The Man Who Sold the World by David Bowie

The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie's third album, came out on Mercury in America on 4 November 1970, and it's where the acoustic folkie of the year before plugged in, turned up and went looking for the dark. Tony Visconti produced it in London that spring, and it marks the first time Mick Ronson and Mick Woodmansey, the future Spiders from Mars, turned up on a Bowie record: the band grinds the songs into heavy, blues-soaked hard rock.

The words are darker still, circling madness, religion, technology and war, from the sprawling "The Width of a Circle" to the haunted title track. Bowie had called it Metrobolist, after the film Metropolis, until Mercury swapped the title without asking him; the British sleeve had him posed in a blue Michael Fish dress, the American one a cartoon cowboy outside an asylum. It flopped on both sides of the Atlantic, charting only when RCA reissued it in 1972.

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