David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. My first album by him. Great place to start.

Let's Dance was the first Bowie album in my house, my parents bought it. I liked the singles but nothing else on the record. I ended up buying the next 2 albums which i didn't like beyond the song "Blue Jean". Thankfully someone played me Hunky Dory soon after or I would have thought Bowie was not worth checking out.

 

Yeah. It's one of the reasons I was briefly into albums generally. It was by no means a Bowie habit only. I mean you had some people like The Beatles who could run a whole album but generally whatever I was buying on albums I would edit down onto cassette and then came the (girls') idea of just exchanging 'mixtapes' of 'best tracks', often with little voiceovers in between, and that led to taping off the radio and discovering the use of the fader when doing so in order to cut out a radio DJ and put your own comments in with a very cheap microphone. Real recording pioneers we were, some singing over the tracks.
We invented mixtapes, DJing, karaoke and Pirate Bay basically.
Because buying sweets was more important. And still is.
I'm off to buy some now.

 

Let's Dance wasn't the first Bowie album I got (that was both The Next Day and ★, both well after his passing), but I agree it makes for a perfect gateway release. It's a nice blend of pop accessibility and art rock eccentricity, grabbing a layperson and warming them up to the weirder side of Bowie's output at the same time. Admittedly for a while the title track was the only Bowie song I genuinely knew, so maybe that might play into my biases, but either way it sits in a good niche to act as a gateway album for prospective fans. Heck, while "Heroes" is my personal favorite Bowie album, Let's Dance is the one I always recommend first to people looking to dive into the back-catalog.

 

Great post. I had kind of a similar experience and have been thinking about Let's Dance again recently. When it came out, there were only a few of his records that I knew and liked, Scary Monsters and Changesonebowie being the ones I remember. Didn't love them, but certainly enjoyed them. Let's Dance came out and I didn't hate it, in fact liked half of it quite a bit. But, in the years since, I've gotten to be a much bigger fan of the 70s work and it occurred to me what a huge turd Let's Dance must've been to his serious fans. I mean, Scary Monsters is, I think, brilliant - maybe my favorite of his records - and, for fans expecting the next step in his evolution, Let's Dance must've been such a massive disappoint.

All of which is to say that I liked it then but can't really take it now. And yet, like the OP, I'm kind of glad I started there...

 

I love this album and listen to it all the time. The only thing that would have made the album even better was if it had been a full Chic Production.

It’s too bad that Bernard Edwards was not dependable during that time and that Tony Thompson didn’t play on all the tracks because Nile wasn’t comfortable trusting them to show up for all the sessions.

I hope they eventually release more of the demos also because the Let's Dance Demo was great.

 

I was in my early 20s and leaving music behind a little when Let's Dance was released,and didn't really have a sense of a major artist whom I needed to back catalogue. Bowie in 1983 was a major cult artist long past his hits. In fact so many artists were now 'being Bowie' ( in the UK especially,New Romantics,Syth Pop,Plastic Soul and Glam/Goth were huge)that by Let's Dance, Bowie himself felt like he was copying Bowie. He almost missed his own bandwagon ( eg, there's four years between Gary Numan's Cars,an obvious Bowie ripoff hit and Let's Dance's release).

 

I bought the Let's Dance LP back in the summer of 1983 as a teenager. It was also my first Bowie album. To me, it's like four great singles ("Let's Dance", "China Girl", "Modern Love", "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)") and four interesting B-sides grouped together rather than a true 'album' like Ziggy. But I still love it. "China Girl" is still one my most-played 80s singles.

 

It was cheap when it came out too!

 

Modern Love is the song that got me into Bowie. I loved the horn arrangement on that one. I could listen to that over and over and not get tired of it. Let's Dance the song was ok but got overplayed so much it became a turnoff and China Girl I did like at all. Nowadays, I can tolerate Let's Dance and I think China Girl is a masterpiece.

But, Modern Love got me to ChangesBowie and then I was able to appreciate the earlier songs and gained respect for him as an artist.

 

I was just out of a university grant,living on £20 a week. I think £4.25 was a lot! You certainly had to think about buying records then. There's people today would resent paying almost £5 for an albums worth of music.

 

I was working by then so I didn’t mind the cost. £4.25 was a good price for an LP in 1983 surely?

 

I’m a massive db fan and this was the first new record out after I got into him so I played it to death, but at the time it must have sounded awful to his longtime fans. But at this distance I really think there’s an unexplored subtext to it. Something quite dark and interesting well beyond its bombast. Plus there’s a lot of mystery around it compared to many of his other records I think. I’d like to hear the full story from Nile R (who I think is great faod). He’s always a bit coy about to for fear I think of offending db fans. Let rip Nile

 

I consider Let’s Dance to be the last album in Bowie’s run of uninterrupted classics that began with Hunky Dory. I know many put a hard stop after Scary Monsters but Let’s Dance is at least as good as Diamond Dogs and Young Americans, and IMO should be considered as part of Bowie’s run of classics. The three singles walk the tightrope of being accessible yet still unique. Bowie’s artistic voice isn’t lost in the process of making more consciously popular music. And I would argue there is not a single filler track on the album. By all accounts Bowie worked extremely hard on the album and I love every track on it, nothing on there sounds like filler. The only misstep for me is the re-recording of “Cat People”, which I find to be inferior in every way to the original soundtrack version, but the song itself isn’t filler.

Compare the album to Tonight or Never Let Me Down and it’s clear that Let’s Dance has a level of inspiration behind it the other two lack. The black triangle CD of the album sounds immaculate, I’ll have to pop the SACD on again to see if that’s an improvement or not.

 

Not my first Bowie album (I already had ChangesOne and Two and the Christiane F. soundtrack), but I suppose Let's Dance would certainly count as the first one I bought in "real time" . Going to repost what I wrote about it in a thread a couple of years back:
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I love the entire Let's Dance album as well and make absolutely no apologies for it - it played a huge part in my life during my college years. Was it the boundary-pushing music of his brilliant 70s period that I also loved? Of course not but it was still distinctive, it still sounded better than 99% of what you were hearing on the radio (nevermind MTV, where the videos stood out like a lighthouse beacon) and still reached out and hit you in the gut. It was a "physical" Bowie album versus "intellectual", but, for me, anyway, still just as spiritual as those that came before it. I think that is why some don't like it - like it's beneath him or him slumming in some way - but it's what he wanted to do, again challenging himself, and honestly, I'm sure thinking Nile Rodgers would be a fun guy to work with was no small part of it. Having seen Nile in person talk about working with Bowie, I personally think it was a hugely rewarding and beneficial partnership - and friendship - for both of them.

 

I was always spending £3-4 on LPs so £4.25 was cheap especially for a major artist. I don't know how I bought reggae,jazz,EPs and dub! Twice as much in specialist shops.

 

I’ve just dug out my old copy and it has a sticker on that says ‘Record Fayre - £3.99’ Looks like i got a bargain!

 

How about the SACD ? Do you like it ?
I would love to get my hands on one !

 

To me the SACD is the best version I’ve heard.

 

Yeah, you outdid Boots.

 

Absolutely not a groundbreaking or even original album. This is Bowie for the masses.
But was that really a bad thing after all?
I suspect the Bowie-league just got a bit jealous because they suddenly had to share him.
Of course things got wrong with “Tonight”, but no one could have foreseen that in 1983.

The album is solid, but compared to his other more appealing albums like “Hunky Dory”, “Ziggy Stardust”, “Aladdin Sane” and “Young Americans”, I find it weaker than all of them with the possible exception of “Young Americans”.
It’s not the album I would recommend to start with. The 3 big singles is on many of his hit-collections anyway.
Anyday I would recommend “Hunky Dory”, “Ziggy Stardust” and then either “Station To Station” or “Low” for the more ‘difficult’ stuff.

 

Let’s Dance is the Bowie album that gets played most often in our house. That’s not to say I consider it his best album, just that it gets played most often.

My main attraction to this album is the guitar work. I love and appreciate Stevie Ray Vaughan as a guitar player, but this album is music that’s more my speed than his own material. The combination with Nile Rodgers is fantastic.

And we get SRV playing on an Iggy Pop song! Come on!

 

Station to Station was a Funk/Rock mix
Let's Dance is a Funk/Blues mix

Not so bad after all

 

I didn’t think much of it in 1983, and I haven’t changed my mind since. I liked practically everything he did through Space Oddity to the Baal ep, but this sounded bland and uninteresting. I like the Metro cover, but Iggy Pop’s China Girl, and the Giorgio Moroder produced Cat People are my preferred versions. I also prefer the Let’s Dance single, to the unnecessary extended cut. And there are two tracks which I cannot stand, Without You and Shake It.

 

Plus Carmine Rojas hits it out the park on bass!