"Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)," true to the title, is a strange song with a disorienting lyric. Bowie sings from the perspective of a guy who has a strange encounter with a woman, apparently seducing her ("She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind") and then driving her to madness ("Now she's stupid in the street and she can't socialize").
Bowie explained the song in a promotional interview he sent to radio stations. "It's sort of a nasty piece of London-ism," he said. "The character on that - and it is a character - was objective of a few people I've met. He's sort of a criminal with a conscience... maybe it is about me! He talks in terms of how he corrupted a fine young mind, so it's the the corrupter talking, having his own self doubts."
The song has a horror-inflected sound crafted by Bowie's producer, Tony Visconti. "The 'Scary Monsters' backing vocals sounded like a demonic choir singing through the blades of a helicopter," he wrote in his book A New Career In A New Town (1977–1982) Visconti created these effects by pushing the boundaries of sonic experimentation.
He and Bowie had been working together since 1967 and were on the same page when it came to musical daring. Other Bowie albums Visconti produced include Space Oddity (1969), The Man Who Sold The World (1970) and Young Americans (1975).
Before becoming "Scary Monsters," this song began life as "Running Scared" around 1974. According to Iggy Pop, Bowie played it for him on guitar at a house on Sunset Boulevard, hoping Pop could do something with it. When Pop couldn't make anything of it, Bowie kept working on it for several years until it evolved into "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)." Bowie wasn't one to let an idea go to waste, even if he had to put it on the shelf for a few years.
"Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)" is the title track to Bowie's 1980 album, best known for the songs "
Ashes To Ashes" and "
Fashion." The album was a turning point in Bowie's career, a return to his progressive pop sound following three more experimental albums he made in Berlin. (This era was known as Bowie's "Berlin period. He lived there and embraced the culture. His best known song from this time is "
Heroes.")
On the
Scary Monsters album, Robert Fripp and Pete Townshend both made appearances on guitar, with Fripp playing on six tracks, including the title song. The album was recorded in two main phases: the backing tracks were laid down at Power Station in New York with his core band, while overdubs and vocals were completed at Tony Visconti's Good Earth Studios in London's Soho district.
The distinctive descending notes in the song's introduction were created by producer Tony Visconti using an EDP Wasp, a budget synthesizer memorable for its black-and-yellow color scheme. In his book Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy, Visconti explained how he achieved the unique "barking dog" sound: "I programmed a descending bass line and fed the snare drum into the trigger circuit of the keyboard. Sometimes the kick drum and tom-toms that bled into the snare drum track also triggered the sequence."
Visconti also played acoustic guitar on the track.
According to an interview Bowie did with Tim Rice in 1980, the title came from a box of Corn Flakes cereal that offered a prize of "scary monsters and super heroes" inside.
"Supermen and Nosferatus... as I was writing a New York album, it seemed the perfect collective title for the bits and pieces I was writing," he said.
When performing the song live, Bowie stayed committed to its darker themes. It remained in his setlists through several tours, including the Serious Moonlight Tour (1983), Glass Spider Tour (1987), and the Outside Tour (1995), where he sometimes performed it with Nine Inch Nails. His final performance of "Scary Monsters" was at San Francisco's Kezar Pavilion on December 7, 1997, though he did play an unexpected country music version of it with Reeves Gabrels on Chicago radio station WRXT in October of that year.
