20. Reality (2003)

It speaks a lot to David Bowie’s great artistic versatility and consistency that a record as fundamentally solid as 2003’s Reality should be so near the bottom of a list like this. Effectively a continuation of the soulful rock of Heathen that had restored Bowie’s critical stock the previous year, Reality is a classic example of one of those perfectly enjoyable albums that doesn’t really have any truly stand-out moments. Working once again with Tony Visconti, he sought to rediscover one of his past sounds; namely, the creeping paranoia of Scary Monsters…, and tweak the timeless sound just enough to make it modern.

While it sometimes attempts to be a little artier than Heathen, there’s nothing here to frighten the horses despite the assured production and occasionally imaginative songs like ‘Fall Dog Bombs The Moon’. Not that this affected Bowie’s status in the eyes of the public. The accompanying A Reality Tour grossed higher than any other touring artist in the world in 2004, despite Bowie suffering a heart attack in Hamburg that caused him to cancel the rest of the tour. It would be his last album for nearly a whole decade. (LISTEN)

In his own words: “I feel that reality has become an abstract for so many people over the last twenty years. Things that they regarded as truths seem to have just melted away, and it’s almost as if we’re thinking post-philosophically now. There’s nothing to rely on any more. No knowledge, only interpretation of those facts that we seem to be inundated with on a daily basis.”

Highlights: ‘New Killer Star’; ‘Fall Dog Bombs The Moon’

19. Black Tie White Noise (1993)

The start of an artistic renaissance for Bowie after the ill-fated Tin Machine albums and the line-drawing exercise of the nostalgic Sound + Vision Tour, Black Tie White Noise sounds more refreshed and energised than anything he had produced for a decade. Inspired by his wedding the previous year to Iman (who would remain his wife until his death in 2016), this was music by someone who had rediscovered his sense of purpose and happiness.

Bringing back Chic’s Nile Rodgers on production, the man who had helped make Let’s Dance such a commercial colossus ten years previously, helped to put these happier, more philosophical songs with bold new electronic textures and dance beats into an accessible mould. Notably, it also included a contribution on ‘I Feel Free’ from his famous Ziggy­-era guitarist Mick Ronson, who was soon to die from cancer. Subtler songs came in the shape of ‘Jump They Say’, an autobiographical track concerning Bowie’s half-brother Terry, who suffered from mental illness his whole adult life and who had committed suicide the previous year.

Some have suggested that Bowie’s name prevented the songs from being bigger hits than they were, apparently proven by the dancefloor success of various remixes of ‘Pallas Athena’ that were distributed anonymously among American DJs. The arrangements certainly lent themselves to such treatment. While Black Tie White Noise is inspired in places, it’s uncharacteristically soporific in others, making for an uneven experience. (LISTEN)

In his own words: “I think this album comes from a very different emotional place [than previous albums]. That’s the passing of time, which has brought maturity and a willingness to relinquish full control over my emotions, let them go a bit, start relating to other people… the stakes have changed. I feel alive, in a real sense.”

Highlights: ‘Jump They Say’; ‘Pallas Athena’

18. Space Oddity (originally released as David Bowie) (1969)

Bowie’s second self-titled record – symbolically a kind of re-boot of his stalled career – was largely unheralded until it was re-issued as Space Oddity in 1972 at the height of Bowie-mania. While it still more or less cleaved to the hippy-ish folk of the times, what was immediately notable was how much more confident and complex his songwriting had become in the intervening two years, with elements of balladry and even prog-rock creeping in.

While some regard Space Oddity as another false start, other fans think of it as the first ‘proper’ Bowie album. Certainly, it’s the first deemed worthy of regular re-issue, and some individual moments like ‘Cygnet Committee’ and ‘A Letter To Hermione’ rank as his earliest highlights. His record company had cannily taken advantage of the Apollo 11 launch, releasing the title track ‘Space Oddity’ as a single which hit the UK Top Five earlier in 1969 (it would top the charts on re-release in 1975). The subsequent album, in November, wasn’t quite as successful as had been hoped, but at least Bowie was now on the radar. (LISTEN)

In his own words: “It [‘Space Oddity’] was written because of going to see the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I found amazing. I was out of my gourd anyway, I was very stoned when I went to see it, several times, and it was really a revelation to me.”

Highlights: ‘Space Oddity’; ‘Cygnet Committee’

17. Earthling (1997)

Bowie celebrated his 50^th birthday in some style with his 20^th album Earthling, a fearless turn into drum’n’bass and jungle territory that was much better than it had any right to be on paper. It was also the first album that Bowie had produced by himself since 1974’s Diamond Dogs. It was not a commercial success, with the thundering digital soundscapes a world away from his past, but it received some strong critical notices that raised Bowie’s profile still further, following his receipt of the BRIT Awards’ Outstanding Contribution to Music prize the previous year.

A couple of tracks, like the enjoyably nonsensical ‘Little Wonder’ and the fusion of dance rhythms and guitar riffs on ‘Dead Man Walking’ are some of the highlights of Bowie’s ‘90s, but Earthling is one of the least accessible entries in Bowie’s catalogue. With persistence, however, it pays off as a listening experience.

Some argued that Earthling represented a rare example of Bowie following in the slipstream of his contemporaries, rather than leading the pack and breaking down doors for others to walk through. Then again, spin that the other way round: that Bowie was able to run with them at all was a marvel. While so many of his peers from the early ‘70s had long since lapsed into self-parody by the mid-‘90s, at least Bowie was still challenging himself and his audience. (LISTEN)

In his own words: “Unlike most drum and bass things, we didn’t just take parts from other people’s records and sample them. The drummer… went away and did his own loops and worked out all kinds of strange timings and rhythms. Then we speeded those up to your regular 160bpm. That’s very much how we treat the album. We kept all sampling in-house and created our own soundscape in a way.”

Highlights: ‘Little Wonder’; ‘Dead Man Walking’

16. The Man Who Sold The World (1970)

We’re only on #16 and it’s already time to make agonising choices on this list. Bowie’s third record, The Man Who Sold The World, is usually regarded as a turning point in the artist’s career. Not only had the quality of his songwriting improved once again, but the album’s new, heavier rock sound was a dramatic departure from the folk-rock of his first two records. This transformation in sound was engendered by Bowie’s new alliance with guitarist Mick Ronson, who would prove to be the central plank in his glam-rock sound in less than two years’ time.

With references to paranoia, delusion and schizophrenia contained within many of songs’ lyrics, the jagged edges of Visconti’s production went on to influence the goth-rock of artists like Siouxsie and The Cure later in the decade. More importantly, it signalled the beginning of Bowie’s ‘classic period’ – in particular, the sprawling opener ‘The Width Of A Circle’ and the dystopian, Lovecraftian visions of ‘The Supermen’ would set down the template for his immediate future. In terms of his image, Bowie’s long, flowing hair and foppish dress sense (see the elegant front cover!) showed that the subversive element of his persona was coming more to the fore, influenced by his stay in the bacchanalian Haddon Hall with his first wife Angie.

The Man Who Sold The World is best understood as Bowie’s first transitional record, the beginning of a magnificent arc and the point he truly discovered his identity. The variety of writing styles present on the record shows his trademark shape-shifting style in an early format. While it underperformed in the charts, arguably because it lacked an obvious single, it had an impact on those who heard it – the title track was later picked up by Lulu who turned it into a Top 3 hit in 1974. (LISTEN)

In his own words: “Maybe now that I feel more comfortable with the way that I live my life and my mental state and my spiritual state whatever, maybe I feel there’s some kind of unity now. That song [‘The Man Who Sold The World’] for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you’re young, when you know that there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet. You have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.”

Highlights: ‘The Man Who Sold The World’; ‘The Width Of A Circle’; ‘All The Madmen’