Bowie kicks back and contemplates world domination at Haddon Hall in Bromley, early 1970
Though Bowie’s first feat of style-hopping, going from the whimsical, Anthony Newley-esque cheeky chappie on David Bowie to ajaded chronicler of the decline of 60s idealism on Space Oddity, could be interpreted by the listener as more of a career refocus following widespread disinterest, Bowie’s third album marked his first major sonic evolution on his own terms. The Man Who Sold The World is a snarling and sonically abrasive record with a hitherto only hinted at force of intellect that remodels the David Bowie universe into something that was simultaneously more aggressive and, contextually speaking, more accessible to a wider audience, many of which were in thrall to the then developing heavy metal sound being pioneered by the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.
Aside from the patently ‘on-trend’ occult references, the record’s dominant themes surround mental instability, the flawed idealism of Nietzschean philosophy and the loosening of identity: Bowie would flit between lyrical narrators throughout the album - from the brutally unhinged solider of Running Gun Blues and All The Madmen’s passive, opiated mental patient, to the mortally unscathed ‘man who sold the world’ himself on the title track.