I’ve gone through some pretty interesting changes”, Bowie told NME’s Andrew O’Grady in 1975. “Rock and roll certainly hasn’t fulfilled its original promise… it’s just become one more whirling deity, right?
Going around that never-decreasing circle. Rock and roll is dead. It’s a toothless old woman. It’s really embarrassing”.
What he was saying wasn’t a million miles away from what punk rockers would soon shout. But this was 1975, and Bowie had become a soul man. His blue-eyed – or as he put it, “plastic” – soul switched a generation of white boys on to the joy and pain of black music. His alleged inauthenticity was of no significance. He sang it, felt it, transmitted it. The listener was moved by the result, never mind the process. The influence of the Young Americans album, the ripples and reassessments it initiated, were to prove incalculable, irreversible.
Elton, Roxy and Rod soon embraced soul or disco; throughout the 80s everyone from Talking Heads and Japan to ABC and the new romantics chose this strain of Bowie as their infection. Rock may not have expired, but it knew it had to learn some new moves. Another Bowie risk, intuition, perverse gamble, had, by accident or design, paid
