David Bowie – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

Where the fuck did ten years go?

I’d only just bought Blackstar that afternoon. Didn’t even have time to listen to it before the news broke (indeed, my first hearing of the album would be on Double J that evening when they played the whole thing). Dave’s timing was impeccable. In memoriam ten years later, duke.

You won’t buy it either

Contrary to what the ad says, I suspect most people have in fact long forgotten Mr Bowie’s second single of 1970, which Mercury Records apparently politely but firmly insisted he record (or re-record, the original version having appeared on his album) after “The Prettiest Star” tanked and sold only about 800 copies. I don’t know who the hell at Mercury thought this song—even if rocked up a bit with newly added Mick Ronson—would work as a single at all, let alone do better than “Prettiest Star”, but they were shortly proved catastrophically wrong as it did as little business as that song did (indeed, Bowie wouldn’t have a proper hit until “Starman” two years later).

Bowie on Bowie

I think I just found a new favourite image of Dave:

Photographed for Harper’s Bazaar in 2002. I know it’s generally considered poor form to wear your own band merch, but I think we can make an exception for Mr Jones, yes?

Don’t you wonder sometimes

After listening to the live album the other day, I had to pull this out for another listen. I really didn’t get this the first time I heard it, though now I place it as my second favourite Dave album after Ziggy; but I was in good company in not getting it at first, cos in 1977 a bunch of critics (and his own record label) didn’t get it either. I don’t entirely blame them (though Charles Shaar Murray’s description of it as “an act of purest hatred and destructiveness” was kind of ludicrous), cos I suppose it was a fairly what-the-fuck album even in 1977, especially coming after Station to Station. Side two in particular must’ve seemed just alien. Somehow the thing was still popular once RCA grudgingly released it…

Splendid production and a quite remarkable range of sounds at work, and it’s got “Sound and Vision” on it, which is only one of his best singles (the remix of the latter on the Ryko issue of the album is less so, shall we say). And that drum sound. I know Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham get the credit for gated reverb, and Visconti didn’t actually do gated reverb as such on Low, but that harmoniser box he did use came up with much the same effect.

This is all last-night stuff, folks

Revisiting this one tonight in belated honour of Dave’s birthday yesterday. I suppose this is a reasonably representative performance from the Isolar II tour, with the notable exception of “Sound and Vision” making its concert debut at the very end of the tour. George Murray is a pretty solid bassist here, isn’t he? And the intro on “Station to Station” is mad, markedly longer and noisier and more extravagant than the one on Stage.