My Favourite 350 Songs of All Time. #336

David Bowie - Watch That Man

Me and Bowie go way back. Born in the same town (well, kind of). My dad went to school with him. And his mum used to get her newspaper from the paper shop where my mum worked. And it was me who lent him a copy of Surfer Rosa when he was short of inspiration after Tin Machine. Alright, the last one isn't true. But this was the first pop record I vividly remember hearing. I'd be about four years old and my mum put this on our tinny Fidelity 4-speed record player, a device so old it actually looks like it was made out of black and white.

The album was Aladdin Sane and I was terrified and secretly a bit excited about the famous sleeve. I'd never seen anything like that in my life, all the blokes in my family were hairy fellas whose idea of androgyny roughly equated to listening to 10cc whilst drinking a sly shandy bass.

It's one of the best starts to an album ever, big power guitar chord into some glam nonsense punctuated with the kind of honky tonk piano and excited backing vocals you just dont get anymore. I bought the CD a while back and I hated it, I wanted the cheap tinny sound of my mum's record player, some things age badly, this still sounds fresh as a newborn's toenails but it helps if you play it on something pre-war.