Hunky Dory: The coming of age of David Bowie, the chameleon of pop, before Ziggy

And he discovered it by accident. “I was about 15 and it was Halloween,” he recalls. “I’d procured an illegal six-pack of Carlsberg to drink up the fields, as you do, and when I met my friend, his older brother had had his drink confiscated. So he offered to swap me Hunky Dory for my beer. I think I already knew Life on Mars?, but I asked him to play a few more.”

He made the swap and took the album home. There would be no regrets. “Once I heard the whole album, it was Bowie all the way for me. I never looked back.”

Brereton is a man of many hats. He is the guitarist in the Dublin band Sack, he plays in a Bowie tribute act, the London Boys, who focus exclusively on the pre-fame days of the late 1960s, and he is the director of the Dublin Bowie Festival, the now-annual celebration of one of pop’s most enduring icons.

Last year, the festival survived unscathed. Covid was still unknown here. This time around, it’s all happening online, and there is a special emphasis on Hunky Dory, which was released half a century ago this year. 1971 is now regarded as one of the greatest years in modern music — Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and Joni Mitchell’s Blue were all released — and Hunky Dory is up there with the best of them.

“It’s an album that’s revered among Bowie fans,” Brereton says.

“Tim Burgess [the Charlatans frontman] is doing one of his Twitter listening parties on the album [tomorrow night] to coincide with the festival and when it was announced, a huge number of Bowie fans said it was their favourite album. Hunky Dory has everything, but most of all it has really great songs.”

Several of Hunky Dory’s tracks are essential components of the Bowie canon, including opener Changes, the aforementioned Life on Mars? and Oh! You Pretty Things. The latter Bowie composition had already been released by Herman’s Hermits’ Peter Noone, with the young David on keyboards. Changes would come to be seen as self-fulfilling prophecy about Bowie’s chameleon-like shapeshifting throughout the decade and Life on Mars? was, apparently, an attempt to rewrite Sinatra’s My Way. Bowie later said the song was “inspired by Frankie”.

Bowie was just 24 when he started work on the album, his fourth. After the rock stylings of The Man Who Sold the World — released in November 1970 — he opted for a more contemplative approach. Brereton calls it “the most acoustic album he made” — and it’s certainly one of the albums in his vast catalogue that that comfortably fits into the traditional singer-songwriter mould. Ironically, for an album that features plenty of strummed guitar, most of the songs originally came to life on piano.

On Hunky Dory, he collaborated with a group of musicians including guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey, the three of whom would be with him for some of his most daring sonic adventures of the first half of the 1970s. Progressive rock visionary Rick Wakeman, who had played on his 1969 breakthrough hit Space Oddity, returned as pianist on sessions that began shortly after Bowie’s US tour in early 1971.

The album saw him take giant leaps as a songwriter — and the Bowie boffins have been kept busy ever since trying to untangle his thoughts on several of the songs, including the knotty, extraordinary The Bewlay Brothers, the closing track.

Two songs pay homage to a pair of iconic US songwriters: Song for Bob Dylan — “Oh, hear this Robert Zimmerman/ I wrote a song for you/ About a strange young man called Dylan/ With a voice like sand and glue” — and Queen Bitch, which is in thrall to the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed. Bowie had covered that band’s I’m Waiting for the Man in 1967 and in 1972 he — along with Mick Ronson — would produce Reed’s groundbreaking solo album, Transformer.

It’s Quicksand, a song dense with allusions to occultist Aleister Crowley and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ conceit, that has intrigued Shobsy, the stage name of Shane O’Brien, frontman of the Dublin band State Lights, from the first moment he heard it.

“There’s so much happening on it — musically and lyrically. And to think he wrote it when he was a year younger than I am now. He doesn’t sound 24. There’s a sort of agelessness to the songs.”

Shobsy is 25, and — remarkably — discovered Bowie the way many others had years before. “I saw that clip of him playing Starman with Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops,” he says of the legendary 1972 TV performance. “I was about 13 at the time and it was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ He was like this figure from outer space preaching through the television screen at me.”

It was a performance that introduced Shobsy to Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie — an album that would emerge just seven months after Hunky Dory’s December release — but it was Hunky Dory that would steal his heart.

“What brought me to it originally was Life on Mars? And I think it’s one of the most perfect songs ever written. And, thinking of the album now, you can see the early formation of Ziggy happening then.”

While Bowie has had minimal impact on State Lights’ output, he is fundamental to Shobsy’s burgeoning career as a solo artist. In one of the standout events of the Dublin Bowie Festival programme, Shobsy features in a specially commissioned film where he reinterprets Hunky Dory. Turn and Face the Strange — borrowed from a line in Changes — airs tomorrow evening and sees him tackle the album, one track at a time.

Immersing himself deeply into the album demonstrated to the singer just how much Bowie achieved on those 11 tracks. “It’s his fourth album and you can see that he’s really finding his voice. And it came at a critical stage for him too because he was becoming a father for the first time,” he says.

Bowie’s son, Duncan Zowie Jones, was born in May and Bowie quickly wrote one of his most most sentimental songs, Kooks, in honour of the boy. “Don’t pick fights with the bullies or the cads,” he sings, before adding that smile-making line: “Cause I’m not much cop at punching other people’s dads.” Duncan, incidentally, would later emerge from his father’s shadow as the film-maker behind such critically acclaimed sci-fi movies as Moon and Source Code.

The writer Nicholas Pegg, one of the world’s foremost Bowie scholars, appears at the Dublin Bowie Festival on Thursday for an online interview with Tony Visconti, who produced several of Bowie’s greatest albums (though not Hunky Dory — that was Ken Scott, who also produced The Fall and Rise of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars).

In his seminal book, The Complete David Bowie, Pegg writes of Hunky Dory: “Having exorcised some of the most frighteningly withdrawn and introspective material he had ever written, Bowie could free his mind to concentrate on the conquest of pop. Perhaps, ironically, in the process, he produced in Hunky Dory an album that occupies a privileged place at the very heart of his recorded legacy.”

One would struggle to find a Bowie fan to disagree.

The Dublin Bowie Festival runs online from tomorrow, January 10, until Sunday, January 17. See dublinbowiefestival.ie for events and ticket information