“China Girl” by David Bowie

David Bowie's "China Girl" was the second single from Let's Dance in 1983, but the song was already seven years old. Bowie and Iggy Pop wrote it in 1976, and Pop got it first, on his debut solo album The Idiot in 1977: Bowie built the music and Pop made up the words on the spot at the mic, drawing on an affair with a Vietnamese woman and a lover who comes to see his Western ways as a kind of poison to her. Bowie reportedly cut his own version partly to help Pop out of money trouble.

Nile Rodgers, co-producing with Bowie, turned the brooding original into a gleaming pop record, hanging it on an Asian-flavoured guitar hook. Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughan play guitar, Omar Hakim and Carmine Rojas lock the rhythm tight, Rob Sabino adds keyboards and Sammy Figueroa percussion, and Bob Clearmountain engineered and mixed it to a high shine.

It went to number two in the UK and 10 in the US. The video, starring New Zealand actress Geeling Ng in an interracial romance, was meant, Bowie said, as a statement against racism, and he played the song often on tour.

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