In 1973 David Bowie came out with an album of Covers called Pin Ups. The cover had himself and the model Twiggy dressed like Fembots from an episode of The Bionic Woman or some post Logan's Run version of clones. Anyway... most people don't remember this Bowie outing, sandwiched in between Aladin Sane and Diamond Dogs. Mostly tunes by The Who, Pretty Things and Syd's Pink Floyd, there are some cool stuff here. Rosalyn, I Can't Explain, Where Have All The Good Times Gone, Shapes Of Things & Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere. Overall a very enjoyable listen. The original Ryko re-issue had two extra tracks: Springsteen's Growin' Up & Port Of Amsterdam. Definitely worth it to find that edition.

Dig it!

If the opening one-two punch of Rosalyn/Here Comes the Night doesn't catch you, nothing will. Bowie seemless re-invents these mid 60's swinging London songs and turns this into a true Ziggy Stardust album. At the same time he shows true respect for the songs. Listening to this disc makes you realize what a great band the Spiders were...and one of his coolest covers, too.

The reviews I read here call this an album of covers, which it is. But to call it that, merely that, misses the point.
Bowie has always been one to do something different, even if it is exactly the opposite of what was expected of him - something U2 has borrowed from. This album is indeed a tribute to the music that influenced Bowie during the British Invasion during the 60's, as the original LP liner notes explained. You hear The Who, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, Them... But no Beatles or Dave Clark 5. Bowie makes a very personal statement hear, not only by defying expectations of his audience as perhaps the most original songwriter of his generation, but by taking his favorite songs by the bands that influenced him and putting his stamp on them with the then-Bowie style that those bands had influenced.
When I was 16 in 1983 I would travel to Crow's Nest Records in Crest Hill, IL (long before "Crow's Nest Digital") to search their massive supply of records and other fandom paraphernalia, particularly the many U2 imports. You could get anything there - from Boomtown Rats to Soft Cell to Hüsker Dü. A staff member there noticed my selections and asked if I like Punk. "Yes." "Do you own 'Pinups'?" "What's that?" (Fearing that he was talking about some kind of bad magazine.)
He explained that Bowie's Pinups was the first Punk record, because it bridged the gap between the 60's bands like The Who and The Kinks and the Punk bands that they influenced, from Iggy to Bowie to Talking Heads to the Pistols. I don't know if I agree that it was definitely the first Punk album, anymore than I agree that Elvis' "That's Alright" was the first Rock 'n' Roll Record, but like "That's Alright", Pinups was a monumental record in my musicology. It turned me on to Bowie and then to each of the bands that Bowie saluted with Pinups, and a whole new world opened up to me beyond the Beatles and a connection was made that before bands like the Ramones and before Bowie was singing "Let's Dance" there was a music with an intense authenticity, fertile with sound that would inevitably plant itself in the hearts of musicians for generations.
Most point to Ziggy or Aladdin Sane. But this and The Man Who Sold The World have always been my favorite Bowie records. Ziggy, Sane and Diamond Dogs are right there as well, and now, with Outside and Heathen, Bowie rocks again.
Another note: This concept certainly influenced the Annie Lennox album, Medusa.

I had to write this review to correct misinformation posted by the reviewer from Auburn, AL. The songs covered on this album are, by no stretch of the imagination, '50s bebop songs.' What Bowie had in mind when recording this album was a tribute to the mid-60s British music scene, and the songs covered here include works by The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Them, and Pink Floyd, as well as a handful of other since forgotten bands.

Though, as a rule, I am not a great fan of cover versions, Bowie here does a good job of putting his particular stamp on the songs while retaining the feel of the originals. His version of 'Here Comes the Night' and 'Sorrow' are very well done, and he even pulls off a pretty Floyd-ian take on 'See Emily Play.' But the best track is his slowed-down and muscular version of The Who's 'I Can't Explain.'

Though perhaps a bit "un-Bowie" in that it lacks the art-rock originality and energy of other Bowie albums of the 1970s, Pinups is a solid album nonetheless.

At the time, Pinups appeared to be little more than a quick toss-off, a means of pushing out something fun before digging into the next serious `project'. I suppose that it still remains the same even now, only that it has taken on an aura all its own in the past thirty years (my God, has it been that long?). Pinups shows Bowie paying tribute to the bands that had influenced and inspired him while growing up in the sixties. From the perspective of a new millennium, it might be hard to conceive of a time when, like most other English kids, David Bowie was a fan and not a superstar, but he was. In his pre-Ziggy, pre-superstar, pre-pubescent era, he loved Pink Floyd, the Who the Kinks and the Pretty Things like any school-aged English boy would. As it turns out, he was no ordinary schoolboy, and his interpretations of these songs are hardly ordinary, either. Bowie plays with the arrangements of these classic (or semi-classic) compositions, treating them reverently but never resorting to straight cover versions.
Taking a cue from his magnificent remake of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" on Aladdin Sane, Bowie brings as much as he borrows. Because of its oddities and idiosyncasies, Syd Barrett's (of Pink Floyd) "See Emily Play" is not a song that could normally be considered for a cover version, but Bowie does a magnificent job of it, retooling it as a psycho-surreal workout for the fabulously gifted pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar. Other arrangements that transcend expectations are "Friday On My Mind" (with the `zoom zoom zoom-zoom-zoom' backing vocals a la Esquivel) and "Rosalyn", a rocker that Bowie turns into something resembling psycho-billy.
As for the rest of the album, there are high points ("Sorrow", "Everything's Alright") and moments of mediocrity ("Shapes of Things" "Where Have All the Good Times Gone", and "I Can't Explain" don't offer much that's new in their interpretation here), but it never gets bland, and it's never anywhere near bad. At this point, Bowie was cruising high and firing on all cylinders. He was slowly working his way away from the `Ziggy' persona, but Pinups catches Bowie at a time when he and his creation melded naturally, and as such, it is also one of the least pretentious works of Bowie's career. A- Tom Ryan