Scary Monsters was Bowie’s final studio album on the RCA label and his first following the Berlin Trilogy
Bowie’s instruction to the firmly established bandleader and rhythm guitarist Carlos Alomar as the sessions for Scary Monsters… began was, “We gotta kill ‘em.” It was a direction that Alomar was all too happy to pursue. “With that album, he wanted fun,” Alomar told us. “He wanted the edge and he just wanted a good time.”
This sense of enjoyment is palpable on the record, particularly when evaluated next to the more insular and cerebrally minded Berlin Trilogy. Tracks such as the acerbic Fashion, the wise Teenage Wildlife and the towering, career-evaluating Ashes To Ashes find a freshly emboldened Bowie easily retaking lost ground in the mainstream world, which had been colonised by his progeny while he’d been exploring new sonic frontiers in Europe. That being said, a strand of the experimental still remains on Scary Monsters, despite the departure of Brian Eno.