david bowie

where is this

http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/

Thank you, Ned. Yes, Elvis, the Life on Mars one is mindblowing...he also finds these great photographs to lead off each song entry, and links to streaming versions of the demos and live versions he is discussing...

wow that "life on mars" entry is amazing

Let's hear it for the author of the astonishing "Pushing Ahead of the Dame" who has just completed his epic song-by-song catalogue, with brilliantly incisive essaylets on every recording he could get his hands on, up until Pin-Ups...check it out! This is historic stuff

obviously he is just getting started...I cannot wait for the Diamond Dogs entries!

bowiesongs.wordpress.com

jeez...
http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/

Great blog.

Side two of "Heroes" sounded great walking to work in the sub-zero temperatures this morning.

http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/end-of-chapter-four-1973-1975/

He got a book deal!

Very well deserved, that.

Apparently finally a new album on its way too:
Really surprised "Supper's Ready" made the list, but what the hell I vote that

Been strangely silent from the once so profilic act lately, but this is maybe finally some news.

http://www.countdowncow.com/when/new-david-bowie-album-coming-out-first-half-2011
(Sorry wrong link above)

I was all "wtf David Bowie's doing "Supper's Ready" on his new album?" for a moment there...

"Hello i love david bowie is he coming on tour next year to holland? And how can i write him greatings tiziana"

I was all "wtf David Bowie's doing "Supper's Ready" on his new album?" for a moment there...

Well he does have a habit of doing shit cover versions

Here comes Geir to say "that would be great though, ;)" or some such...

i guess i'm way behind the curve, but i guess need to track down Toys then ?

http://www.planetrock.com/newscentre/rock-news/unreleased-bowie-album-leaked-online-1671

Toy, singular

65 today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB9RSG-56wU

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/06/david-bowie-s-vanishing-act-and-looming-return.html

Busy being Dad

I was just about to post that, curmudgeon...the bit that grabbed me was the drug/alcohol bit. was he really addicted to coke for ten years? i would've thought maybe 73-77 were the coke years...followed by a "massive bout of alcoholism". so he had an alcohol problem STARTING in let's say 1982 (if he did coke for the previous ten years). not sure why i care but it would be nice to know what he was addicted to and when.

Awesome! Bowie will be making a rousing return with a ... coffee table book!

I'm glad I saw him on that Moby tour and later at MSG. He was great.

according to Bowie in Berlin alcohol subbed for coke as early as '76. The other Bowie bios allude to a toot here and there (e.g. Kevin Armstrong, who played on "Absolute Beginners," bought a bag of coke for him for the sessions).

*a toot here and there after the seventies

yeah the story goes that he was often still 'bang at it' circa Let's Dance. just not as bad as in the 70s.

In the name of my never-abated fandom, I would gladly pass the hat around if it would persuade him to stay retired.

I'm still amused that the last new song he performed is that "funny little man" song for RGervais' "Extras"

I've still not actually heard it tho.

In the name of my never-abated fandom, I would gladly pass the hat around if it would persuade him to stay retired.

he's not going to make any new records. there is no longer any cultural cache in making records, and what he likes is being able to make a splash.

He's going to dive into a swimming pool nude with Lexi?

who will love a dad insane

i assume given those stories that he won't ever tour again, huh? i saw him once, serious moonlight '81, hartford. was pretty good, but i'd rather have seen a show from the ill-fated diamond dogs tour (i was 6 then).

Btw, thanks Alfred et all for the responses

It would be great if he suddenly appeared starring in a great play, as he did with Elephant Man (did anyone see him in that on B'way? if so, how was he?)

There are excerpts from it on Youtube... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEwJ3BEL72Q] it's pretty much what you'd expect.

Why does the line 'It's a crash course for the ravers' give me goosebumps?

I've been watching Tin Machine videos for the last couple of hours, then saw that Arcade Fire collab vid which was breath of foul air in comparison

http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Who-Sold-World/dp/0062024655/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343782122&sr=8-1&keywords=the+man+who+sold+the+world+david+bowie+and+the+1970s

Anyone read this yet? I feel bad for the "Pushing Ahead of the Dame" blog guy, this is a song-by-song book so I hope the former's excellent work isn't upstaged.

Sorry, not "former," the blog guy--don't know his name (anyone else been very tired this summer?)

Ha, if anything this book will be upstaged by Pushing Ahead! Dissecting only the seventies is a sign of safety; the whole point of the bowiesongs blog is to do EVERYTHING. Two to one says Bowie himself 1) reads that blog and 2) approves of the fact that he's going whole hog.

hear, hear!

cuz this other fellow doesn't dissect Tin Machine chord sequences like Pushing does

Dogget's book was originally going to be by Ian Mcdonald supposedly; it was gonna be his follow up to Revolution In The Head.
the Dogget book's had relatively little coverage/hype but it's meant to be pretty good but yeah Pushing Ahead.. is gonna be amazing.

Pushing Ahead is currently going through the backwaters of TMII. I don't think anyone else has bothered examining that period in any real detail.

I read a few entries from the Doggett book in Waterstone's and it didn't seem like much more than any other cheapo song-by-song hack job - i.e. anyone with an interest in Bowie could manage much the same off the top of their head. Meanwhile, Pushing Ahead of the Dame is often genuinely revelatory - this was true before he got to 1980, but even more so now. I hope when his book comes out he gets to include at least some of the images from the blog - they're always superbly chosen.

Oh great. I just got that Doggett book...opened it and read an entry and thought the exact same thing, Eyeball.

Wazzabout this other book, Starman, by Paul Trynka, the guy that wrote the Iggy Pop bio that was pretty good?

Bowie also obviously appears in the new memoir Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust, by Ken Scott.

Wazzabout this other book, Starman, by Paul Trynka, the guy that wrote the Iggy Pop bio that was pretty good?

Some of the reporting.

Some of the reporting what?

Some of the reporting was pretty good.

xp I cried so much my wife was worried abt me

I also cannot really listen to Blackstar, although I have played some tracks on the radio recently I am still not up for the album as a whole.

Life changing for me in every way imaginable, checking out an LP copy of "Ziggy Stardust" from the public library at age 13 and I was immediately won over (well, duh).

I had bought Blackstar but hadn't listened to it yet when Bowie died. That day I listened to TND and Blackstar back to back. I've listened to both in the decade since but not that much. Oddly enough for someone whose music has been such a huge part of my life, I didn't cry when I heard the news. The feeling for me was and still is like being run over by a slow moving glacier. I did cry when George Michael died, despite not feeling as much of a connection with his music, because it felt much more personal, like a friend dying.

I still haven't the heart to listen to Blackstar all the way through, I almost wish he had done like a Calypso album as his last or something.

My wife worked on his back catalogue and was in the middle of prepping for the second of the big box sets, I remember much excited talk of the correct version of the lost 'Gouster' record, I woke up that morning and she was already sat up in bed, typing furiously on her Blackberry, 'Bowie's dead' was the first thing she said to me, it felt like a very bad dream. She had dozens of emails and messages going back and forth, I hardly saw her for the next week.

Bowie had been a near constant presence in our house, it was a big percentage of her work for a lot of years. She never got to meet him, always the management instead, who were very cool but never the man, sadly. We got to see him a good few times on the record company dime, I sat next to Eno during the famous Meltdown gig where he played all of Low and Heathen (which was very odd) and we have these lovely signed posters hanging in our stairwell.

I don't believe in conspiracies and the 'everything went to shit after Bowie died' conceit would be more of a supernatural belief, but it is kinda fitting. Later that year my wife was struck by a brain hemorrhage and had to stop working altogether, then we had Brexit, Covid, President Shithouse and all the rest of the chaos. So, it was the beginnings of a heavy time, maybe one day I'll revisit Blackstar.

(which was very odd)

the full-album double-header? or sitting next to Eno?

Sitting next to Eno watching the band play Low, I guess

Obv I cried— I didn’t have his number or anything but we’d met several times, had dinner in Alphabet City. Genuinely the most charismatic person I’ve ever encountered and it’s not even close.

His presence in my life has changed over the past ten years. Something shifted in my feelings about his lyrical style. Maybe it’s just that I’m such a sweaty writer, myself, and I like music with sweaty lyrics more than people doing a free association thing. Blackstar is great that it exists but listening to it has always felt more like homework than anything else.

The two most interesting things I’ve listened to in the past ten years were the Visconti redo of “Man Who Sold”, which is terrific— that album won’t supersede “Station” as my favourite 70s album but it has gotten a lot more play recently. And “The Gouster”, which is a weird one— “Americans” being a very low point for me in my Bowie adoration— still absorbing it and figuring out how I feel about it

Genuinely the most charismatic person I’ve ever encountered and it’s not even close.

It's good to know I'm second to Bowie.

I’ve been meaning for some time to dive into Bowie’s 90s and 00s catalog. I haven’t heard much beyond Never Let Me Down, which unfortunately did at the time. So this thread revive, and Alfred’s display name, seem like a good prompt.

I’ve been exploring Toy today. There’s some really great songs on there. I haven’t listened to him much in the last decade, and certainly not explored the ‘new’ stuff. Not sure why.

On Friday at work I asked my team to post their favourite five Bowie ‘things’ (there are four of us and I suspected we’d have BIG Bowie crossover: I was spectacularly correct). These were mine:

5. The fact that he basically "quiet quit" celebrity for ten years and lived low-key in Manhattan so he could walk his daughter to school and watch Spongebob. I love that.
 
4. Station To Station; 6 songs, all of them absolute BANGERS and really different to each other, yet somehow absolutely possessed of gestalt. His best album qua album, I reckon, with maybe one exception. And apparently he had no recollection whatsoever of making it because he was on a strict diet of cocaine, milk, and red peppers, and thus out of his mind the whole time.
 
3. Strangers When We Meet; maybe my favourite song, alongside "Heroes", this was originally on Buddha of Suburbia in 1993, but then he re-recorded it for Outside in 1995, and it's just amazing, an unsung gem in his ouevre.
 
2. That interview where he tells Paxman that no one has any idea how seismic the internet is going to be, and Paxman looks at him like he's a madman, and Bowie was absolutely right.
 
1. Blackstar, the whole recording, release, death affair. Just an absolutely incredible way to go, an extraordinary record recorded and released in an extraordinary way. On a weekend when Exeter City were playing a premiership team in the FA Cup, just like this year, exactly a decade later...

There was a time when I put "Strangers When We Meet" (the Outside version) on every mixtape I recorded for people; I was convinced it was the era's grand ballad.

Catching the Outside tour show I did was gratifying because he did both "Strangers" and "Nite Flights." Full setlist:

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/david-bowie/1995/great-western-forum-inglewood-ca-4bd62bba.html

As I said in my Patreon piece, this was only one of two shows I ever saw him do and the other was a Tin Machine promo, and for a Bowie show where he was still steering away from the obvious back catalog choices the results were amazing (especially since both "Andy Warhol" and "Man Who Sold" were heavily reworked for that tour in particular -- a smart decision, in the case of the latter song, to not simply seem like he was riding off Nirvana's take).

There was a time when I put "Strangers When We Meet" (the _Outside_ version) on every mixtape I recorded for people; I was convinced it was the era's grand ballad.

I think it was you who turned me onto it.

i broke down and bought the I Can’t Give… box set and was delighted at the comprehensive book, and was not delighted by the tiny typeface

I was talking to my partner on the bus on the way to a massage - and out of nowhere she just said "oh David Bowie is dead" having read it on a headline - I told her that was clearly bullshit as it was there had been a few hoax-y death rumours, I remember Jeff Goldblum was one

anyway I finally accepted it was true and had to get off the phone, then I was lying on the massage table with my mind racing and I could hear my phone going buzz buzz buzz with pals messaging to tell me that bowie was dead

I was shocked by how upset I was, it was a really hot night in Sydney and my family was away and everything just felt fucked, the next day I drove to the beach and had a swim at sunrise and listened to Fantastic Voyage and the instrumental side of Low

that evening a friend came over and we listened to the classics, and talked about Bowie things - then I couldn't listen to Bowie for ages and ages - still haven't played Blackstar since my second spin (the day before he died)

I don't really get sad about people I don't know dying but with Bowie I felt like I needed to apologise to all those people who got sad about Princess Diana who I had thoroughly mocked at the time

oh yes I remember my young son being out and seeing a David Bowie Dead newspaper headline and telling his partner with surprise "look other people like David Bowie, it isn't just dad!"

*telling my partner!

I didn't cry when Bowie died but it was just so shocking -- the last thing I expected to read about that day, especially considering that he'd released an album two days earlier -- that I felt a dark cloud hanging over me for a few days afterward. I had assumed he was retired from the music business after 2005 or so, and had come to accept that. Then he returned out of nowhere and was gone a few short years later.

My favourite Bowie "thing": the possibility that Bowie inspired the sleng teng riddim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIaESzQ1X9w

seu being great