Let’s Dance

The harmony is deliberately economical: Rodgers rebuilt Bowie's folk sketch into a B-flat minor dance vamp where inversion, upstrokes and rhythmic placement do the heavy lifting. The tension between the sleek post-disco harmonic bed and Stevie Ray Vaughan's blues-edged guitar is what makes the track distinctive.

In late 1982, after leaving RCA and signing with EMI, Bowie regrouped with Nile Rodgers at his home in Montreux, Switzerland. Playing a 12-string acoustic guitar that had only six strings, Bowie presented a folk-like number he believed could be a hit with the right arrangement. Rodgers dismissed it as sounding 'like Donovan meets Anthony Newley' and reworked it: moving it higher in the scale, switching the key up to B-flat, inverting the chords and adding upstrokes. A demo was cut at Montreux's Mountain Studios with Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay on bass, whose initial Jaco Pastorius-style part was simplified into the song's bassline.

Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, 'Let's Dance' transformed a folk-like sketch into a sleek dance-rock juggernaut recorded at New York's Power Station in late 1982. Featuring a blues-edged guitar from a then-unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan, it topped the charts in the UK, the US and numerous other countries, redefining Bowie as a global pop superstar.