Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)

Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), 1980

Briefly readopting the caricature cockney of his earliest Anthony Newley-inflected vocal incarnation, Bowie recounts the tale of a woman whose eyes ‘were blue but nobody home’, touched by an insanity that manifests itself in

‘a horror of rooms’. ‘Stupid in the streets, she can’t socialise,’ but Bowie will ‘love her till the day she dies’. So far, so Dave. But what nudges Scary Monsters’ title track from greatness to true genius is Robert Fripp’s truly astounding atonal guitar work, mirroring the lyric’s madness, set against a bass riff that pumps along with producer Tony Visconti’s era-defining

gated bass drum beat.