Scary Monsters… and Super Creeps by David Bowie

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), David Bowie's fourteenth studio album, came out on RCA on 12 September 1980, and it's the sound of Bowie deciding the art-house experiments were over and it was time to be a pop star again, on his own terms. After the Berlin trilogy of Low, "Heroes" and Lodger won the arguments but not the sales, Bowie set out to make something more commercial, and he got it without dumbing anything down.

He co-produced with Tony Visconti, cutting the tracks at the Power Station in New York and finishing at Good Earth Studios in London between February and April 1980. Much of the old crew came back, with extra guitar from Chuck Hammer and Robert Fripp and a cameo from Pete Townshend. This time Bowie wrote the songs out properly instead of improvising in the studio, and some grew out of older, unreleased material. The result is jagged and bright: the guitars squeal like live wires, the rhythms snap, and the title track leers and lurches. "Fashion" is a sleek, sneering dance-floor strut, and "Ashes to Ashes" drags Major Tom out of "Space Oddity" for a haunted, hallucinatory return trip, sold with a startling video.

On the cover Bowie is a Pierrot in a giant collage, with nods to his past records on the back. It topped the UK chart and rebuilt his standing in America, where it reached No. 12. It was his last studio album for RCA and his last with Visconti for more than 20 years, and it still turns up on lists of the greatest albums ever made.

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