Just weeks after he famously “retired” Ziggy Stardust at a live show, David Bowie bounced back with a saxophone singing Sorrow, the first track from the covers album Pinups.

The list of cover versions that improve on the original – or even bear comparison to it – is short, and the subject of eternal arguments. In late 1973, two of my favourites came out in the space of a single week. This was the first.

To be fair, most of Pinups still leaves me cold. Apart from this song, which is one of my favourite Bowie singles. I’d never seen this strange video with Amanda Lear – and Bowie demonstrating his terrible ‘acting’ at the end.

A lot of fans felt Pinups was not a “proper” Bowie album because it consisted entirely of covers of songs by British bands from the mid-Sixties (The Who, Kinks, Yardbirds, Pretty Things, Pink Floyd, Them). And critics, perhaps brought up on those earlier songs, were far from enthusiastic.

For me, too, the album – intended as a stopgap before his next proper album – was a disappointment after Aladdin Sane (my favourite) apart from Sorrow and its equally great B-side, his dramatic interpretation of the Jacques Brel song Amsterdam.

But, coming out just after that famous “last show we’ll ever do” speech when Bowie retired Ziggy Stardust, it was just great to have him back making music.

Sorrow had been a 1966 hit by The Merseys and that’s the arrangement Bowie adapts. But it first appeared a year before that, in a slower folkier style, on the B-side of another cover version – Fever – by an American band, The McCoys. It wasn’t written by them, but by the same songwriting team as I Want Candy, another song I know only from cover versions (by Bow Wow Wow and The Count Bishops).

Bowie’s band on Pinups featured a new drummer in Aynsley Dunbar after he had summarily dismissed drummer and bassist Woody Woodmandsey and Trevor Bolder, though Bolder was invited back after Bowie’s first choice – Jack Bruce from Cream – turned down his offer to join…  something I never knew ’til now.

Footnote: apparently The Beatles “borrowed” one of the lines from Sorrow (“With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue”) for a song on Yellow Submarine called It’s All Too Much.