Boys Keep Swinging being one of those David Bowie tracks that should’ve been a huge hit (and it did actually chart in the UK), but the Americas of the late 1970s just weren’t ready for a song about boys being boys, cutting their moves, striking their poses, popping cherries, checking out other boys, looking good in uniforms. Certainly not one sung by a known alien.
“A nifty bit of Bowie genius from 1979’s Lodger, the comparatively overlooked album that capped off his so-called Berlin Trilogy. So-called because Lodger was actually recorded in Switzerland and NYC in and around various tours. But Berlin was never far away from Bowie’s heart and brain in those days, the friction of its divided soul fueling mutant sounds and angles that couldn’t seem to help invent the future — the decade to be known as the 1980s.” (Philip Random)
Fun, strong instrumental track from Low, the first of David Bowie’s post cocaine psychosis “Berlin albums“. Side two is mostly ambient and revolutionary in its way, but side one is where it all starts really: the big ass drum sound that came to define the 1980s (ultimately in a bad way). Credit usually goes to Phil Collins and/or Peter Gabriel, but that was three years after the fact.
Randophonic 