This record reeks with the stench of a city gone rogue. It throbs to the beat of dystopian gloom before dystopia was even a thing. In the mid-seventies, my best friend V and me were planning our overthrow of the Kingdom of Rock from her family’s living room in Westmount, Montreal. We had her parents fancy cabinet turntable, a ton of seminal records that were current at the time, a very loud speaker and a LOT of hash.

Bowie was our fearless leader, menacing and elegant with his skeletal frame and tendrils of cigarette smoke curling up the wicked planes of his cocaine – chiseled visage. He wasn’t just ‘gender -fluid’, he was ‘human -fluid’, – bordering on alien. His low pitched voice exuded passion and a deep world weariness – before we even knew what that was.

The stand out track for me on this brilliant record is the extraordinary “Sweet Thing/Candidate”. When he wails ‘well you see – that I’m scared and I’m lonely’ he pretty much speaks to an experience that all of us are familiar with – and somehow he makes it less lonely.