fed into theories that fascism was also squarely in Bowie’s sights, with the “goon squad” of the song’s chorus simply following orders to “Turn to the left/Turn to the right” as commanded over a squelchy beat. Bowie’s stated intention, however, was to “suggest more of a gritted teeth determination and an unsureness” about society’s slavish chasing of trends. Again, a promo clip rounded things out: where the Blitz Kids added to the otherworldly nature of the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video – not least Steve Strange, whose portentous one-armed bow became a notable feature, repurposed by Bowie in the ‘Fashion’ promo – Manhattan’s self-conscious club-goers are sent up for ridicule here, as even the most absurd gestures are taken up by a horde of hopeless fashionistas who line the street for food handouts as desperately as they fill the New York City clubs, looking for a cultural sustenance they seem unable to find on their own.
‘Teenage Wildlife’
Robert Fripp’s soaring guitar might recall his work on ‘“Heroes”’, but the slow-burning ‘Teenage Wildlife’ is an altogether more caustic creation, Bowie dismissing his imitators (“Same old thing in brand-new drag”) and slipping loose from their demands of him (“You’ll take me aside and say/‘Well, David, what shall I do? They wait for me in the hallway’/I’ll say, ‘Don’t ask me, I don’t know any hallways’”). And yet there is more to the song than a simple extension of ‘Fashion’’s battle lines. Telling ‘NME’ that the “midwives to history” who “put on their bloody robes” were symbolic entities, Bowie allowed, “We all have them… They’re the ones who would not have you be fulfilled,” indicating that ‘Teenage Wildlife’ goes beyond mere generational finger pointing and into a more private realm in which trials are overcome, but not without struggle.
‘Scream Like a Baby’
A reworking of ‘I Am a Laser’, a brittle funk number that Bowie first recorded in the mid-1970s for his short-lived side project The Astronettes, ‘Scream Like a Baby’ is a brooding return to the dystopian cityscapes of ‘Diamond Dogs’, as filtered through the synth-pop of the early 1980s. With as clear a lyrical narrative as the ‘Scary Monsters’ album offers, the song bears witness to the persecution of a protagonist who “mixed with other colours”, describing the militant beatings meted out to “faggots” who are “thrown into the wagon/Blindfolded, chains and… stomped on” before being stripped of their clothing and “pumped… full of strange drugs”. Bowie’s incomplete stuttering on the line “Now I’m learning to be a part of societ – societ – s – ” and his varispeed vocals at the point of desperate escape (“He jumped into the furnace/Singing old songs we loved”) place these characters in the lineage of cracked personalities that litter his 1970s work and who are pushed to breaking point by authoritarian regimes.
‘Kingdom Come’
A cover of a song by Television co-founder Tom Verlaine, ‘Kingdom Come’ sits comfortably among the more despairing material that makes up much of the second half of ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’, Bowie’s arrangement deepening the textures of Verlaine’s choppy original in a way that tightens the net on a narrator struggling with the futility of his actions. If, towards the start of the album, Bowie could take going “up the hill backwards” in his stride, here a life of hard graft – “Yes, I’ve been breaking these rocks/What’s my price to pay?” – raises questions about the meaning of it all, as Bowie, perhaps also channelling the imprisoned protagonist of ‘Scream Like a Baby’, prays for deliverance.
‘Because You’re Young’
Despite admitting that ‘Because You’re Young’ was partly inspired by having a nine-year-old son at the time of writing the song, Bowie refused to let sentimentality blind him from the woes that would likely befall his firstborn. There may be traces of yearning in the chorus – “Because you’re young/You’ll meet a stranger some night/Because you’re young/What could be nicer for you?” – but there are more than a few stings in the verses, as Bowie surveys the ruins of an adolescent relationship and finds little comfort. “She took back everything she said/Left him nearly out of his mind,” he sings, as if it was all so inevitable, before tallying “a million dreams” against “a million scars” in a song that doesn’t so much offer advice as sound a note of warning.
‘It’s No Game (No.2)’
Taken at a more measured pace than it’s opening counterpart, ‘It’s No Game (No.2)’ is, on the face of it, a considered end to an album which, Bowie said, “takes you through a lot of the doubting and the dilemmas that I, myself, as a writer find myself in”. Listen closer, however, and although Robert Fripp’s guitar and Michi Hirota’s vocals are removed, giving the song a less claustrophobic feel, many of the same lyrical concerns remain, the track ultimately acting more like a full-circle moment rather than a cathartic resolution. It was, Bowie explained, an expression of “what happens when a protest or an angry statement is thrown against the wall so many times that the speaker finds that he has absolutely no more energy to give it any impact any more”. As the tape that opened the record spools to the end, Bowie seems to be saying that it may not be possible to settle matters, but it might become possible to live with them.
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