Let’s Dance

Let’s Dance, 1983

Joe BonamaSSa

“As much as I really, really love the stuff that featured Mick Ronson, I’m gonna go with this one. Stevie Ray Vaughan played the lead guitar on it. David at that point was a stadium-level pop artist but decided, as he was prone to do, to just go and do something different instead. So he allowed Steve to lay down a load of blues guitar over a pop song, and of course it really, really worked.”

kip WinGer, Winger

“It’s very un-Bowie, and he came to hate it. I think that’s so interesting. Nile Rogers’s producing was amazing on that record and it was immensely successful. I think it created havoc in Bowie’s psyche, as he had ‘sold out’. That’s right – sold out every seat in the house. It’s the point where his amazing vocal performances became immortalised to the masses, yet he was unhappy with it. I find that so interesting.

“I love the song and the whole record, as well as all of his more eclectic music. But there’s no way around the fact that this record, for better or for worse, blew him up into a massive superstar – and I love irony.”

roBB Weir, tygers of pan tang

“When we drove across the UK and the continent on tour back in the 1980s, that album [Let’s Dance] was my cassette tape of choice. The rest of the band would be listening to Black Sabbath or whatever, but I’d be there with my headphones on listening to Earth, Wind & Fire, Brothers Johnson and Bowie playing disco. I’d pick Let’s Dance over any of his rock songs. What a great groove it had. That guitar solo, too – it had everything.