David Bowie: tomorrow the special on “The Man Who Sold The World”

Tomorrow we will publish on Rockol a special insert on “The man who sold the world”, David Bowie’s album released 55 years ago, with analytical sheets of all the songs on the album.

“The Man Who Sold the World” is David Bowie’s third studio album, released on 4 November 1970 in the United Kingdom and on 9 December of the same year in the United States by Mercury Records, with production by Tony Visconti. The work marks a decisive turning point in the career of the English musician, who abandons the folk and psychedelic sounds of his predecessor Space Oddity to embrace a harder and more complex sound, close to hard rock and proto-glam. Recorded at Trident Studios and Advision Studios in London in the spring and summer of 1970, the album sees Bowie joined by Mick Ronson on guitar, Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Woodmansey on drums: this lineup will form the nucleus of Spiders from Mars, the future “Ziggy Stardust” band. The nine tracks that make up the album, all written by Bowie, develop dark and introspective themes such as madness, alienation, double identity, power and decadence, reflecting the author’s interest in psychology, philosophy and science fiction. Among the songs stand out “The Width of a Circle”, “All the Madmen”, “After All” and the title track “The Man Who Sold the World”, which will also become famous thanks to Nirvana’s reinterpretation in 1993. At the time of its release, the album received mixed reviews and had limited commercial success, but it was later recognized as one of the key moments in Bowie’s artistic evolution, a point of transition between the experimentation of his early days and the full affirmation of his theatrical and androgynous. The cover of the first British edition, which depicts Bowie reclining on a Victorian sofa wearing a satin lady’s dress in a languid pose, helped consolidate his provocative and ambiguous image, while the American version featured a more conventional comic-style illustration. Today “The Man Who Sold the World” is considered a fundamental work, not only for the maturation of Bowie’s musical language but also for the influence it exerted on the rock of the following years, anticipating the sounds and themes that would characterize the glam season and the artist’s mutant identity.