David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album was released in 1983. A collaboration with Chic’s Nile Rodgers, it was an instant success: the title track became Bowie’s only single to go no.1 in the US and UK, while the parent album went on to sell 11 million copies and turned Bowie into the international star he had wanted to be. By the end of 1983, it’s estimated that he earned around $50 million that year alone.
But the album divided Bowie fans. It had just eight songs and, of them, the title track and Cat People had already been released, China Girl was a new version of a song he'd written with Iggy Pop in 1977, and Criminal World was a cover version of another 1977 release by British band Metro – a song that had been banned by the BBC for allusions to gay sex. If it seemed tailor-made for Bowie, the changes he made to Criminal World gave us greater insight into the David Bowie of 1983 than he perhaps intended.
