Week 2: Absolute Beginners (soundtrack, 1986)

I remember listening to my cassette tape of this soundtrack in college and feeling disappointed after the first, excellent song— Bowie’s title track. The rest of the album doesn’t hold up, including Bowie’s second contribution, “That’s Motivation.” There are a bunch of other songs by other people including Sade and Ray Davies, but the highlight is really “Absolute Beginners.” The song holds up and would reappear on subsequent compilation albums (it appears on my reissue of “Tonight”). Not so much for “That’s Motivation,” which is more interesting than enjoyable. Unlike the title track, Bowie actually performs the song in the movie. The whole thing is reminiscent of a Broadway musical, or more accurately, a mid-20th Century movie musical, which is what the film is modeled after. Sadly, these were the only two Bowie songs on my tape (which I still have despite no longer owning a tape player). But that’s not the end of it. The CD version of the soundtrack, which is currently out of print, contained a third Bowie song— Volare. Volare? The Dean Martin song? Yep, that’s it. There’s a scene in the movie in which Bowie hums part of the song to himself. That apparently gave him the excuse to record a tongue-in-cheek version of it (actually, the singing isn’t tongue-in-cheek at all, though the instrumentality sounds like elevator music, which I am pretty sure was meant to be funny). Volare has to count as one of Bowie’s most obscure recordings. I have only heard it recently because I downloaded it off an “Absolute Beginners” EP, which only contains Bowie’s contributions to the soundtrack (along with some alternate mixes of the title track). And despite it being atypical for Bowie, I can’t keep it out of my head…