The Most Important Album In The World... EVER! (12/01/13)

We're a week after Bowie suddenly re-emerged from a long silence with the utterly wonderful 'Where Are We Now?'. And that set me think ing about the past...

I have come to the conclusion, reinforced by last week's wonderfully dramatic, unexpected reappearance that David Bowie's  'Scary Monsters......and Super Creeps' is the single most important album that I have ever bought.

I was 16. September 1980. The albums' release was the culmination of the summer, the last word in a season of change.

It was the summer that I discovered The Teardrop Explodes and Echo The Bunnymen through endless dull games of post O level completion snooker. The summer I went beyond Bowie's obvious singles with a friend's home copied cassette of Hunky Dory & Aladdin Sane, albums that came out when we were too young to consider them, 'Time's lyrical conceit "falls wanking  to the floor" still eliciting schoolboy smirks.

It was the summer that I got my first part time job - Saturday and two evenings at Kwik Save in Walton Vale, close enough to the now long gone Tudor Records that it was also when I first bought albums with my first pay packet - literally a packet, a brown envelope with cash in it. ( Those albums? Peter Gabriel 3 and The Jam's still wonderful Sound Affects)

And the August, an August partially spent in a rented home in Newquay, was dominated by two songs; Dexy's rabble rousing 'There, There, My Dear' with its claim that "the only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things" and Bowie's 'Ashes to Ashes' a summer number one that sounded like nothing on earth, a wonky synth line supporting a strange nursery rhyme that referenced the hero of his first hit, the strung out action man figure of  Major Tom.

With its post apocalyptic, planet conquering video, replete with support from the new breed of soon to be pop star New Romantics, the time was right for Bowie to taste the commercial success that had seemingly eluded him for a massive, erm 2 or 3 years. An age, back then.

I remember the anticipation for the album and in my memory its release seemed to be delayed several times; it feels as though I enquired about the album on a weekly basis only to be told each time that it had 'gone back to next week'. But that can't be true, the single was August, the album 12th September, I must be imagining it, exaggerating the wait in my mind.

I am sure, though, about the feeling of holding the album for the first time, the thrill of the first listen.

The cover was like nothing I'd seen before; a sketch of Bowie in the Pierrot costume from the 'Ashes...' Video obscuring a black and white photo of  the same; the cardboard of the sleeve had a rough texture, nothing at all like the glossy LP sleeves I'd handled so far. It felt heavier, richer and came with a deluxe lyric sheet. It was sumptuous and became one of the holy relics of my teenage years, along with The Wild Swans 'Revolutionary Spirit' 12", New Order's 'Ceremony' 7",  'Heaven Up Here' and both Joy Division albums; items to be treasured for more than the music, iconography. Looked at now it's a thin card sleeve with very little substance, obviously time worn, the record itself contained in one of those old fashioned cheap white paper inner bags, a single piece of 12" square paper nestling with it.

But the music - dark, off kilter, threatening, mysterious, vaguely unsettling. The noise of machinery operating behind Japanese vocals, guitars that droned and pulled in odd directions, howling solos and aggressive acoustic rhythms. Side one was pop, but some odd vision of pop, fractured and refracted. Side 2 was darker still, murder ballads of imprisonment and isolation ending with a re-reading of the first track, its screaming madness replaced with an insouciant delivery that made the lyric's implied suicide bid seem something to do when stultifying bored with all the madness that preceded. It was, in short, utterly thrilling and exactly what my 16 year old self didn't know he'd been waiting for. It was music for outsiders. I could now consider myself an outsider.

Everything else I'd discovered that summer had been created by lads in bands only 2 or 3 years old than myself, many living in the same city, some in the same area; this was made by a man near the end of his career (actually the end of the first phase of his career) living in the preposterously unachievable New York City, an ageing otherworldly presence making a last stand. He was 33.

Ahead of me was an undiscovered land, I was a year away from unrequited love, a year away from learning to drink, 2 years away from my own first band but everything that I discovered that summer pointed me toward everything else that would come. Every strand of music took me backward to other influences, forward to those influenced by it and sideways to each of their peers and at the centre of it there tended to be an odd eyed alien from Brixton.

The Jesuit brothers have a saying 'give me the boy at seven and I will give you the man' often misinterpreted as meaning that our personalities are set at that age.  I can't read it that way, there is so much to change in us. For me the time that defines you will always be the summer that you're sixteen.  I was lucky to have mine in 1980.