Mojo Magazine August 2018 Back Issue

BOWIE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF HIS BIGGEST EVER HIT
What do you do when you've reinvented yourself, and music, on an annual basis for the best part of a decade, only to find that everyone else is now cashing in on your synthesized innovations? For David Bowie in 1983 the solution, as ever, was to go against the grain. “So much of the music that’s being made at the moment is very earnest,” he opined to one interviewer
in May that year. “It doesn’t have that quality of necessity that music used
to have; it’s become style over content.” Let’s Dance might have been Bowie’s most successful album, but it remains oddly undervalued and unexplored; a work of radical fusions and reconnections to the past, where the singer’s seemingly straight new image – “executive realness,” as Nile Rodgers calls it hid enduringly weird content. Thirty-five years on, Tom Doyle probes far beyond the gleaming surfaces of eighties pop to uncover the truth about Let’s Dance, while our CD reconstructs the R&B soundtrack that inspired this most misunderstood Bowie incarnation.