Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Let’s Dance sheet music

Let’s Dance sheet music

Let’s Dance sheet music, lyrics and music by David Bowie, c 1983

Jones Music, Woolloomoolloo (NSW), photograph by Denis O’Regan

MUSIC FILE/BOW

Acquired September 1983


BOWIE DOWN UNDER

Let’s Dance is a song about dancing with a lover and tells the story of a young Indigenous Australian couple’s struggle with assimilation. Written and performed by UK cult-hero David Bowie, it was the singer’s fastest selling single to date and his only transatlantic No. 1 hit. Bowie was an early pioneer of music video and these clips as little movies, stating that ‘some movies can have a point…so why not try to make some point…all over the world’. Determined to use his music videos as a platform for social observation, Bowie devised the Let’s Dance clip as a direct statement against racism and oppression. Filmed on location in Sydney and outback NSW, in March-April 1983, this music video provided one of the few instances for contemporary urban Indigenous Australians to be seen on global television by mainstream audiences.


David Bowie’s little-known love affair with Australia — a country he called ‘brutal and terrific’ — began at the age of 12, when he bought a recording of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre Du Printemps because it had an ‘entrancing’ picture of Uluru on the cover.


Denis O’Regan (1953–  ) was an emerging talent in rock photography when he landed the ultimate professional ‘gig’ as official photographer on David Bowie’s first truly grand-scale, global tour — the first of the performer’s four Australasian tours — which arrived in Australia in November 1978. 


During a break in the 1978 Australian tour, local support act The Angels were booked to play a gig at the Bondi Lifesaver Club — then a popular music venue in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs — to the amazement of the band and their audience, Bowie and his entourage dropped-in to see the show.


Bowie visited Australia regularly for nearly a decade, between 1983 and 1992, staying in Sydney, ‘the great sparkling city of the new world’ for a month at a time and revelling in the anonymity afforded by his apartment overlooking the harbour at Elizabeth Bay, his ‘favourite suburb on the planet’.


The Let’s Dance album was recorded in three weeks; describing the record as ‘a protest album’ and an exercise in direct expression Bowie cited advice he’d received from John Lennon, ‘say what you mean, make it rhyme and put a back beat to it.’