Hunky Dory by David Bowie

Hunky Dory, David Bowie's fourth album, came out on RCA on 17 December 1971, and it's where the chameleon first finds his true colors. After a break from the road, he sat down and wrote on piano instead of guitar, then pulled in Mick Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass and Mick Woodmansey on drums, cutting it in mid-1971 at Trident Studios in London. Rick Wakeman played piano not long before he joined Yes, and Bowie co-produced with Ken Scott, who had engineered his previous two records.

Where The Man Who Sold the World was all hard-rock guitar, this one is warm, melodic piano pop with an arty streak a mile wide. "Changes" chews on the compulsion to keep reinventing yourself, "Oh! You Pretty Things" and "Quicksand" wander into the occult and Nietzsche, "Kooks" is dedicated to his newborn son Duncan, and his trip across the States left him writing tributes to Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. "Queen Bitch" struts with a sneer, and "Life on Mars" swoops and soars. Even the cover, a black-and-white photo tinted with color, has him posing like a Hollywood screen siren.

RCA barely pushed it or "Changes", worried that he was about to switch personas, so despite glowing reviews in Britain and America it sold poorly and missed the charts. Once Ziggy Stardust broke him in 1972, people went back for it, and it climbed to number three in the UK. These days it's ranked among his best, the record where he really began to sound like himself.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.