David Bowie: Let’s Dance inspired one Paul McCartney album

By editorial board on February 3, 2024

David Bowie's "Let's Dance" inspired Paul McCartney while The Beatles inspired some of Bowie's early tunes like "Space Oddity."

David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” was an inspiration for one of Paul McCartney’s solo albums. Paul made the album with one of Bowie’s 1970s punk peers. On the same token, Bowie discussed how The Beatles influenced his lyrics for “Space Oddity.”

David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’: Producer Nile Rodger and Engineer Bob Clearmountain on the Making of the Singer’s Multiplatinum Breakthrough.

  Paul McCartney was thinking of David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ while working with Elvis Costello on the record Flowers in the Dirt. During an  interview with The Washington Post, Paul discussed his mindset while crafting “Press to Play” from Flowers in the Dirt. “Sometimes you get caught up in trying to be the current flavor, trying to go along and flavor your cooking with the food of the month, and I think ‘Press to Play’ was certainly that,” he recalled. “Press to Play” features a lot of yuppie synthesizers.

“I remember the records I listened to,” Paul added. “‘Let’s Dance.’ Or ‘Drive’ by The Cars. Records that were of the time and I probably just thought, ‘Yeah, it’d be quite nice to get into a bit of that.'” Paul didn’t write many dance songs for The Beatles. For that reason, it’s surprising he was so taken with 1980s dance music.

 

While Paul drew inspiration from Bowie, Bowie drew inspiration from The Beatles. During a  interview in the book Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters with David Bowie, the singer discussed the line “Here (am I sitting in my tin can)” from “Space Oddity.” He said the lyric was inspired by the puns in the Fab Four’s songs. Similarly, he admitted to reusing the vocal line from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘s “Lovely Rita” in his tune “Star” from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

“Bowie had this wonderful saying,” Nile Rodgers recalls. “He’d say, ‘Nile, darling, it’s all the same, but different.’”

 

“Let’s Dance,” which he co-produced with Bowie, was the album that vaulted him into the mainstream — and within a year he’d be helming Madonna’s smash breakthrough album, “Like a Virgin,” and overhauling Duran Duran’s original muddled mix of “The Reflex” into a global smash single. (Excerpt from Variety, to read the full article click  HERE)

“David opened a door for me that never closed, and for that I’m grateful,” Rodgers says.

Yet the album was hardly an obvious move: A combination of vintage rock and roll, big band jazz and chunky R&B that he and Bowie chose for “Let’s Dance.”

David showed Rodgers a photo of Little Richard getting into a red Cadillac: “That’s what I want my album to sound like,” Rodgers recalls Bowie saying.

Bowie also waited until all of the instrumentals were finished before recording his near-peerless vocals. Contrary to common belief, however, it wasn’t Rodgers who recorded Bowie, but Clearmountain.

“Bowie recorded his vocals after all of the tracks were done, but it was me (Bob Clearmountain, engineer) who recorded him,” said Clearmountain. “When it was time to do his vocals, Bowie really and truly wanted to do it on his own, so it was just him and me. First off, without insulting anyone, he is the most amazing, most incredible singer that I ever worked with. On ‘Modern Love,’ he came in, started singing, but began an octave lower than what it wound up being, in that deep Anthony Newley-type voice of his. So, he sings a verse and chorus, stops, asks to hear it back, listens in the studio with his headphones without coming into the control room – gets to the end of the first chorus, rubs his forehead, and says, ‘Let’s do it again.’

 

 

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