{"id":6945,"date":"2017-11-22T13:21:38","date_gmt":"2017-11-22T13:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=6945"},"modified":"2025-02-03T11:58:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T11:58:32","slug":"on-lets-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2017\/11\/22\/on-lets-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"On Let\u2019s Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wanted to write about David Bowie\u2019s Let\u2019s Dance<\/em> album for the Rialto<\/em> Cold Fire<\/em> pamphlet, primarily because it features the song \u2018Modern Love\u2019, one of my favourite songs to dance to.<\/p>\n

Never going to fall for (Modern Love)
\n<\/em>Walks beside me (Modern Love)
\n<\/em>Walks on by (Modern Love)
\n<\/em>Gets me to the church on time…<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a song about ambivalence, especially towards love, but is sung and played with such a huge sense of joy that it feels like a celebration, the chorus call-and-responses (shown in brackets) providing feverish jubilation.<\/p>\n

(Church on Time) Terrifies me
\n<\/em>(Church on Time) Makes me party
\n<\/em>(Church on Time) Puts my trust in God and Man…<\/em><\/p>\n

This song comes first on the album and, to my mind, dominates it \u2013 I measure everything else against it. The songs that follow immediately, the cracked paranoiac \u2018China Girl\u2019 already made famous by Iggy Pop, and the floor-stopping \u2018Let\u2019s Dance\u2019, are also memorable and striking, spectacular, but then it all seems to descend into a mix of poppy puff pieces that feel far removed from the more inventive ambitions of his earlier work. They\u2019re far removed from the first three tracks of this album, even.<\/p>\n

Bowie later referred to this, with\u00a0Let\u2019s Dance\u00a0<\/em>as the starting point,\u00a0as his \u201cPhil Collins\u201d period. A\u00a0Phil Collins\u00a0period means different things to different people (especially to\u00a0Phil Collins\u00a0I\u2019d assume) but my impression is that Bowie used it pejoratively, to indicate a prioritisation of commercialism at the expense of credibility. Selling out, if you like, but in all its meanings, and deliberately of course, as with everything Bowie did. Even so, \u2018Modern Love\u2019 remains a glorious pop hymn, at the top of a strange knowing album slide down that enacts Bowie\u2019s transition into a different phase of his career.<\/p>\n

I wanted to try and capture some of this feeling in the poem \u2013 this ambivalence towards love, towards work, towards the world, the possibility of great highs and great lows, but also this sense of being on the edge of something, of starting a descent. It is also a product of the period I wrote it in: late January 2017.<\/p>\n

I almost feel nostalgic for the manifestation of my anxieties in that period. They seem so calm and collected in comparison to today\u2019s. It was after Trump\u2019s inauguration, when reality was starting to sink in, but the year was still new. The mass culling of all my childhood heroes, including Bowie, that happened in 2016 was over, and Brexit realities had yet to hit. This was all back before Trump had decided to try and start a race war and a nuclear war in the same week, back before people were flying swastikas so openly over America. There\u2019s a bit of \u2018China Girl\u2019 in the poem, but perhaps if I was writing now I might have leant on it more.<\/p>\n

Visions of swastikas in my head
\n<\/em>Plans for everyone
\n<\/em>It’s in the whites of my eyes
\n<\/em>My little China girl
\n<\/em>You shouldn’t mess with me
\n<\/em>I’ll ruin everything you are<\/em><\/p>\n

The poem I ultimately created is a pastiche of quotes, lyrics and writing about the album, moulded together into a single piece. It acknowledges the darkness and confusion, but ends with the spoken word introduction to \u2018Modern Love\u2019, which is as good a mantra for modern life as I\u2019ve ever heard. There\u2019s a time when I would have wanted us all to unite under the singular banner of \u2018Let\u2019s Dance\u2019. In these harder days though, these are the words I most live by:<\/p>\n

I know when to go out
\n<\/em>And when to stay in
\n<\/em>Get things done<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chrissy Williams<\/em><\/p>\n

You can buy cold fire <\/strong>here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wanted to write about David Bowie\u2019s Let\u2019s Dance album for the Rialto Cold Fire pamphlet, primarily because it features the song \u2018Modern Love\u2019, one of my favourite songs to dance to. Never going to fall for (Modern Love) Walks beside me (Modern Love) Walks on by (Modern Love) Gets me to the church on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6947,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6945"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6952,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6945\/revisions\/6952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}