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Pin Ups (also referred to as Pinups and Pin-Ups) is the seventh studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released on 19October 1973 through RCA Records. Devised as a "stop-gap" album to appease his record label, it is a Cover version, featuring glam rock and proto-punk versions of songs by 1960s bands who were influential to Bowie as a teenager, including the Pretty Things, the Who, the Yardbirds and Pink Floyd.
The album was recorded from July to August 1973 at the Château d'Hérouville in Hérouville, France following the completion of the Ziggy Stardust Tour. It was Bowie's final album co-produced with Ken Scott. Two members of the Spiders from Mars backing band contributed, Mick Ronson on guitar and Trevor Bolder on bass, while Mick Woodmansey was replaced by Aynsley Dunbar on drums. Following a surprise announcement at the end of the tour that the Spiders were breaking up, tensions were high during the sessions, which was reflected in the tracks. The album cover, featuring Bowie and the 1960s supermodel Twiggy, was taken in Paris and originally intended for the cover of British Vogue magazine.
Released only six months after Aladdin Sane and preceded by a cover of the Merseys' song "Sorrow" as the lead single, Pin Ups was a commercial success, topping the UK Albums Chart, but received negative reviews from critics, who criticised the songs as generally inferior to the originals. Retrospective reviewers have described it as uneven, while others believe it had a good premise, but suffered from poor execution. Bowie's biographers have noted it as an experiment in nostalgia. Some publications have regarded it as one of the best covers albums. It has been reissued numerous times and was remastered in 2015 as part of the box set Five Years (1969–1973).
On the final date of the tour, 3 July, Bowie unexpectedly announced that "this is the last show we'll ever do". The announcement drove a wedge between Bowie and his backing band, the Spiders from Mars – Mick Ronson (guitar), Trevor Bolder (bass) and Mick Woodmansey (drums) – specifically Bolder and Woodmansey, who were unaware of the announcement in advance. The two were also unhappy upon discovering the pianist Mike Garson, who joined the tour after Aladdin Sane, was being paid more than them. Shortly after the tour's end, Woodmansey was fired by Garson over a phone call. To record the covers album, Bowie brought back Garson, Ronson and the Aladdin Sane players Ken Fordham and Warren Peace. The session drummer Aynsley Dunbar replaced Woodmansey and Bolder returned after Jack Bruce of the band Cream declined.
The songs on Pin Ups feature the same arrangements as the originals, albeit performed in glam rock and proto-punk styles. Regarding this, Bowie explained: "We just took down the basic chord structures and worked from there... Some of them don't even need any working on – like 'Rosalyn' for example. But most of the arranging I have done by myself and Mick, and Aynsley too." The author Peter Doggett writes that only two tracks, "I Wish You Would" and "See Emily Play", contained varied arrangements from the originals.
A version of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat" was recorded during the sessions but went unreleased; Bowie donated the backing track to Ronson for his 1975 solo album Play Don't Worry. The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" was also attempted during the sessions, but was left abandoned. The sessions were put on hold in mid-July for the recording of the Scottish singer Lulu's covers of Bowie's tracks "Watch That Man" and "The Man Who Sold the World". The Pin Ups personnel contributed to the recording.
Pin Ups was the first of two "1960s nostalgia" albums that Bowie had planned to release. The second would have contained Bowie covering his favourite American artists, but was never recorded. Rumoured tracks to have appeared for the project include the Stooges' "No Fun", the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City" and Roxy Music's "Ladytron". Bowie also considered making a Pin Ups sequel: he had compiled a list of songs he wanted to cover, some of which showed up on his later releases of Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003).
The original LP's rear sleeve featured two photos by the photographer Mick Rock, one of a concert shot from the Ziggy tour and another of Bowie wearing a double-breasted suit cradling a saxophone. Bowie wrote in the book Moonage Daydream: "I chose the performance photos for the back cover as they were favourite Rock shots of mine. I also did the back cover layout with the colour combination of red writing on blue as it again hinted at Sixties psychedelia." A discarded idea for the sleeve came from photographer Alan Motz, who "wanted to shoot Bowie metamorphosing into an animal". This idea would be used for Bowie's next album, Diamond Dogs (1974).
The album's release coincided with Roxy Music's former singer Bryan Ferry's covers album These Foolish Things. As Ferry had recorded his album weeks before Bowie began work on Pin Ups, Ferry was annoyed at the perceived copying of his project, calling it a "rip-off". According to Sandford, he allegedly went to his label Island Records to request they file an injunction to prevent Pin Ups from being released before These Foolish Things. Instead, O'Leary writes that Bowie phoned Ferry to inform him of Pin Ups and requested permission to record a Roxy Music song. Ferry later told biographer David Buckley, "At first I was a bit apprehensive, but Bowie's record turned out to be very different. I myself was always very anxious to be different from other people... and to forge my own furrow." In the event, both albums were released as planned and charted on the same day, 3November 1973.
Pin Ups was also a commercial success elsewhere. It topped the Sverigetopplistan chart in Sweden, and reached number three in Spain, four in Australia and Finland, six in Brazil and the Netherlands, seven in Italy, and eight in Norway and Yugoslavia. Sandford writes that by Christmas 1973, the album was selling 30,000 copies a week. Upon release of the massive commercially successful Let's Dance (1983), Pin Ups returned to the UK chart again, peaking at number 57.
Discussing Pin Ups as a whole, Record Mirror found the album "unsatisfying, too cluttered musically and over-produced". A writer for Sounds magazine also reacted negatively, declaring that Bowie "used R&B as a prop, not a springboard". In , veteran critic Robert Christgau found the idea of the record good, but its overall execution subpar. On the other hand, Billboard responded positively, stating that, "there's humor in this music if you want to take it as a look back in musical time." Robert Hilburn was also positive in the Los Angeles Times. Describing it as a "light, unpretentious, high-spirited album", he hailed Pin Ups as "one of the year's most inviting albums" and one that deserves special attention.
Bowie's biographers have given Pin Ups mixed reactions. Buckley describes it as "uneven but beloved by many". O'Leary attributes its "scattershot feel" and "lack of a coherent style" to the dysfunctional nature of its recording, while Sandford acknowledges the album's lack of originality in the song arrangements. Doggett calls Pin Ups "an exercise in Pop Art", meaning it was "a reproduction and interpretation of work by another, intended for a mass audience". James E. Perone, on the other hand, argues that Pin Ups predated the release of covers albums by other English artists, such as John Lennon with Rock 'n' Roll (1975) and Elvis Costello with Almost Blue (1981) and Kojak Variety (1995). Perone also recognises the album's musical influence, stating that Bowie's version of "Here Comes the Night" was a forerunner in the post-punk and new wave sound of the late 1970s and early 1980s, presaging songs such as Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" (1983). He contests that "Here Comes the Night" foreshadowed the Soul music oriented directions of Young Americans (1975) and Station to Station (1976), while "See Emily Play" evokes the avant-garde experimentations of Bowie's late 1970s Berlin Trilogy.
Some biographers have analysed the album as an experiment in nostalgia, which Doggett states "was already emerging as one of the dominant themes of the early seventies". Pegg writes that "it remains perhaps glam rock's most cogent expression of its own inherent nostalgia, an affectionate reminder of the process that had led to the charts of 1973." Buckley states that the album "began an era of pop archeology" and that it "came at a time of uncertainty, a time when many cast backward glances as pop entered its first retroactive phase". In the Spin Alternative Record Guide, the critic Rob Sheffield agreed, characterising the album's "Swinging London oldies" as "atrophied nostalgia".
In 2013, in a ranking of Bowie's albums up to that point, Gabriela Claymore of Stereogum placed Pin Ups at number 18 (out of 25), calling it "The only one of Bowie's '70s records you can safely call 'inessential'. She felt it was out of place coming off of Aladdin Sane, but stated, "For what it is, it's quite good". Following Bowie's death in 2016, Bryan Wawzenek of Ultimate Classic Rock ranked all of his 26 studio albums from worst to best, placing Pin Ups at number 21. He praised the song choices as "excellent", describing "Sorrow" as the highlight. However, he found that Bowie went "way, way, way over the top" on every other track. He concluded by stating: "In spite of all the effort, Pin Ups remains a slight affair." In the context of Bowie's entire career, Eder views Pin Ups as an artistic statement, in that it represented a "swan song" for the Spiders from Mars and an "interlude" between the first and second phases of his international career, with his next album Diamond Dogs being the end of his glam rock era: "It's not a bad bridge between the two, and it has endured across the decades."
Despite mixed reactions overall, some publications have praised Pin Ups as a covers album, calling it one of the finest in the genre. Pierre Perrone of The Independent and the writers of NME classified Pin Ups as one of the best cover albums in 2013 and 2019, respectively, with the former describing it as "the covers album that launched a thousand copycats." Radio X called it the best covers album ever in 2023. Eder states that today it is still dismissed by many as just another covers album, including Wolk, who in 2015 described it as "quick-and-sloppy".
The American alternative rock band Human Drama imitated Pin Ups for the concept, cover artwork and packaging of their 1993 covers album Pinups.
Production
| +1990 weekly chart performance for Pin Ups
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| UK Albums (OCC) | 52 |
| +2016 weekly chart performance for Pin Ups
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| +2023 weekly chart performance for Pin Ups
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| Hungarian Physical Albums (MAHASZ) | 24 |
| +1974 year-end chart performance for Pin Ups ! Chart (1974) ! Position | |
| Australian Albums (Kent Music Report) | 12 |
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