Description

2015 remaster by Ray Staff at Air Studios.

Pin Ups fits into David Bowies output roughly where Moondog Matinee (which, strangely enough, appeared the very same month) did into the Bands output, which is to say that it didnt seem to fit in at all. Just as a lot of fans of Levon Helm et al. couldnt figure where a bunch of rock & roll and R&B covers fit alongside their output of original songs, so Bowies fans after enjoying a string of fiercely original LPs going back to 1970s The Man Who Sold the World werent able to make too much out of Pin Ups new recordings of a brace of 60s British hits. Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane had established Bowie as perhaps the most fiercely original of all Englands glam rockers (though Marc Bolans fans would dispute that to their dying day), so an album of covers didnt make any sense and was especially confusing for American fans apart from the Easybeats Friday on My Mind and the Yardbirds Shapes of Things, little here was among the biggest hits of their respective artists careers, and the Whos I Cant Explain and Anyway Anyhow Anywhere were the only ones whose original versions were easily available or played very often on the radio; everything else was as much a history lesson, for Pink Floyd fans whose knowledge of that band went back no further than Atom Heart Mother, or into Liverpool rock (the Merseys Sorrow), as it was a tour through Bowies taste in 60s music. The latter was a mixed bag stylistically, opening with the Pretty Things high-energy Bo Diddley homage Rosalyn and segueing directly into a hard, surging rendition of Thems version of Bert Berns Here Comes the Night, filled with crunchy guitars; I Wish You Would and Shapes of Things were both showcases for Bowies and Mick Ronsons guitars, and See Emily Play emphasized the punkish (as opposed to the psychedelic) side of the song. Sorrow, which benefited from a new saxophone break, was actually a distinct improvement over the original, managing to be edgier and more elegant all at once, and could easily have been a single at the time, and Bowies slow version of I Cant Explain was distinctly different from the Whos original in other words, Pin Ups was an artistic statement, of sorts, with some thought behind it, rather than just a quick album of oldies covers to buy some time, as it was often dismissed as being. In the broader context of Bowies career, Pin Ups was more than an anomaly it marked the swan song for the Spiders from Mars and something of an interlude between the first and second phases of his international career; the next, beginning with Diamond Dogs, would be a break from his glam rock phase, going off in new directions. Its not a bad bridge between the two, and it has endured across the decades.