David Bowie’s best selling album, Let’s Dance, is 40 years old this month. It was, and is, a great album, with the master shape-shifter finding new ground in the 1950s American R & B he so loved in his youth. Bowie hooked up with US funkster, Nile Rodgers, studio wizard, Bob Clearmountain, and a still little-known guitar ace, Stevie Ray Vaughan, to create a truly great album that ruled radio for a year and generated four hit songs.
It’s an album with a deep Australian connection, with two of its videos made here, including the one for the title track, featuring Indigenous dancers, Terry Roberts and Joelene King. It wove a deep social commentary around a funky dance track, and was played often on the then brand new music video channel, MTV.
It’s 40 years since David Bowie invited us to put on the red shoes and dance the blues under the serious moonlight. This album was the soundtrack of my first year in radio, remembered now as always warm, sultry, with dancing likely to begin at any moment. One night, I finished a radio shift at 11pm in North Sydney, and drove to Melbourne with my house-mate, to see the Serious Moonlight concert at VFL Park, because the Sydney show had sold out. Somewhere north of Albury, the sun came up, and Let’s Dance came on the radio, probably 2AY. That song gave me enough energy to make it all the way to a coffee shop in Brunswick, and on we went, to Glen Waverly and a great concert.
The whole thing might have turned out very differently. Hear Nile Rodgers describe the title track, Lets Dance, as Bowie first played it to him – an earnest folk thing that no-one could dance to.
