Lulu bounced back into the charts after a five-year gap in 1974 with her cover of an old David Bowie song – thanks to some help from the man and his band.
With a nod to the past (Berlin’s Weimar cabaret) and a look into the future (Bowie’s Thin White Duke), a cross-dressing Lulu took The Man Who Sold The World into the pop charts in January 1974.
For all but the hardcore Bowie fans, her cover version was the first time they heard this song; just as Kurt Cobain’s impassioned acoustic performance on Nirvana Unplugged would bring it to a new generation 20 years later.
(So much so that, to his chagrin, Bowie was regularly accosted by young Nirvana fans congratulating him on his “cover version” of a song he had written and sung first).
His 1970 album of the same name had not been a hit at the time and Lulu’s career had mysteriously faded following her 1969 Eurovision winner, Boom Bang-A-Bang.
It was her biggest hit and Lulu instantly became a national treasure at the age of only 21, marrying Maurice Gibb of The Bee Gees and expanding her range by moving into panto (Peter Pan) and TV comedy (Morecambe & Wise).
On the musical front she changed direction entirely from pop to make a pair of serious soul albums with the Muscle Shoals crew in America and, while they are rightly revered by collectors, they did nothing to put her back into the charts.
Even her Bond theme – The Man With The Golden Gun – earned an unwanted place in pop history as the only one not to chart either in the UK or USA.
That all changed when Bowie, who loved her voice, invited her to his famous ‘farewell’ gig at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, telling her afterwards they would make “a MF of an record” together. This sleazy retread, recorded at the same sessions where Bowie recorded his own covers album Pinups in July 1973, at Château d’Hérouville in France, is the result.
It’s produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson and features Bowie’s band, as does the B-side Watch That Man, another Bowie song (from Aladdin Sane). Lulu later recalled that: “In the studio Bowie kept telling me to smoke more cigarettes, to give my voice a certain quality.”
Bowie plays the sax and sings backing vocals (on the record, if not in this lip-synced video), Mick Ronson plays guitar, Trevor Bolder the bass, Mike Garson the piano and Aynsley Dunbar (who had just taken over from Woody Woodmandsey) the drums.