Bowie’s third single of 1972 offered a tantalising first taste of his next album Aladdin Sane, the follow-up to his breakthrough Ziggy Stardust. Unforgivably, it was kept off the top of the January chart the following year by Little Jimmy bloody Osmond.
The Jean Genie demonstrates Bowie’s gift for pilfering and purloining by building a new song around an old Muddy Waters/Yardbirds/Deviants riff taking Mick Ronson back to his RnB roots in Hull.
It’s also a virtual note-for-note copy of an obscure French song, La Fille Du Père Noël, by Jacques Dutronc. In fact there were essentially two versions of the same song in the charts at the same time, with Sweet’s only number one single, Blockbuster, arriving while Bowie was still in the Top Ten.
The similarity was probably just a coincidence but Nicky Chinn, who wrote the Sweet song with Mike Chapman, remembers a meeting with Bowie at which the latter “looked at me completely deadpan and said: ‘Cunt’… and then got up and gave me a hug and said: ‘Congratulations’.”
The Jean Genie – described in a throwaway soundbite by Bowie as “a smorgasbord of imagined Americana” – is just great, chugging along on that familiar riff while Bowie spins a splendidly surreal yarn about his new mate Iggy Pop (the titular Jean Genie), with an arty nod towards the gay French playwright Jean Genet – of whom I had never heard at the time.
The lyrics are memorably nonsensical – “Ate all your razors while pulling the waiters / Talking ’bout Monroe and walking on Snow White” and “Says he’s a beautician and sells you nutrition / Keeps all your dead hair for making up underwear.”
Best of all is that shimmering shake of the tambourine the leads us into the chorus, and Ronno’s guitar playing – as near to a solo as he ever got on record (though Jeff Beck famously stood in at one gig of the time).
This video was shot by rock photographer Mick Rock during the Ziggy tour, featuring Bowie onstage with the Spiders, interspersed with footage of him larking about outside the Mars Hotel in San Francisco with his girflriend Cyrinda Foxe, a Warhol acolyte (and receptionist at Bowie’s NYC management office), rocking a platinum blonde look that blends late-Marilyn and early-Blondie.
Anyway, here is Bowie v Sweet…