To this day I think David Bowie’s third album, 1970’s The Man Who Sold The World, remains one of his least-known and poorest-selling. Shame, because it’s also one of his best, as well as marking Bowie’s first work with producer Tony Visconti (back in the fold recently for Heathen) and future Spiders From Mars Mick Ronson and Mick Woodmansey.

It’s cracking stuff from start to finish, albeit coming from some pretty dark headspace, as is amply illustrated by most of the songs on the album. Consider these lines from “All The Madmen” (“Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall, I’m not quite right at all”), “After All” (“Man is an obstacle, sad as the clown”), “Running Gun Blues” (“For I promote oblivion, and I’ll plug a few civilians”), “The Supermen” (“Man would tear his brother’s flesh, a chance to die, to turn to mould”), the title track (“We must have died alone a long long time ago”) and “The Width of a Circle” (actually, that one’s too weird to just pick any single line from).

In some ways, though, track six (or track one, side two for those keeping track on vinyl rather than CD), “Saviour Machine” is the darkest and strangest thing on the album. In galloping 6/8 time it tells the tale of President Joe, who has a dream; unlike Martin Luther King, though, his dream leads to the construction of a machine that brings law, peace and harmony to the world. Bowie sings this opening bit in that somewhat reedy voice he still possessed at the dawn of the 1970s, before switching to a soaring, slightly operatic, reverb-laden tone as the machine “crie[s] in its boredom”:

Please don’t believe in me
Please disagree with me
Life seems too easy
A plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war
Or I may kill you all

Even in the early 1970s I doubt whether many people would’ve picked “a plague seems quite feasible now” for a rock lyric, which is probably why I like it as much. In print, I know, those lines maybe don’t look like much, but the secret and the joy is all in the deathless delivery. There follows a short guitar and synthesiser flourish before Bowie hits the chorus:

Don’t let me stay, don’t let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I’ve seen,
You can’t stake your lives on a saviour machine

Whereupon cue the middle eight and solo by Ronson, some final words of wisdom from the machine, and a second go at the chorus, before the fadeout spins off into spiralling chaos. “Saviour Machine” all adds up, therefore, to a word of warning to us all, and is one of the former Mr Jones’ strangest and most striking early achievements, a million miles removed from “Let’s Dance” and “Modern Love”…