I love Young Americans. I was surprised when I started reading your post that someone had belittled it. Then as I read on and saw that Hepworth was involved it all made sense. The Trollmeister General at work again.

Is his emptiest offering. No question. Young Americans isn't so bad, although I probably play the outtakes more than the album - After Today and Hard To Be a Saint in the City..

For what YA could have been check out the Astronettes People from Bad Homes album - and you'll also discover where Bowie stole his soul voice. No it's not him singing - honest!

http://www.divshare.com/direct/5765290-2b4.mp3

I Am Divine (later reworked into Somebody Up There Likes Me)

I was reading out an opinion being run up the Word flagpole by a reader or listener. However, since I had made it my life's work to let the air out of the Dame's tyres whenever the opportunity arises, I am happy to lend my name to the sentiment, which was, initially, Tippy Wooder's.

...during my teens, it was my favourite Bowie album.

Wasn't Karaoke Circus fun, Andrew?

The title track is probably my favourite Bowie track ever, well apart from Heroes. Or Station to Station. But it's up there in the top five, definitely.

And just how cool does he look on the album cover? We must discount Station to Station and Low as they had Nic Roeg's hands all over the imagery...

Has a distinctly summer feel to me. Whereas Station to Station and Low are definately winter albums. I hope that makes sense to someone other than me.

YA is full of WIN!?

I'm with the original post on this one. YA has three out and out classics (the two singles and "Win"). The other four originals are also perfectly decent. I've never been keen on the version of "Across The Universe" but that is the only weak link on the album.

I think the reason this album gets slightly overlooked is because, unlike many of his other 70s albums, this one felt like he was following rather than leading. You could argue that it was impressive that a glam rocker from Bromley could forge a Philly-soul sound in quite so convincing (erm) fashion, but nonetheless the end result is pastiche as opposed to innovation.

Regarding the sins of the mid to late 80s, I'm no apologist but Tonight and Never Let Me Down do have their moments:

Tonight - "Loving The Alien" - - widely accepted as the one redeeming feature from this otherwise lazy album. If you're not keen on Hugh Padgam's production (he really likes those marimbas does Hugh - see also The Police and Peter Gabriel) then there's a stripped down version on the new Reality Tour album.

Never Let Me Down - The title track is a really touching Lennon tribute. "Time Will Crawl" is in my opinion something of a minor classic and a less 80s mix can be found on Bowie's ISelect album on Itunes. Finally, "Zeroes" is a pastiche of Around the World In A Day era Prince. Again, a minor classic.

Well, almost. Almost no early 80s band would exist without that album and Roxy Music.

Can I champion the "Labyrinth" album? Well, Underground and Magic Dance, anyway

Is my favourite Bowie song and has been for a long time my favourite song period. A rare combination of soul, melody, vocal and artistry ..."theres been many others...'

You tube not overflowing with versions but this is a bizarre curio.

By coincidence decided to punish the young tunes by watching Labyrinth yesterday afternoon (£3 on dvd from Fopp) - blimey. Could have been worse but you have to question his reasons for saying 'Goblin King? Bunch of muppet-like gnomes? The bog of eternal stench?Sounds good sign me up'.

Worst Bowie album? Outside

When that 'scene' shifted circa 82-83 loads of them went 'soulboy', ABC were certainly big Young American fans, and if you listen to most of the likes of them and Soft Cell and Spandau etc there's a huge amount of soul influence on them.

And as for the sound of Scotland through the 80s, the amount of bands playing white soul/funk with deep Bowie style vocals...for a while you couldn't spit in Glasgow without hitting one.

is monumentally brilliant.

The fact that it may not be as monumentally brilliant as Low, Heroes, Station to Station, Diamond Dogs, Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust orHunky Dory is hardly a criticism.

Is it, however, in itself, ground-breaking? Well, what else - made contemporaneously -sounds remotely like YA? What else made since really does?

Indeed, I could make a case that it is Bowie's most ground-breaking record. The point where he cut the umbilical chord to the same folk, rock and roll and vaudeville antecedents that informed The Beatles, The Stones, The Faces, Elton John, Bolan, Roxy and Genesis amongst major British contemporaries. And this at the height of his popularity.

Not quite pop - does it actually sound like T.Rex? Not quite Soul - does it actually sound like Bobby Womack? Something wholly new, entirely original. If you heard "Can You Hear Me?" or "Win" or "Fascination" or "Right" - right now, today, for the first time - it would still sound fresh and different and radical.

Without Bowie in general and YA in particular - the sorts of sounds that say Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, The Police, Talking Heads, REM, - to name a few - made - would have been very different.

Young Americans is unquestionably a major work by a major artist.

And you can have sex to it. And you can dance to it. Which two activities are the whole point of pop.

Tim, Im with you on your post and am delighted to find someone else who regards 'Can you here me' as Bowie's finest moment.

I am not so sure I'm keen on the term 'soul pastiche' that is thrown about whenever this album is discussed, to me its a soul album. OK it may not be standard ( by which I mean gloriously uplifting music that pulls on your heart strings and your feet at the same time) mid 70's philly soul fare, but soul it is. Not pastiche, not homage, not fakery (although, as a committed modern soul fan from the mid 80's until the early 90's, when I finally gave in and admitted you could like more than one genre of music at a time, I can tell you that at any club, weekender, whatever, Bowie would not have been given houseroom from the largely white working class devotees, YA or otherwise).

However, as to the influence this album might have had on various 80's bands (ABC etc), I think they would just have likely been influenced by any quality soul act of the period and, if truth be told, more influenced by black soul artists. Even less sure on how YA influenced REM, Talking Heads and, god forbid, The Police.

... is even better.

I took out FAME & ACROSS THE UNIVERSE and replaced them with the outtakes WHO CAN I BE NOW? and IT'S GONNA BE ME on my player.

Makes for a "smoother" listen.

I listened to the first side of Scary Monsters in the car* the other day (It's No Game, Up The Hill Backwards, Scary Monsters, Ashes to Ashes, Fashion) and decided it was the most exciting 20 minutes of music EVER - the same thought I had when I first heard it in 1980.

I missed the Philly era - too young. Perhaps you can carbon date people by their favourite Bowie album.

*The needle jumps like a bitch if you go above 20mph.

...I was listening to Diamond Dogs in the car and decided that it was top of the heap. There's not a duff track on there, he's never written (or rather thrown up in the air and re-assembled)better lyrics ("When it's good it's really good, when it's bad I go to pieces","We'll buy some drugs and watch a band, and jump in the river holding hands")

There's some very early disco (1984), balladry (When You Rock and Roll With Me, We are the Dead), two classics (Diamond Dogs and Rebel, Rebel), and if there's a greater 10 minutes that Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise), I've yet to hear it. Hell, there's even a chant of an ever-circling skeletal family - you don't get that on your average Steps LP!

And he played most of the guitar himself!

... on top of all of the above, what about the sheer speed with which he did all this - only 10 months between Diamond Dogs (June '74) and Young Americans (April '75), and just another 10 months between that and Station To Station (Feb '76.) In a very real sense, Wow.

From what I've read, Bowie was touring DD in the states, but becoming obsessed with the Philedeplphia sound & other soul music he was hearing on the radio day by day, and writing his own take on it on the road, what he himself described as "plastic soul." As the tour progressed, he started integrating these new songs into the set, to the point where the 2nd leg of that '74 tour was renamed "Philly Dogs" to acknowledge the amount of new material he was previewing...

was probably the most elaborate and expensive stage set ever designed to that point and was seen in part on the Cracked Actor documentary - an utterly bonkers period in a seriously coke-addled Bowie's virtual meltdown after Ziggymania.

With the soul obsession growing as the tour progressed, the sheer expense and physical effort required to trawl the DD set around became too much for everyone to bear and what had started out as a darkly, futuristic cityscape was jettisoned in favour of the increasingly alarmingly cadaverous Dame rasping em out with Luther & Ava Cherry and co dressed in the most curious of check sports jackets and heavy cotton trousers as the tour became "Philly Dogs"!

TV appearances of the time off The Dick Cavett show, Soul Train, alongside Cher etc manifestly illustrate a disconcertingly fragile state of mind but the music he was churning out was, and still sounds, impossibly brilliant to my ears

Sadly, although there are rumoured to be full-show tapes of both legs of the "Dogs" tours on video, nothing of these spectacles which were seen only in North America has ever been sanctioned for official release

Happily, and incredibly the creative roll was far from affected, maybe even enhanced, by the chemical intake or all-round dissolute lifestyle and it never fails to amuse me that the chosen form of recovery/therapy to put these dangerous ways behind him was to go and live in Berlin with Iggy Pop!

I agree that "Across The Universe" is YA's only real weak link and the album would have been improved by one or two of the outtakes

What times though. All that great music and the likes of Nick Kent and Shaar Murray documenting it - I used to run downstairs on a Thursday morning and sit in the window looking for the papergirl then rush out and grab the NME when she was still about a dozen doors away from our house just to have an extra 30 seconds reading it

I'm going to listen to Young Americans at the next opportunity. I've never considered it one of his best, but I'd certainly contend that there are more than two good songs on it. Title song, Fame, Can You Hear Me and Win are all good (though only the title song is what I would call a Bowie Classic. And his version of Across The Universe is pretty painful.

... I heard Bowie's "Across The Universe" many times before I heard the original version. In fact, it was only when an older friend pointed out that it was a Beatles song that I started to investigate their music. Funny old world.

is probably my favourite album. Along with Blood on the Tracks and Hejira, My favourite Bowie album though I can see why other ones are more rated. Maybe it is not as important as Ziggy Stardust but it is the one that I like the most. Can you Hear Me and Win are wonderful songs. The title track is brilliant also.

By the way I love YA. IMHO its one of the Dame's best.

Came across this other day. I'd never seen it before or even knew of its existence. Simply astonishing stuff!

contains possibly his most upbeat lyric ever. yes more even than Heroes. essentially the message is be happy because it's a genuinly great thing to be alive, and because he's *david fucking bowie* he gets away with that without making it trite and sentimental. i think also that this was a fantastically *generous* thing for one of the most famous and influential pop stars in the world at that point to do for his audience. most people at that stage in their careers are moaning about life on the road or whatever but the dame never rolled like the rest.

But it will always be 'Station to Station'.

would be good.
Love to get a sound copy of it, or is it on any bootlegs?

The Dick Cavett show.
I would read avidly about these things in the NME's American reports at the time but frustratingly never see them for decades until discovering bootleg videos at record fairs
Now of course YouTube has opened up whole forgotten decades of these obscurities
The earlier clip with Marianne Faithful is from the "1980 Floor Show" which was filmed for TV in late 73 I think around the time of Pin-Ups
Insanely, it was then never broadcast - certainly not this side of the Atlantic. If you consider that there were just 3 terrestial channels and that Bowie was reckoned to be somewhat out there, edgy and dangerous, perhaps that goes some way to explaining why such an elaborate undertaking was left in the can.
Imagine a TV special showing today's hottest star performing at the very peak of their powers being recorded then not even being shown in any form!
I'm pretty sure it was filmed over one or maybe two days at The Marquee. Bowie had attempted to interest George Orwell's surviving relatives in licensing him to adapt 1984 - they declined and what few ideas survived from the abandoned project mutated into Diamond Dogs
The "1980 Floor Show" was if I am not mistaken around the time when the original idea was still a possibility. A lot of the songs performed were from the then-current PinUps album - Ronno surviving the post-Hammersmith Spiders cull for his last appearance with Bowie until about 1992 I think.
However "1984" was certainly performed and the Marianne duet, her clad as a nun in a backless habit, was pretty outrageous for the time
Bowie also sang one number in an elaborate costume which had disembodied hands all over it
I have the whole thing on video someewhere and must dig it out

but theres a fair few round here who would be happy if you did!

but theres a fair few round here who would be happy if you did!

bobbins with technology but if anyone wants to receive a brown envelope containing said VHS cassette provided I get an assurance I get it back I've no problem whatsoever with that
Luckily, whren I re-met my now Mrs in 2002 (we last went out together as young kids before that to see The Jam!) I moved down to Nottingham
I took a handful of stuff, most of my CD's down and most of my other things were eventually put in storage
During times of financial difficulty I stopped paying the Standing Order for the storage unit and lost all my vinyl, books, etc
I've never particularly bothered - I'm 51 now and can't imagine I'd ever have, say, gone out and bought another record player to whip through my Deaf School albums
But somehow, the Bowie video was one I thought: "Ah, the 1980 Floor Show...I'll take that"
wilkinsonjim@btinternet.com if anyone is interested

I chucked out my vhs player last year and of course now regret it.
Y'know for a cuople of quid theres quite a few places that will transfer that stuff on to dvd for you - it will age better. I had tons of stuff - 'rare' gigs, tv clips filling up video tapes - the clash, zeppelin,joy division, loads of ogwt and music telly rarities and most of em perished in my damp cellar. If I had transferred them...

... is still available on DVD - "Dick Cavett Rock Icons" - it's a box set.