Bowie reached his creative peak in 1972-73 and this song – John, I’m Only Dancing – bridged the brief gap between Ziggy Stardust and the next album, Aladdin Sane.
He actually recorded two versions a few months apart. This is the first, recorded in June 1972 and released as the follow-up to Starman.
After his Starman performance on Top of the Pops launched Bowie’s career with its gender-bending otherworldliness, the BBC’s censors found Lindsay Kemp’s scantily clad mime artists in Mick Rock’s video too sexual (IKR) and banned the video from TOTP altogether, consigning the song to a comparatively lowly No.12 in September that year.
Alternating acoustic guitar with the muffled thump of Woody Woodmandsey’s drums, the song is a strange and wordy affair, its lyric toying with Bowie’s recent revelation that he was bisexual with an apparent narrative of the singer informing his boyfriend John that there’s nothing to be jealous about when he spots him with a girl, because he’s “only dancing.” As a result, RCA judged the song too risquéfor America and didn’t release it there at all.
Bowie would record it again six months later, during sessions for the Aladdin Sane album, and re-released it as a UK single in April 1973, but it failed to chart a second time and was not included on the album. Confusingly, both versions were given the same catalogue number but the second one is a completely different recording, with the addition of Ken Fordham’s saxophone. I much prefer this earlier recording.
There would be a third version recorded in a funky Philly-soul style during the Young Americans sessions in 1974 – John, I’m Only Dancing (Again) – but not released until 1979, which the original version was put on the B-side and this video was finally shown on TV to promote it. The promo was shot by Mick Rock on 16mm film at the Rainbow Theatre in London, during rehearsals for a show on 19 August 1972.
Bowie only had a £200 budget for the film, which it’s actually a silent movie – Bowie and the group are miming to the song, being played through the Rainbow’s sound system on a record player. It’s one of four brilliant low-budget Bowie promos that Mick Rock made (the others being Space Oddity, The Jean Genie, and Life On Mars?).
Incidentally, the gay tease of the song lyric is only a theory: it could equally be about a bloke reassuring a girl’s boyfriend that he’s only dancing with her; and there’s even a theory that it was Bowie’s response to John Lennon making disparaging remarks about his cross-dressing.