The title above sends us on a tangent immediately. Is the mark of a true musical legend the right to be referred to by surname only? Few artists have achieved it: Hendrix, Dylan, Jagger & Richards, McCartney & Lennon, Clapton possibly too, though few would put him in the same bracket as the others. Other rock school heavyweights never quite reached that level – Morrison? Joplin? Daltrey? Jackson?? Nah – doesn’t quite work. Possibly it came about for the Stones and Beatles pairs because of the song-writing credits that were regularly applied after the song titles, but the same goes for Page & Plant or the Davies brothers. You wouldn’t refer to the Led Zep singer as ‘Plant’ though, without sounding like a bit of a peanut. And Bowie appears to be the only one outside the 60s canon to have joined this exclusive club.

But this is all digression. Let us turn to the subject of this post. Since the death of the Thin White Duke, Bowie’s back catalogue has been on heavy rotation in Club Soda Towers and it is the mid 70s opus Young Americans which keeps revealing its plumage in more glorious technicolour on each listen. Ask a guitarist in a rock band for his favourite Bowie records and he’s likely to say ‘Ziggy …’. An art student might well nominate ‘Low’. But for the soul boys n girls who value the groove higher than the guitar lick, Young Americans is the one. The spectacular mid-point of Bowie’s unparallelled 70s run, it bridges the gap between Bowie theatrical glam rock phase and the darker, art-house visions of his late 70s work. Throughout it is the marriage of blissed out American soul and eccentric English pop sensibility, which gives it its joyously ungainly sex appeal. Most of the tracks sound like Bowie taking black American music and putting his own slant on it. ‘Right’, however, which was the B side to the single ‘Fame’, just sounds like black American music of the most seductive kind. A plaintive Sax winds itself around Bowie’s breathless vocals, more acrobatic than they’ve ever sounded, while wah wah guitar and beautifully poised backing vocals propel the record forward. The opening chords it seems provided the inspiration for the Bee Gees’ ‘More Than A Woman’ a few years later. Like the rest of the album, it’s a truly astonishing musical statement from someone who 2 years earlier had elbowed his way to the high table of Britain’s rock Gods but was now showing he could groove with the best of the young Americans.