David Bowie
Album: Aladdin Sane
Label: EMI
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.davidbowie.com

Having given Bowie's breakthrough Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars the remastering treatment last year, EMI has again entrusted the estimable Ray Staff - who cut the original record at Trident - with tarting up Aladdin Sane. If it were possible to do such a thing with the most lascivious, visceral and downright dirty album of Bowie's canon, Staff is the man to do it and he delivers with a light touch so as not to defile the memory of the record we grew up with. Thanks Ray!

Aladdin Sane is the sound of David Bowie feasting on the world that lay at his feet in the wake of Ziggy. Abandoning any remaining restraint as he allowed America to invade him, this is the wildest party at the very edge of the Earth he fell to. Opening with Watch That Man, a dispatch from the freakiest freak show party, it tumbles into a new Spiders From Mars sound built around the jazz and soul-informed piano playing of New Yorker Mick Garson. For all Mick Ronson's guitar virtuosity - and for all those who bemoaned its fading influence on Bowie's sound - this is a record about piano and perversion.

The title track spins into dissonant outer space from a bold two-chord groove, while the record's darkest moments - Cracked Actor and Panic In Detroit - are able to go further and delve deeper with a piano on board. Of all the tracks, Time has aged least and sounds right at home alongside pensioner David's recent return - cultural decay, human frailty and a little bit dirty.

It's still a genuine surprise that the guileless cover of Let's Spend the Night Together doesn't work at all and the glammed up take on The Prettiest Star is just too saccharine, too redundant and not even Ronson's regeneration of Marc Bolan's original guitar part can disguise its roots as a hangover from a time before Ziggy, a time before time as it felt then.

However, far more successfully, The Jean Genie recalls Bowie's roots in London's R&B scene and is a masterclass is simplicity, blues grit and glamour; while Lady Grinning Soul closes out the record with the night of your life and leaves with a did-that-really-happen sigh.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk