9. Marc RileyHunky Dory
This is a period of transition, which all of those early albums were. If you look at Bowie between 1967 and 1970/1 there was no constant in his life, whether he was a mod, whether he was going through his Dylan period with Space Oddity, god knows what The Man Who Sold The World is… It’s like a prog heavy metal album really… He was changing the whole time.
But if you look at Hunky Dory, I think he just thought that his future was as a songwriter as well as a performer, because I’ve also heard that The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars was his last crack at [becoming famous]. And the amazing thing about this album was two weeks after he finished it he was back in the studio doing Ziggy Stardust. There was a two-week gap between the studio visits for those two records and they’re so radically different from each other. So I think Bowie just thought, "Right I’m having one last crack at being a pop star and I’ve written all these great songs."
And they are great songs on this album, ‘Bewlay Brothers’, ‘Quicksand’, ‘Life On Mars’… When he wrote this song he’d just put in to write the lyrics for ‘My Way’ for Frank Sinatra and he got rebuffed and was really pissed off about it. So he wrote that song to say, "This is what I can do." And it is a great song: one of the greatest songs ever. I think he wrote it genuinely thinking that one day someone like Frank Sinatra would record a version of it.
