Track Listing

1. Width Of A Circle
2. All The Madmen
3. Black Country Rock
4. After All
5. Running Gun Blues
6. Saviour Machine
7. She Shook Me Cold
8. Man Who Sold The World
9. Supermen

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3250 in Music
• Released on: 1999-09-06
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced

Amazon.co.uk Review
With 1970's The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie set aside his pop and singer-songwriter aspirations and headed in a harder-rocking direction. Producer Tony Visconti provided a thick, dense setting with guitarist Mick Ronson playing the role of guitar hero to Bowie's megalomaniac frontman; think Keith Richards and Mick Jagger sprinkled with fairy dust. The new approach flowered on Hunky Dory, but the outline for the master plan is here. The title track, "The Width of a Circle," and "All the Madmen" are essential Bowie, as he slips from cryptic to straightforward, celebratory wordplay. --Rob O'Connor

Customer Reviews

After All - not quite a superman yet
This sounds like a great big jamming session. It is very much an album to showcase Mick Ronson's playing talent, but, from what I understand, Visconti has commented that Bowie himself was not very "present" for much of the work on the album. It shows. It is a brilliantly crafted and engineered piece of rock (as you'd expect from Visconti); but the sensibilities of the mainman himself seem very much in the background except on the beautiful "After All" and "All the Madmen".
"Width of a Circle" sounds to me, for all its evident musical strengths, like Bowie trying hard to be Mick Jagger. But Bowie simply, at that age, did not have the balls for it. His instincts were theatrical and music hall; hardcore rhythm n blues was as alien to him as country and western or reggae.
The album has some, frankly, awful moments - Running Gun Blues, Saviour Machine, Black Country Rock (complete with its "Mock" Bolan vocals.)Even the title track starts to pall after about a minute and a half (Nirvana did it better).
For me, TMWSTW is the least successful of all Bowie's seventies output and represented a complete dead end for him; one he would only revisit again in 1988's Tin Machine; and look at the carnage that caused! Nonetheless, it is worth three stars for the great production and two lovely songs. Thank goodness for Hunky Dory, and the genuine songwriting genius that the next three albums showcased.

The Man Who Sold The World: What Ed thinks
Now fully restored with the original 'Dress' cover- if you remember this with a black sleeve and Bowie/Ziggy performing a high kick, it is the same album. And what an album it is. You won't find any of this on the greaters hits CDs, as it contained....no hits. What you do get is one of those classic 'track 1 side 1s' in Width of a Circle, an 8+ minute piece of classic early '70s rock. There is a good balance here between rock (Black Country Rock, Running Gun Blues, Saviour Machine) and the quieter tracks that hark back to Bowie's previous 'Man of Words' album (After All being a case in point). The MWSTW album is the one album that confirmed I was, indeed, a Bowie fan. Can't mention the title track nowadays without mentioning Nirvana, who covered it on 'Unplugged'. Luckily for curious Nirvana fans wanting to hear the original, it sits on a rewarding album. Buy it.

Finding His Style But Too Much Filla
It feels bad to be a Bowie fan giving the lad a 3-star rating, but after just listening to this again, the minutes do drag somewhat.
The whole album feels like Bowie trying out "rock" in a Deep Purple stylie, but Bowie is pop to his very core & it is really a Ronson/Visconti album acoustically, while the lyrics feel throwaway.
"Width O A C" is certainly a great opener and a huge change in style from the last album. But it smells a bit prog to me - a welding of different song bits together rather than the "proper" songs that made his name.
"All The Madman" feels honest and open, which is very rare for DB. Depressing but my favourite cut off the album, here he is trying to work through the madness that had touched his family.
And after that, the album dies on its arse. Dull dull derivative rock all the way before a bright interlude of "Man Who Sold T' World" (a proper hit record hidden away) before the Nietzschian boredom of Superman.
This version doesn't have the extras of others, and that's a blessing. "Holy Holy" is a holy mess, and the early version of "Moonage Daydream" is dire. "Hang On To Yourself"'s energy is suppressed under lacklustre playing.
This is not an album for any but the most committed Bowie fan - newcomers should skip along to Hunky, Ziggy or Station.