15 March 1986
At this point in my short life I hadn’t yet heard Bowie’s glam, Philly soul or Berlin records. On the plus side, I hadn’t seen the movie Absolute Beginners either. So, my small child brain was a tabula rasa on which to take this Bowie hit—the title song from the aforementioned movie soundtrack—purely on its merits. I liked it at the time and, even with Bowie’s imperial phase available to me for comparison, I still like it now.
If you ever wonder what classic ’70s Bowie hits would have sounded like if they had been made in the ’80s, then (1) you surely have more pressing things to be thinking about, and (2) here’s a possible clue. ‘Absolute Beginners’ is pretty much ‘Heroes’ through a ‘Let’s Dance’ filter. It gets the soaring lovelorn chorus spot-on; Bowie crooning “If our love song / could fly over mountains / could sail over heartache / just like the films” is dizzyingly dreamy. Everything else—music, lyrics, retro backing vocals—is a bit coffee-table bland and safe, and pulls off the odd achievement of making ‘Let’s Dance’ sound avant-garde. Still, Bowie sells the world-weary romanticism convincingly; his creative instinct and muscle memory were intact even this deep into the ’80s. I think of ‘Absolute Beginners’ as the last great David Bowie single.
