Let's Dance: How Bowie played the outback

Three decades after David Bowie's worldwide hit Let's Dance, the remote Australian community where the video was shot is hoping its link with a pop icon will save it from extinction.

Feral pigs roam the outback surrounding the desert outpost of Carinda. Their carcasses - killed by hunters and discarded - greet visitors approaching via dirt roads.

The parched streets - once thoroughfares for the town's cotton industry - are deserted, and lined with For Sale signs. A decade of drought has made the place all but uninhabitable.

Yet this desolate place, with a population now of less than 40, holds a unique place in popular culture. It was here that in March 1983, a tanned David Bowie emerged reborn - after a decade of era-defining, sexually ambiguous personas - to shoot his comeback video, Let's Dance.

Peter Lawless, the shoot's location manager, remembers Carinda as "the closest thing we could find to a desert-like environment", with its nearby mountain range offering stunning, panoramic views, while the town itself felt untouched by the modern world.

"It was so alien for both sides, Bowie and the locals," he says.

"They didn't believe who he was. It was so off the wall. It was kind of weird."