Hunky Dory

Production

With new bass player Trevor Bolder replacing Tony Visconti, Hunky Dory was the first production featuring all the members of the band that would become known the following year as Ziggy Stardust's Spiders From Mars. Also debuting with Bowie, in Visconti's place as producer, was another key contributor to the Ziggy phase, Ken Scott. The album's sleeve would bear the credit "Produced by Ken Scott (assisted by the actor)". The "actor" was Bowie himself, whose "pet conceit", in the words of NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray, was "to think of himself as an actor".

Style and themes

Musical biographer David Buckley said of Hunky Dory, "Its almost easy-listening status and conventional musical sensibility has detracted from the fact that, lyrically, this record lays down the blueprint for Bowie's future career." The opening track, "Changes", focused on the compulsive nature of artistic reinvention ("Strange fascination, fascinating me/Changes are taking the pace I'm going through") and distancing oneself from the rock mainstream ("Look out, you rock 'n' rollers"). However, the composer also took time to pay tribute to his influences with the tracks "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol" and the Velvet Underground inspired "Queen Bitch".

Following the hard rock of Bowie's previous album The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of Space Oddity, with light fare such as "Kooks" (dedicated to his young son, known to the world as Zowie Bowie but legally named Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones) and the cover "Fill Your Heart" sitting alongside heavier material like the occult-tinged "Quicksand" and the semi-autobiographical "The Bewlay Brothers". Between the two extremes was "Oh! You Pretty Things", whose pop tune hid lyrics, inspired by Nietzsche, predicting the imminent replacement of modern man by "the Homo Superior", and which has been cited as a direct precursor to "Starman" from Bowie's next album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Release and aftermath

Bowie had been without a recording contract when he started work on the album at Trident Studios on 8 June 1971. RCA Records in New York heard the tapes and signed him to a three-album deal on 9 September 1971, releasing Hunky Dory on 17 December. Supported by the single "Changes", the album scored generally favourable reviews and sold reasonably well on its initial release, without being a major success. Melody Maker called it "the most inventive piece of song-writing to have appeared on record in a considerable time", while NME described it as Bowie "at his brilliant best". In the United States, Rolling Stone opined that "Hunky Dory not only represents Bowie's most engaging album musically, but also finds him once more writing literally enough to let the listener examine his ideas comfortably, without having to withstand a barrage of seemingly impregnable verbiage before getting at an idea". However, it was only after the commercial breakthrough of Ziggy Stardust in mid-1972 that Hunky Dory became a hit, climbing to number 3 in the UK and remaining on the chart for 69 weeks. In 1973, RCA released "Life on Mars?" as a single, which also made number 3 in the UK. A reissue returned the album, in January 1981, to the British chart, where it remained for 51 weeks.

In 1998, Q magazine readers voted Hunky Dory the 43rd greatest album of all time, while in 2000 the same magazine placed it at number 16 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2003, the album was ranked 107th on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In the same year, VH1 placed it 47th and the Virgin All Time Top 1000 Albums chart placed it at number 16. In 2004, it was ranked 80th on Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1970s. In 2006, TIME magazine chose it as one of the 100 best albums of all time.

Bowie himself considered the album to be one of the most important in his career. Speaking in 1999, he said: "Hunky Dory gave me a fabulous groundswell. I guess it provided me, for the first time in my life, with an actual audience – I mean, people actually coming up to me and saying, 'Good album, good songs.' That hadn't happened to me before. It was like, 'Ah, I'm getting it, I'm finding my feet. I'm starting to communicate what I want to do. Now: what is it I want to do?' There was always a double whammy there."

Track listing

All tracks written by David Bowie, except where noted..

1980s and 1990s

Following its initial release on compact disc in the mid-1980s, Hunky Dory was rereleased in CD format in 1990, by Rykodisc/EMI, with the bonus tracks listed above.

In 1999, the album was reissued by Virgin/EMI (7243 521899 0 8), without bonus tracks, but with 24-bit digitally remastered sound. This edition was re-pressed in 2014 by Warner Music Group, having acquired the Virgin-owned Bowie catalogue.

2015 remaster

In 2015, the album was remastered for the Five Years 1969–1973 box set. It was released in CD, vinyl, and digital formats, both as part of this compilation and separately.

Personnel

Production

Charts

Album

Single