Let's Dance

Bowie played Rodgers a folk-like demo in Montreux, and Rodgers moved it up to the key of B flat and rebuilt it as a dance record. It was the first song recorded for the album, in the first three weeks of December 1982 at the Power Station in New York with the engineer Bob Clearmountain, and the whole album took 17 days. Bowie used new musicians, including Omar Hakim on drums and Carmine Rojas on bass, and played no instrument himself. He hired Stevie Ray Vaughan after seeing him at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival. The rising vocal build at the start comes from the Beatles' version of Twist and Shout, and the brass riff was lifted from Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn.

EMI America released it as a single on 14 March 1983 with Cat People (Putting Out Fire) on the B-side. It reached number one in the UK, where it stayed for three weeks, and on the Billboard Hot 100. By 2017 it had sold 1,064,227 copies in the UK.

Bowie and David Mallet shot the video in Australia in February 1983 with two dancers from Sydney's Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre, Terry Roberts and Joelene King. It uses a pair of red shoes as a symbol in its commentary on the treatment of Aboriginal Australians.