Bowie Top Ten (contains no Ziggy)

Inspired by James Gent's brilliant, knowledgable and tasteful reimagining of a Bowie boxset, I reckoned I could do another 50 different Bowie tracks and it'd still be fantastic.  Then I remembered I have ten days to do a major re-work of my Sherlock Holmes' novel, so decided that ten tracks would have to be enough.  

And then decided - to make it interesting - that none of the tracks could be from either any of Bowie's classic 70s albums, or from his post-Outside resurgence in the late 90s.

And I could still have done 50, you know...

1.  When I'm Five
Originally recorded as a demo in 68, this seemingly whimsical and slight tune sung from the POV of a small child finally made an appearance on mish-mash release 'Love You til Tuesday' and then promptly disappeared again, to be remembered only by Bowie obsessives.  From the first time I heard it, though, I thought it was the saddest song I'd ever heard - and thirty years of listening later I still feel much the same.  It's not a reading I've seen elsewhere so probably nonsense, but the lyrics have always felt to me to be about a seriously ill  four year old. 

Why else does Daddy shout loudly at Mummy when she says the narrator - if he's good - can go to school in August.  Why does he then burst into tears?  For that matter, what's with the headaches in the morning, and why is everyone so soppy and daft when he falls off a trike?  Finally, pleas to Jesus to make him five?  Nope - he's a goner, I reckon.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrmiDWzGvSI

2. Conversation Piece

Another 60s demo which didn't make a contemporaneous album, but instead mouldered in Bowie's archive for a bit, then slipped - almost un-noticed - into the world, as the b-side to the 1970 re-issue of 'The Prettiest Star'.  Bowie re-recorded it for the abortive 'Toy', but I much prefer this acoustic version from 1969 which I first heard on a tape bootleg called 'Bowie Rarities' c 1982.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T54kkF_V4oE

3.  Buddha of Suburbia

Seriously, anyone who says Bowie never recorded a great record between Scary Monsters and 'Earthling/Outside/Heathen/Some Other album from the late 90s onwards' should be forced to sit down and listen to this entire album but - to save time - just give the title track a spin.  Deliberately self-referential (both musically and lyrically, but also in its South London setting), funny and thoughtful, with a great melody, some fantastic guitar and a video where Bowie sits and strums a guitar on a tree stump, the only reason this wasn't a huge return to form was that he didn't need one of those - he'd never been away...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48d4irOHhLY

4.  Time Will Crawl
And just to prove that, how about 'Time Will Crawl'?  Described by the man himself as one of his personal favourite tracks, this is a single as good as anything Bowie has recorded.  It's not subtle, it's not layered and it features Bowie's shittest ever hair style, but from a decade where - random example - Status Quo managed to get into the top ten with 'In the Army Now', this is pure gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMhMaNAmT-U

5.  As the World Falls Down

I almost went with Matt and my favourite track from 'Labyrinth', the awesome 'Magic Dance', and then I thought of 'Underground', for the wonderful refrain of 'Daddy, daddy, get me out of here' if nothing else - but when I was looking for that on YouTube I realised I prefered this, one of Bowie's more mannered vocals, and a genuinely forgotten but lovely ballad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VppuD1St8Ec

6.  Remembering Marie A

James went with the admittedly superb bleakness of 'The Drowned Girl', but personally I've always thought this was as good as Bowie ever sang.  Why is Baal not available on blu-ray, with a beautiful deluxe cd remaster?

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

7. Silver Tree Top School for Boys

This list is a bit 'on the trail of lost songs', I know but Bowie's own version of this turned up unexpectedly on the Bowie Record Day release in 2012, alongside 'Little Tin Soldier'.  Sadly, the version on there isn't a patch on the Beat Stalkers cover version (on which he allegedly sang backing vocals) from the 60s.  Still it's a great song and if you love Bowie's Deram stuff (and you do, don't you?), then this is a little discarded slice of that very English form of psychedelia.

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

8. Loving the Alien

I wasn't a huge fan of Let's Dance, with the exception of 'Ricochet' and I didn't even buy a copy until several years later when I came across it in the Bargain Bin at Vinyl Villains in Edinburgh's Elm Row, but I thought aout half of Tonight was genius from the off.  'Loving the Alien' is my favourite purely because I have a rather lovely picture disc 12" of it, but I could as easily have chosen 'Blue Jean' or 'Dancing with the Big Boys' (or 'Tonight' itself, shorn of Tina Bloody Turner).

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

9.  Absolute Beginners

God that video, Bowie as cool as the fags he's smoking, then the guitar coming in  and Bowie giving it 'ba ba ba oo!'  It's enough to make a grown man cry, it's so good.  The 15 year old me thought it was literally, genuinely the Best Thing that Ever Happened to Music (a fact which wasn't even ruined by a terrible, nightmare date at the movie from which is came some weeks later).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8NZa9wYZ_U

10.  Knock on Wood

No, only kidding.  That's a shit song which even Dave can't save.  Instead we'll have my current favourite Bowie track - 'Can't HelpThinking about Me'.  Bowie himself says it contains two of his worst lyrics, but given that it was his first recording as David Bowie,  the first Bowie track to be released in the States and was re-recorded for 'Toy' (as good a version, in its way, as the original).  There are whole back catalogues from mod bands in the 60s and 70s which don't contain a single better song than this Bowie throw away.

60s version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1MXonBG5NI

Storytellers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah07pbw1xws

Pin Ups (1973)

I always liked the idea that Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was supposed to include the Chuck Berry number 'Round and Round' as an example of the sound of the 'real' Ziggy and the Spiders. And one natural progression from that is that Ziggy and the Spiders ended up as a fifties and sixties covers band, and this album is a compilation of their live favourites.

That approach certainly fits with the quality on offer here.  I wouldn't go as far as some fans who have described the album as weak and individual tracks as 'failure[s] by any reading' but neither would I go with Iggy Pop's appraisal of it as 'tight as a bitch from the bottom up on every cut'. It's undeniable, I think, that some of the tracks on Pin Ups add very little to the original versions, which is the aim of a cover, to my mind (though, again, I wouldn't go as far as the Rolling Stone reviewer who, ungramatically, claimed that 'none stands up to the originals').  It's also an album where Bowie is very obviously trying out new vocal styles and voices, which some people see as a weakness. That said, Bowie apparently looked on the LP as a way of shaking the dust of Ziggy off his shoes, which it certainly does, so from his point of view (and whose else really matters?), it was a successful release.

Part of the problem for people who are not David Bowie is an obvious one.  If these are all songs Bowie loves from the period, then he's bound to approach with a degree of respect which prevents a really experimental approach.  So he either has Mick Ronson outplay the original guitarist, camps things up a bit or simply copies the original almost as is.

One thing which is immediately evident is that the originals are largely far more trebly than the remakes, with the result that listening to the original then the cover lends a murkiness to the Bowie versions.  On the first track, The Pretty Things 'Rosalyn', this has the added effect of drowning the great bassline of the source single, which is particuarly unfortunate.

Track two, Them's 'Here Comes the Night', is more successful for exactly opposite reasons.  Where 'Rosalyn' loses a key component as Bowie adds layers to his version, the Pin Ups version of 'Here Comes the Night' is infinitely preferable to Van Morrison's pretty weedy vocal and his band's dated, country-style guitar work.  From Mick Ronson's first screeching guitar note (my phone ringtone for long enough!) Bowie's version is beefier musically and if the vocal is typically mannered, I far prefer DB's emotional exaggeration to Morrison's dry intonation.  To be honest though, the version by Lulu is the best of the three, veering from resigned drawl to a near stacatto spit of anger and ending like an impersonaiton of Roy Orbison's 'Running Scared' (listen out for the weird backing vocals towards the end though).

'I Wish You Would' by the Yardbirds is virtually the definition of a UK garage band track - simple, circular guitar progression, harmonica in counterpoint, very basic lyric and the entire thing sounds like it was recorded by dropping a mic into a metal cow churn. Bowie tidies things up a bit and Ronson tries to do something interesting with the guitar line, but it's all a bit by numbers, even when Bowie attempts a bad boy growl.

Whereas Bowie's 'See Emily Play' manages to sound awesome even when compared to the brilliant original.  The best song recorded by Syd Barrett's version of Pink Floyd, 'See Emily Play' sounds like a child's song in Floyd's hands, with carnival organ sounds breaking the song in two, and lyrics which recount a small girl playing dress up, failing to understand the adults around her and getting lost in the woods.  Bowie's version, on the other hand, makes the line 'You'll lose your mind and play' the centre of the song, and as a consequence produced a more perverse song entirely, in which the adult Emily is insane, double and treble layered vocals shout at her like monsters, and the guitar is an assault on her health not a comfort.  Mike Garson hammers a single key on his piano as the song approaches its end, then starts interposing little runs as violin, guitar and drums create a dischord around the suddently silent singer.  The only genuine triumph on the album, but worth the cost of the whole just for this one track.

The next track up, 'Everything's Alright' by the Mojos is a rotten original, and a pretty bog standard cover which at least manages to make the song listenable.  That's more words than the track really deserves.

I'm starting to flag a bit now, so let's do both Who covers at once.  Both of David's versions of 'Anytime, Anwhere, Anyhow' and 'I Can't Explain' appear to get a bad press from fans of both Bowie and the Who but I don't see what's so wrong with them myself.  Which version you prefer largely boils down to a single question - Pete Townsend or Mick Ronson, and it'll always be Ronson for me.  I've seen 'I Can't Explain' described as 'an act of vandalism' but that, if you ask me, is due to a hagiographic attitude to the faintly unpleasant Townsend rather than any inherent weakness in either song as covered by Bowie.

For the rest, 'Friday on my Mind' is competent and no more, while Don't Bring Me Down' has a subtle reworking of the song's opening line so that Bowie has 'nowhere to roam' rather than 'just want to roam' and a peculiar bur effective near-spoken line towards the end where Bowie puts on his best drawling American accent to good effect.  Nicholas Pegg isn't wrong, too, when he says nowhere are Bowie's most basic influences more obviously on show than here.  'Shape of Things' and 'Where have all the Good Times Gone', om the othe rhand, are pretty decent originals given nothing extra by Bowie and his band.

Which leaves 'Sorrow'.  I love this song, but even I'd have to admit that Bowie's version doesn't really add all that much to The Merseys version (even if David Buckley described it as the album's highlight).  What it is though is MILES better than the Status Quo version below...

Great Lost Track

There's not one really, as evidenced by the way that Rykodisc padded out the 90s reissue with two covers not from the Pin Ups sessions - a note perfect cover of Springsteen's 'Growin Up' and the brilliant but utterly unlike Pin Ups cover of Jacques Brel's 'Amsterdam', at one point planned for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

I suppose the best we can do is this - the instrumentation for a cover of the Velvet Underground's 'White Light/White Heat' was recorded but not used by Bowie, eventually ending up on Ronson's second album Play Don't Worry.



Compare and Contrast


And finally, have a listen yourself - a Spotify playlist with every Bowie song on Pin Ups alongside the original version...

Interlude: Bowie with Dick and Cher, 1974/75

1974 and The Dick Cavett Show. 

Bowie swaggers on stage with an orange quiff and DA, wearing what appears to be a brown Balero jacket, and dances like a rubber legged spastic attack throughout 1984, like a drunk man bouncing off hedges as he staggers down the road only just in control of his limbs. The voice is still fine and he exudes confidence, but close ups on his sweaty, skull like face and his half forced shut eyes tell a different story - any brash self-confidence is obviously based on false, coke fuelled self belief, the thinnest layer of ice over the deepest, coldest lake. How the fuck he didn't end up dead is quite miraculous based on this and the interview that follows, which is filled with Bowie misunderstanding and avoiding questions, laughing at the wrong point, wittering about black noise and even getting words wrong, all the while sniffing constantly. Cher wouldn't have touched him with a stick...

Skip forward a year or so to late 1975, and Bowie dueting with mine host on the Cher Show.

They appear, one after the other, head shots floating in clouds of gender specific colour and croak their way through their opening lines.  Cher, in Una Stubbs' stolen hair (possibly literally) and wearing what - in the fuzz of a fiftieth generation tape - appears to be a black kimono, serenades Bowie in grey slacks and blue blazer; he dressed like the secretary of his local bowling club, she like the Oriental trophy bride of some fifties US executive, as they torch at one another in a studio filled with orange smoke.

But above the collar is the all that matters with Bowie, and above his light blue shirt there's the head of a full on degenerate, drops of pale sweat and slicked back dyed blond hair like straw, Draco Malfoy all fucked up but having the time of his life.Bowie has never looked so close to Nosferatu as this.  If Cher, in her Good Life frock and Charlie's Angels bob, values her life she best not get too close, frankly.

Usually the song itself wouldn't matter at all - see the medley with Cher later on in the show for sheer fun where the song is immaterial - but in this case the song is the perfect complement to the murky, dirty visuals; it's that rarest of things, a genuinely sensual performance.

Even in '75 Bowie's still messed up and you doubt he could even see the corner he needs to turn, but rest assured, Berlin's just over there...

Aladdin Sane (1973)

In a recent interview, Bowie described this album as 'Ziggy goes to America', and as a bit of a filler - a semi-Ziggy album droppe dinto his recoridng schedule almost as a placeholder for a different, non-Ziggy album. He's uner-playing the quality of the songs on offer but he's not wrong about the American influence.  At its most obvious - the very title 'Panic in Detroit', the flirtation with doo-wop at the start of the same track, the Muddy Waters steal for 'The Jean Genie' - it works very well, even if at the lower end  -  filtering the States via a Rolling Stones fixation, the chugging rock of 'Watch That Man' - it comes across as a mildy (if appropriately) schizophrenic mix of the sort of straight-forward US rockers not seen since 'Man Who Sold the World'  and slices of weird Americana, science fiction and even a smattering of torch song.

Side one
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Watch That Man"	4:30
2.	"Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)"	5:06
3.	"Drive-In Saturday"	4:33
4.	"Panic in Detroit"	4:25
5.	"Cracked Actor"	3:01

Side two
No.	Title	Length
6.	"Time"	5:15
7.	"The Prettiest Star"	3:31
8.	"Let's Spend the Night Together" (Mick Jagger, Keith Richards)	3:10
9.	"The Jean Genie"	4:07
10.	"Lady Grinning Soul"	3:54

This album was banned in Rhodesia as 'undesirable', you know.  They musn't be big Rolling Stones fans is my theory, because that band pops up all the bloody place on Aladdin Sane.  For a start 'Watch That Man' is like a Stones song if anyone in that band had any genuine imagination, and 'Let's Spend the Night Together'. while being my second least favourite Bowie cover (see a few hundred words below for anyone desperate to know what track I think is even worse), is a considerably better version of the Stones' original.

Ignore those two, however, and concentrate on the great bits on this lp.  Mike Garson's wonderful trails of piano, Bowie's fragments of lyrics and his voice, moving from wavering insecurity to bellowing grand-standing - and back again - in the space of ten songs.

The title track in fact contains my favourite piano playing of any song ever.  Garson starts off letting runs of notes tinkle up and down, then throws in some dischordant chords, as though he's just thumping his hands on the keys, before launching into a long, mad, rocking piano solo described by one very good Bowie blogger as the best such solo of the decade.  Afterwards he combines with Bowie on sax for a while, like geese farting the fog, before that brilliant ending of little trills and single thumping notes.  It's the end of the world, just as propheised in the dates in the song title.

'Drive in Saturday', in contrast, is the first really American song on the album.  True, it first name-checks Mick Jagger, but other than that this is one of Bowie's very best stabs at sci-fi pop.  Ostensibly a song about two lovers (one more keen than the other, but isn't that always the way) and their attempts to 'get it on', but it's peppered with the same sort of post-apocalyptic lyrical asides which make the song come across as a musical accompaniment to the movie 'The Man Who Fell to Earth'.

Perhaps the strange ones in the dome/ can lend us a book we can read up alone

And try to get it on like once before/When people stared in Jagger's eyes and scored

Mentions of the Astronette and fall out saturation (treading similar territory to Kate Bush and 'Breathing' a few years later), cement the science fiction disaster setting but at heart this is still a pop song about a young American, taking his car and his lover to the drive-in, hoping to take things further, but she's not sure whether she should let him, for all that she tells herself she loves this latest Buddy in a long line of nameless lovers.  Ooh, even as I type that ridiculously unpunctuated sentence out I'm gobsmacked that Bowie fits quite so much into lyrics which I've heard described as meaningless by some people. Bizarrely, it's long been rumoured that Bowie offered this song to Ian Hunter, but the Mott the Hoople frontman turned it down.

Whether 'Panic in Detroit' is actually about the Detroit Riots of 1967, thugs that Iggy Pop knew as a kid or something else entirely, it remains the most amazing b-side to a genuinely crap a-side of all time.  Bowie's cover of 'Knock on Wood' remains his only real creative mis-step of the seventies and backing it with a track voted Mick Ronson's greatest guitar masterpiece serves to highlight that fact something awful.

'Cracked Actor' is vile.  Probably Bowie's most unpleasant lyric of all time.  No, not probably - definitely.  Did he ever again write a line as brilliantly horrible as

Forget that I’m fifty/Cos you just got paid

 or create a character as revoltingly self-obsessed and grubby as the eponymous actor, stiff on his legend, a few years from his Hollywood highs, coked up and looking for cheap sex?  That the description (if not the loss of fame) could, in part, equally apply to Bowie himself a mere year or two later is the world's least surprising irony - a lack of surprise made concrete by the title of 1974's Alan Yentob helmed documentary on the man himself...

The second side kicks off with a song which is less unpleasant, but not by a lot.  In fact, the first few verses would work just as well if you took them as descriptions of the cracked actor himself.  Probably not, though, because that character would still be wanking now, still be buzzing on Quaaludes and red wine, still be looking old.  Whereas by the end of this the singer is crooning that perhaps Billy Murcia (recently decased New York Dolls band member, the Billy Doll of the second verse) is in a better place, smiling now.  It's been described as  'terrible' lyric, and it's certainly lacking in subtlety, but that doesn't seem out of place to me on this album and besides, even when the lyrics aren't perfect, this is an track where the music is always interesting.

I like 'The Prettiest Star' a lot, especially in single format, backed by the original (and best) version of all but forgotten classic 'Conversation Piece'.  But it's the cuckoo in the nest on this album.  Where 'Watch That Man' and 'Let's Spend the Night Together' out-Stones the Stones, and 'Cracked Actor', 'Time' and 'The Jean Genie' are by turns brutal and nasty, 'The Prettiest Star' is a slight, pretty, love song showing its roots as a song from three years previously, when 'Letter to Hermoine' and 'Memories of a Free Festival' were ideal examples of Bowie's work .  True, Bowie and Ronson coated the original in more Aladdin Sane style instrumentation, beefing up the guitar, adding horns, throwing in some backing vocals but for me this attempt to shoehorn the track into the album ends with it being less than it was, like a young girl trying to put on her mum's makeup, or a nice fresh piece of steak slathered in BBQ sauce (or some other strained simile of your choice).

Anyway, in both forms I like it better than 'Let's Spend the Night Together'.  Yes, it out-rocks and is in every way better than the Stones' version but since I could barely fill a double album of great Stones' tracks, even using their entire sprawling back catalogue, that's not exactly the biggest and proudest boast ever.

Rolling Stone's review at the time only mentioned 'The Jean Genie' in its final paragraph, dismissing the track as one of the three weak ones on the album.  But as the reviewer was also apparently under the impression that one of the tracks was called 'Pretty as a Star', I think we can ignore his opinion! Apparently arising from a jam on a bus trip by Ronson and Bowie' equipment manager, Will Palin where the lyric was 'Bus, Bus Bus, - we're going 'Busin'!', the track is now thought of as a Bowie staple, on a par with 'Rebel Rebel' and similar rockier Bowie numbers from the period (Bowie has claimed, incidentally, that the harmonica in the song was a deliberate attempt to ape the Rolling Stones).

(Want to hear a lovely, Dr Who related story from Kevin Cann's 'Any Day Now' regarding Bowie playing 'The Jean Genie' on British chart show, Top of the Pops?

Wednesday 3 January 1973

Dressed in their unusual stage outfits, The Spiders spend time between takes in the BBC bar. "An episode of Doctor Who was also being recorded, so there were actors in futuristic costume drinking there", said Trevor Bolder. "People were approaching us asking what parts we were playing.'

Sadly, Bolder was probably wrong and these were people recording somehting else - no Doctor Who was being filmed at the Beeb that day, so he's either mis-remembering or it was another show entirely. Ta to Jim Smith for the Dr Who info.)

And finally, 'Lady Grinning Soul', the lushest, most sensual song Bowie had written to that point - possibly the lushest and most sensual he's ever recorded (and in another Stones' reference allegedly about the same person as the Stones' 'Brown Sugar').  Hearing it for the first time as a thirteen year old, busily buying every Bowie album I could this was the track that I kept putting on, over and over again, flipping the needle up and back a bit every three minutes, doing my best to make sense of the lyrics - what's an Americard? (a credit card, I discovered years later).  And canasta? (a card game not played very often in Wester Hailes in the early 80s).  

And as for the mention of breasts...well I was thirteen...

The Great Missing Track

Has to be Bowie's version of 'All the Young Dudes'.  Written - allegedly - while sitting cross-legged on Ian Hunter's living room floor, this ode to glam and side-swipe at the rock 'n' rollers of the previous musical generation is, to be honest, better when done by Mott the Hoople but it's no slacker when Bowie has a go either.

Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture (1983)

It may seem a bit daft to leap from the original Ziggy Stardust album to a live version released ten years later, but it would be far more counter-intuitive to put this in strict chronological order, straight after the 80s popgasm of Let's Dance. More importantly for me, this is the album that introduced me to Bowie, and so it both makes more sense to cover it as early as possible and, by putting it here, I'll actually have something to say beyond comparing live to studio versions of the various tracks.

I can remember ripping the wrapping paper from two large, thin, square Christmas presents in December 1983 as though it were, if not yesterday, at worst a day sometime last month. We were at my Nana's house and the presents were from my freshly separated-from-my-mum dad. They had to be albums obviously, but which ones - and why?

In retrospect it's difficult to imagine what prompted my dad to get me two LPs for Christmas, given I didn't own a record player of my own and he had no idea (nor did I, really) what kind of music I liked. Which is not to say I didn't like music - but it had tended to be stuff from my parents' music collection (mainly Frankie Laine, Tammy Wynette, Jim Reeves and Elvis) and the occasional single ('Bright Eyes' by Art Garfunkel was an early favourite, replacing the Disney double A side of The Emperor's new Clothes/The Ugly Duckling in my affections). My own taste in music was as unformed as my taste in naked ladies - I was sure I'd have favourites one day, but Christ alone knows how you found out what those favourites were.

I assume - like Scott's dad with the notorious suitcase full of meat - he bought the records from some random guy in the pub, and I could just as easily have ended up with Handel's Messiah in a commemorative box or a handsome gentleman's shaving set, but maybe I'm doing him a disservice.

Regardless of the reason, it was a revelation for me. The first album - the original Now That's What I call Music - less so admittedly, but even that had some good stuff on it. I spent the whole of the Boxing Day playing the two albums over and over again on my Nana's ancient drinks cabinet cum radio cum record player, loving Genesis, Madness and Culture Club on Now! but just staring open mouthed at the turntable every time 'My Death' came up on the Bowie album.

From that moment on, I both obsessed about music and loved anything David Bowie chose to record. This is the starting point for a life time of Bowie obsession, then, the jumping on point for all those singles, albums, posters, books, soundtracks, cds, videos, dvds, movies and everything else. This album is the reason that I once spent most of a day on the Internet trying to track down a Bowie track I once had listed on a bootleg as 'Library Pictures'. It's the cause of me and an equally Bowie daft mate at school asking for a copy of 'Trader' in HMV (someone somewhere having got the album title 'Lodger' mixed up and thus - in that pre-Internet age - having us believe in a mythical lost Bowie album). It's the justification for the title of my first ever short story ('Future Legend') and that of my less than stellar only ever novella ('The Shape of Things'). This LP led me to the rest of Bowie's back catalogue, but also, circuitously, to Ultravox, Thomas Dolby, Brian Eno, Mick Ronson, T Rex, Tony Newley, the entirety of the sixties folk rock boom, Gary Numan, Sparks, Velvet Underground...

Actually, this album led me to everything. That's why it's the best album ever.

Great Missing Track

A bit of a no-brainer. Jean Genie in a segue into and back out of Love Me do (with Jeff Beck on guitar and Bowie on mouth-organ) was recorded but never included on the album. You can see it here:

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973)

It's 'Stairway to Heaven', isn't it?

Or The Wall. Or Sgt Pepper, or 'Paint it Black' or 'My Generation'. It's Never Mind the Bollocks and it's also that Bryan Adam song about doing everything for you. It's even Wet Wet Wet nicking the Troggs' thunder with 'Love is All Around' (I've just horrible flashbacks to my wedding and the vile music played for the first dance. Shudder. I wanted 'the Ship Song' by Nick Cave, I might add, but that's an entirely different story...)

In short, it's the David Bowie album that even people who don't like music have heard of. the same could be said of Let's Dance, probably with more legitimacy, but you'll both have forgotten about that by the time I get round to Bowie's 80s albums.

It's also the Bowie album which has suffered most due to fan over-familiarity. I mean, I adore Bowie, but I'd be more likely to stick on the Tonight than Ziggy 99% of the time. Ziggy's better - but I've heard it a million times.
So, in order to keep my own interest from flagging, how about constructing the fantasy album that could have appeared straight after Hunky Dory?

To start with, our imaginary album could grab everything recorded by Bowie's proto-Ziggy project, Arnold Corns. It's not a huge amount of music, to be honest (especially once you dump the two tracks by the band that Bowie doesn't sing on), but what there is is brilliant.

I particularly love the Corns' version of 'Moonage Daydream', complete with different lyrics and melody, which replaces the stonking metal sound and fury of the Ziggy track with a far more Hunky Dory-esque soft glam track, reminiscent far more of Mott the Hoople than Ziggy-era Bowie. I love the way the track stops and starts suddenly, the way the lyric is far more (day)dreamlike and Bowie's high-pitched vocal. The repetitive forty five second guitar break at the end, while Bowie appears to be trying to start a Mexican wave ('Whoooaaaa!'), I can live without though, to be honest.

This version of the track (and we could, if we wanted, include the John Peel 'In Concert' version of 'Looking for a Friend' which does have a Bowie vocal) was never considered for Ziggy Stardust, but there are several tracks which were considered and then dropped for one reason or other.

It's not hard to see why a cover of Chuck Berry's 'Round and Round' was dumped. Intended to serve as an in-album example of the sort of music which allegedly made Ziggy famous, it's a lovely idea, but unfortunately it's rather a dull and routine sort of song - surely not the sort of thing that made Ziggy a 'leper Messiah'! Equally 'Holy Holy' is a re-recording of a track once intended for Hunky Dory and Bowie has rarely been one to look backwards.




Perhaps instead of those two tracks we could have 'Bombers', one of the very few tracks which was once intended to feature on a nameless album between Hunky Dory and Ziggy? More a Hunky Dory funny, folky sort of song than a rocking Ziggy one, 'Bombers' would segue nicely from the Corns track, and work as a quick mood lightener before moving onto the maudlin grotesquerie of Bowie's cover of Jacques Brel's 'Port of Amsterdam'. Probably the most squalid lyric in Bowie's back catalogue, the track actually appeared on an early official Ziggy track listing but listening to it now it sounds more Brecht than Brel, and definitely more suited to Baal than Bowie's alien rock star.

Continuing the outsider theme of 'Amsterdam', how about throwing 'The Shadow Man' into the mix next? It isn't a rock number by any means, but it has one of Bowie's most in your face vocals and drips passion and sorrow and alienation ('See his smile/Made of nothing but loneliness') and segues brilliantly into one of my favourite Bowie obscurities 'Tired of My Life'. Admittedly it sounds more like a Space Oddity out-take than a post-Hunky Dory one, but the quiet despair of 'Tired of my Life' is a decent choice to follow on from the noisier horror of 'Amsterdam', and so it gets the nod over other contenders.

Kicking off the flip side and serving notice that side two will be more rocky, 'Velvet Goldmine' is one of the best of all Bowie out-takes. The track is one with a reasonable claim to be the nearly man of Bowie tracks, having been originally recorded for Hunky Dory, nearly made Ziggy, appeared as a b-side without Bowie's permission and eventually ended up appearing on Best of Bowie compilations. Apparently it was pulled from Ziggy for being 'too provocative' but the lyric isn't exactly gay porn and times have changed in any case. It makes an excellent opener for side two of our putative lost Bowie album (n.b. this is a vinyl album with two sides; this is 1973 after all).

How did 'Sweet Head' fail to make the actual Ziggy Stardust album? Lyrically it's a perfect fit for the rest of the album, with the first verse plausibly being sung in response to the narrator of 'Five Years' and the chorus ('Sweet head, give you sweet head/(spoken)While you're down there...') being a far more explicit version of that in 'Velvet Goldmine'. It's also a cracking tune, with real Ziggy-style guitars throughout.

A bit quieter now, but just as emotionally sturdy and almost as good a song - How Lucky You Are. Starting with battered, single key piano, then Bowie's stilted, flat vocal, it sounds nothing too astonishing to begin with. Schoolboy rhymes in the first verse and a little pedestrian bass it seems fairly obvious why it never made an actual album. But then the chorus kicks in with a roll of drums and Bowie's vocal moves up an octave or two and it turns into something altogether better. It's a shame it's only demo quality, but I'd like to have heard a proper studio version. Either way it deserves better than to be forgotten.

I think we might need to make side two a four track one, rather than the intended five. The problem is that, although there are other unreleased Bowie tracks in the period, they tend to be fairly straight-forward demos of songs which made Ziggy. A piano led version of the title track, a couple of different versions of Lady Stardust (one subtitled 'Song for Marc' just to make it clear who Bowie is singing about) and then we've got to wait for the Diamond Dogs out-takes to find anything of similar quality to the Hunky Dory/Ziggy ones.

So to sign off, let's bookend the album with Arnold Corns - in this case, the Corns' version of 'Hang onto Yourself', which manages to be just as different from its Ziggy counterpart as 'Moonage Daydream', but achieves that effect by going in the opposite direction. With Bowie's most exaggerated American accent ever, this is as obvious an attempt to do a Velvet Underground track as the far earlier perviness of 'Little Toy Soldier'. The first line, in fact, is sung in as close to a Lou Reed impersonation as anyone's ever done and the lyric ("Thought we had a good thing going, and you know and Mama had a thing on/My baby got out last Monday and me I'm on a radio show") with its suggestion of prison and non-sequitur ending could be straight from the Reed Book of Song Writing.

So there you go - an album to fit between Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. Maybe its best it never happened though because, as someone once remarked, if Sgt Pepper is the ultimate 60s album, Ziggy fills the same role in the 1970s.

Tracklisting to the imaginary album

Side 1

Moonage Daydream (Arnold Corns version)
Bombers
Amsterdam
Shadow Man
Tired of My Life

Side 2

Velvet Goldmine
Sweet Head
How Lucky You Are
Hang onto Yourself (Arnold Corns version)

And finally, from the actual album, the performance of 'Five Years' which remains one of my all time favourite Bowie moments.

Five Years on the Whistle Test

Hunky Dory (1971)

Ask any of your friends what their favourite David Bowie album is and chances are about half of them will plump for Hunky Dory (obviously all your friends will have a favourite Bowie album - how could they be your friends otherwise?). Even now, forty years and a couple of dozen albums later, there's still something about Hunky Dory which stands out, something truly special which makes the listener - both old and new - stop in sheer pleasure.

And that's actually just a wee bit surprising. Because if 'Width of a Circle' on the previous album was a Frankenstein of a track, this is the same mish-mash of styles and attitudes at entire album length. There genuinely is something for everyone on here, just as long as the everyone in question isn't looking for production line blandness. In the words of the always entertaining music critic Robert Christgau: on Hunky Dory Bowie "has a nice feeling for weirdos, himself included".

The title allegedly refers to Japanese brothels and the front cover is another of Bowie in drag - based on photos of Marlene Dietrich, though as a kid I always assumed it was meant to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. So it's fair to say that from the off we're not in Kansas here, nor was this album intended to sell to the same people who snapped up the latest Sweet record.

Tony Visconti had left to concentrate on Marc Bolan's career and for the first time ever Bowie was backed by the musicians who would make up the Spiders from Mars, as 'Woody' Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder joined Mick Ronson in just about the only backing band I can name individually. Bung in Ken Scott on co-production duties with Bowie (as 'the Actor' on the sleeve notes) and everything has changed.

Which laborious segue brings us to the music itself.

Hunky Dory has the best start of any Bowie album to date. 'Changes', describes the current situation for Bowie in one brilliant verse, wondering with bemusement what he's been waiting for, and why he ended up down 'a million dead end streets'. It's fantastic stuff, preceded by a short if genuinely funky intro and carried along on a sweet piano line, before sliding into a chorus in which he recognises the need to change himself and that change can be fascinating in itself.

As album openers go it was immediately bettered by 'Five Years' on Ziggy Stardust, but that aside there's little competition to it even in a catalogue as strong as Bowie's. As a statement of intent it's never been bettered anywhere.

From here on the album roller-coasters along both lyrically and musically. It's very easy to concentrate on the 'deep' songs with obvious 'meaning' and diverse and subtle layers but doing that means you miss so much about what makes this record truly great. Yes, 'Oh! You Pretty Things', manages the amazing trick of being a pretty pop song about Jesus and the Nietzschian Supermen, for instance, but it's the segue directly into 'Eight Line Poem', an actual pretty pop song about nothing much at all, which raises it to genius.

I've heard 'Andy Warhol', 'Queen Bitch' and 'Song for Bob Dylan' described as the weakest tracks on the album and even as the songs which 'ruin' it. And on first listen they do seem to be nothing more than throw away tributes and debts repaid ('Queen Bitch' is even subtitled 'Some VU White Light Returned with thanks') on the track-list but the first two are better rock tunes than any filler could ever be even if I'm forced to agree with David Buckley that 'Song for Bob Dylan' doesn't quite work. Incidentally, look out for Dana Gillespie's vocal on 'Andy Warhol', alongside Bowie and co as Arnold Corns (recorded live for Peel in 1971), to hear just how much of a viciously crunching track this actually was.

f there is any filler on the album it's in the folk rock pastiching 'Kooks' and the Biff Rose cover 'Fill Your Heart', but since they're both brilliant, who cares that they're not about anything. David Buckley seems to miss the point a little with these two tracks, calling 'Kooks 'twee' and 'fey' with 'cod precautionary lyrics', instead of seeing it as a valid throwback and fond farewell to the sort of songs the changed Bowie would now be leaving behind.

Which leaves the three songs which take a great album and raise it into the musical stratosphere. I suspect more has been written about 'Life on Mars' than any other Bowie track and it's topped at least one critics list of greatest songs of all time. It's got a stunning melody, a brilliantly obtuse lyric which constantly seems on the verge of meaning something and one of Bowie's very best vocal performances. Sufficient to say that it deserves every plaudit thrown its way over the years - if Bowie had only ever recorded this one track he'd still be remembered as a genius even now.

And it's not the best track on the album. Not even close.

For old school fans each side of the album ends with a long moment of utter brilliance. Even now I can still remember getting to 'Quicksand' at the end of side one, sitting on my bed in my black walled and ceilinged bedroom (sadly - due to carpet costing a lot to replace - I still had my sister's pink carpet thus ruining the effect somewhat). Fourteen years old or whatever and there's Bowie starting a song with

I'm closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley's uniform
Of imagery

then name-checking Himmler, Churchill, Bardot and Garbo. What the hell is this?! And that chorus:

Don't believe in yourself
Don't deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death's release

Bloody hell, that was strong stuff for me, far more bleak and scary than anything The Smiths or Nirvana ever conjured up, more like Joy Division than the then current Bowie album, Let's Dance. I'd have loved this song for the lyrics alone, but the melody rolled smoothly round your head like a snake and the whole stayed there for ages after the stylus lifted itself off the vinyl and returned to its resting place.

And that's not the best track on the album. Not even close.

'The Bewlay Brothers'. God alone knows what it's actually about because even Bowie isn't sure.

In 2008, after the release of Bowie at the Beeb which contained the first ever live version of the track, he said that "I wouldn't know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within it. It's a palimpsest" and that seems a fairly reasonable summary. Like a manuscript from which all text has been scraped to allow re-use but where the old text still survives in parts to change the meaning of the new, the lyrics to 'The Bewlay Brothers' appear at times to be gibberish.

And yet...

Like some TS Eliot poems, there's a definite feeling even when just reading the lyric on the page that - if you just had the key or a set of footnotes - you could turn these beautiful sounds into something more than that, decipher the meaning behind the seeming jumble, turn the abstract poetry into a dramatic story.

Because this is as dramatic as popular music gets. Bowie's voice thunders and soars as it builds to one crescendo then another. It's lyrically very threatening actually, with junkies and stalkers, devils and monsters populating every line. A brother lies dead on the rocks (prompting some critics to suggest this is a song about schizophrenia and Bowier's half-brother Terry) and - tying in with Bowie's admission that he's a 'faker' in 'Changes' - someone else now thinks 'we were fakers' and Bowie admits 'we were gone'.

And then there's the perversity of Bowie's deranged changed pitch voiceover at the end

Lay me place and bake me pie
I'm starving for my gravy
Leave my shoes and door unlocked
I might just slip away

Paul Magrs was the first person to suggest to me that this is meant to be the Laughing Gnome and it's an idea that Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr agreed with in their book on Bowie. It's an appealing idea and if that was the intention then it just adds another layer of creepy to the entire affair and ends the song in as dark and terrifying a place as Bowie ever went before or after. It's an astonishing, gob-smacking achievement and one of the genuinely shattering moments in popular music. I'd say that I loved it, but I love a lot of songs - 'The Bewlay Brothers' is in a league all of its own.

I'm not sure if Hunky Dory is my favourite Bowie album, but it's up there and even after hearing it a thousand times I'm still delighted to hear it again.

That's unusual enough in itself to make it something worth you (both of you!) listening at least once.

The Great Missing Track

'Bombers', I suppose. Which is a nice enough song, but it'd just be another biut of filler, and a bit more trite and shallow and naive than anything else on the album. Worth getting on whichever cd release of Hunky Dory it popped up on, but really - everything brilliant that could have appeared on this album did appear on this album..

Spotify: David Bowie – Hunky Dory

Man Who Sold the World (1970)

Morrisey described this as Bowie's best album, but that was in the Foreword to producer Tony Visconti's autobiography, so he can be fogiven for minor exaggeration. But no less an authority than Charles Shaar Murray reckons this is where the Bowie story really begins, so maybe Moz has a point.

What's inarguable, I think, is that this is the first great Bowie album. From here on there's a ten year period of unparalleled musical innovation. One triumph follows another as Bowie invents Glam, drops it in favour of popularising electronica, throws that over for white soul in a cocaine haze, before coming back to Major Tom in 1980 with Scary Monsters. There's nothing in popular music which even comes close to this. Dylan manages as long a run of uninterrupted great albums, but there' s not the same variation, and the Beatles didn't produce half as many great albums nor did they have - for all the genius at work - the same scope. Nobody else even gets within a mile of Bowie.

So is Morrissey right about Man Who Sold the World then?

Well, no. It's the start of a brilliant run, and the first evidence of creative genius, but it's not, I think, as brilliant as some of the albums which followed it, nor is it the leap that Bowie needed to make.

There are still obvious lyrical and stylistic links to the earlier David Bowie albums for a start. I love 'All the Madmen' and 'After All' but they could have slipped onto Space Oddity without so much as a note or line change. Tracks like 'Running Gun Blues', 'The Supermen' and 'Saviour Machine' while far heavier musically than earlier recordings, are lyrically at least still in the same universe as 'Little Bombadier' or 'We Are Hungry Men'.

But there's the difference, I suppose. Musically this is a different universe altogether.

Picture me as a thirteen year old boy putting this LP on for the first time (and spot the black and white Ziggy picture on the cover sleeve as I slip the LP out - another bit of marketing mis-direction compared to the original image of Bowie recling on a settee in a dress!), being a little surprised at the wailing feedback which starts 'Width of a Circle', then re-assured by the acoustic guitars which quickly replace it as Bowie starts singing about mythical monsters and talking blackbirds (pre-internet, I had no idea what the blackbird quipped though!).

And then Mick Ronson intervenes.

Christ almighty. Whatever else this album might be, it was pretty evident that it wasn't Space Oddity II. Eight minutes of multiple guitars and apparently meaningless lyrics , the music stopping and re-starting, moving up and down in volume like a knackered lift, massive echoing guitar solos, funky bass lines and sudden unexpected tempo changes, this was an enormous Frankenstein of a track, literally like nothing I had ever heard before, an entire album's worth of ideas poured into a single track. And this was only the opener!

That level's not sutainable, of course, and that's probably for the best. The next track, 'All the Madmen', is a whimsical, if creepier, throwback to earlier times as is 'After All' on the same side of LP. As an aside, when I was fourteen or fifteen I entered the Ryman short story writing competition with a story about a thinly disguised Doctor Who entering his own head and meeting his previous incarnations before finally talking to Jesus (I know, I know, you don't have to tell me). I called the story "All the Madmen", but I nearly called it "Demented Man" after the Hawkwind song - these Bowie ballads could have slipped on a Hawkwind album fo the period without any really noticing.

But back to the music. 'Shook Me Cold' starts with one of the best guitar sounds ever and heads off into new territory of hammering guitar and drums. And the lyric is quite obviously not about gnomes or nursery rhymes, pitiful ex-soldiers or cups of tea - it's most definitely about sex. And 'Black Country Rock' is pure heavy metal; a big, bad bastard of a song.

The rest of the album is pretty clearly a transitional set of numbers. The same sort of songs as stories approach as David Bowie, in particular, but with a science fiction bent that looks forward to Ziggy and Aladdin Sane and with the heavier sound of the post-Hunky Dory years. If it can sometimes sound a little bit silly sounding from the vantage point of forty years later, that's all forgiven when you listen to the title track, where a repetitive guitar line plays over an almost calypso guitar and Bowie comes up with his best lyric to date, sung over one of his best melodies. So good it was covered by Lulu and Nirvana, 'The Man Who Sold the World' would have qualified this album for greatness even without 'Width of a Circle' and the others.

Maybe Mozza had a point, after all?

The Great Missing Track

In reality it should be 'Lightning Frightening', since that's the track which was actually left off this album, if I remember right, but the far better'Shadowman', which was recorded the following year in reality can stand in for it. Too proto-Ziggy for Hunky Dory (from where it actually was omitted), it should have appeared on some Bowie album of the period and is well worth looking out on whatever Rykodisc re-issue it turned up on.

Spotify: David Bowie – The Man Who Sold The World

Incidentally, it was the fourteen minute version of 'Width of a Circle' on Ziggy Stardust - The Motion Picture which I first heard - and it's even more awesome than the studio version.

David Bowie: Space Oddity (1969)

The one undeniable fact about early David Bowie is that he was an ambitious bugger. Nowadays he'd turn up on X Factor, and even back in 1969 he sometimes gave the impression of being willing to do anything to get in the spotlight. If the Next Big Thing back than had been Al Jolsen, you can be pretty sure this album would have been called 'Mammy' and featured a seated Bowie in blackface doing jazz hands to the camera!

As it is, the album perfectly encapsulates two elements of Bowie-dom.

First, having backed the wrong horse at the wrong time with his half-hearted stab at English whimsical psychedelia with his debut album, on this LP he strays into Tim Hardin style introspective singer songwriter territory, baring his soul for £1.49 a copy with an admirable cynicism. It's clear that the record company also bought into this sea change in direction. In the UK the album was originally called David Bowie, the same eponymous title as his debut album two years previously, indicating that the label saw this new album as a chance to relaunch a promising career and consign an embarrassing mis-start to the bin. In the US, the album title was Man of Words, Man of Music and featured a permed, hippy Bowie on the cover, in the style of Tim Buckey's Happysad and innumerable other albums by young men with issues. A relaunch on one side of the Atlantic (the side where people might actually have bought the first David Bowie LP) and a re-imagining as a wordy troubadour on the other (where hardly anyone had bought that first abortive album).

All of which ended up moot because after the success of 'Space Oddity' the single, it was re-issued by RCA as Space Oddity the album, complete with misleading - in every sense - Ziggy era Bowie image on the front and back. It's commonplace to claim that Bowie's great gift has always been to spot the coming thing and then get in there first, but at this point he's still reacting, still a follower, hitching his wagon to the latest fad and failing as yet to find a voice of his own.

Which isn't to say this is a poor album. Far from it. But were you to be playing that game of deciding which artist has had the longest run of consecutive truly great albums, you'd have to be a real optimist to claim this as the first of Bowie's (that wouldn't come for one - maybe even two - more albums). There's some lovely songs on it, and some really excellent lines, but it's all a little derivative, a tiny bit contrived.

Example: 'Letter to Hermione', dedicated to Hermione Fortheringay, Bowie's estwhile lover. Maybe he was sufficiently distraught at the break-up to pen this pretty if self-pitying ode but it does feel a lot like a folksinger checklist sort of song, like a late sixties Phil Collins tugging on the heart strings.

Example: 'God Knows I'm Good', which couldn't more obviously be an older song pushed onto the album to take up space if Bowie had done it in an Anthony Newley voice. The last in a longish line of Bowie songs which tell a story in a naive and one dimensional manner I thought this was so sad when I was thirteen and find it painful to listen to now, which pretty much sums the track up for me.

Examples: 'Memories of a Free Festival' and 'Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud' - decent if cliched peace and love hymns, but cliched peace and love hymns nonetheless.

I don't want to give the impression I hate this record. Really far, far from it. I love it. I've listened to it literally hundreds and hundreds of times. 'Cygnet Committee' might even be the very first song on Bowie's path to the astonishing 'Bewlay Brothers' on Hunky Dory. But it's not a great album and no amount of dodgy marketing will ever make it into one.

It's an album of an artist looking for his own sound which, most importantly of all, marks the last time for over twenty years that Bowie tried to mimic the pack around him. As such it's probably the most important milestone in his career.

The Great Missing Track

Has to be 'Conversation Piece'. Recorded in 1969 (and re-recorded in better quality but inferior vocal for the Toy sessions), it's another one of those little vignettes Bowie has always done so well. I first heard it around 1983, when Stuart Dodds traded me a tape copy of a bootleg called 'BowieRarest' for a copy of an Ultravox album. I won there, I think.

Side one

1. "Space Oddity" – 5:15
2. "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" – 6:55
3. "(Don't Sit Down)" * – 0:39
4. "Letter to Hermione" – 2:28
5. "Cygnet Committee" – 9:33

Side two

1. "Janine" – 3:18
2. "An Occasional Dream" – 2:51
3. "Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud" – 4:45
4. "God Knows I'm Good" – 3:13
5. "Memory of a Free Festival" – 7:05

David Bowie (1967)

I've already mentioned how I came to be introduced to the music of David Bowie. At my nana's old house, listening to Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture over and over again on a long, faux-walnut home entertainment centre from the 1940s, with sliding doors for hiding bottles of sherry and a massive radio with a huge bakalite tuning button - and a little record player with a forty year old stylus ripping new grooves in 'Moonage Daydream'.

From that moment I became a Bowie obsessive, to a far greater extent than I ever came to love one single author or one specific tv series. I adored the Flashman novels and Doctor Who as a kid (and still do), but only when I was reading or watching; Bowie on the other hand was always around.

After The Motion Picture I saved up whatever money came my way and bought the albums which seemed linked to it - Ziggy Stardust itself, The Man Who Sold the World and - on one glorious day upstairs in John Menzies in Princes Street - both Pin Ups and Hunky Dory. Has there ever been a greater run of albums? Now, a quarter of a century later, I can still remember the continual thrills of sheer pleasure I got from each of these first listens. Had Bowie ever recorded anything which wasn't immediately obviously a work of genius?

Well, yes and no.

For a start, the word 'chameleon' is probably defined in the OED as, in part, 'pertaining to David Bowie'. Liking one era of his recorded output is no guarantee of liking the next, as any number of early 80s hipsters no doubt discovered when they bought Low on the back of liking the singles from Let's Dance. Bowie jumps around genre, steals willy nilly from other artists, drops successful sounds in favour of non-commerical ones on a whim. He rarely stays still for long.

And evidently it's not somethign he grew in to, a fact which is immediately apparent when listening to his first studio album, the eponymous David Bowie.

It's impossible, I think, to come up with another artist who's made so many massive and yet successful changes in direction as Bowie did time and again, and it all started here. From this album's whimsical, English music hall to folky hippydom to sex-obsessed Glam Rock - in the space of a few years and a couple of albums. Consequently, Bowie's brief early years do contain chunks of music which seem hard to place in a logical, consistent and organic timeline.

David Buckley described this record as "the vinyl equivalent of the madwoman in the attic" and while that probably suggests a greater degree of sound and fury than is merited, Gus Dudgeon's claim that it was the 'weirdest thing Deram had ever put out" seems closer to the mark.

It certainly stands alone even in the Summer of Love, eschewing the sort of hippy sex and peace concerns suggested by the psychedelic cover font in favour of a succession of mini-stories, flavoured by vaudeville and music hall rather than drugs and free love (the drug and, well, gang obsessed 'Join the Gang' is the odd track out in this respect).

Maybe it's that which causes any search for musical fellow travellers for David Bowie to lead only to individual songs rather than entire lps: bits and pieces of the Beatles output (most obviously John Lennon's 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite'), occasional Kinks' tracks and obscure British psych acts like The Blossom Toes (I may, in fact, have made that last band up!).

Plus, of course, Anthony Newley, on whose vocal sound this entire album is based.

Leaving aside Newley (musically, a dead end even if the conscious model for Bowie at this point) the Beatles more whimsical moments are, in fact, the closest popular match for these early Bowie tracks. Utilising brass and strings, recording tracks with odd timings ('Maid of Bond Street' is in waltz time, for example), and injecting humour via the spoken word and funny voices ('Please Mr Gravedigger' in particular) are all elements which have a mirror in Yellow Submarine/Pepper-era Beatles.

That the Beatles' tracks generally work far better is a given - Bowie was definitely still an emerging artist, searching for a voice of his own, but there are things to admire in this first, uneven recording.

Most obviously, it's simple to trace certain of the themes which Bowie embraced right up until the early 80s in this very early and atypical work. 'She's Got Medals' deals with cross-dressing and trans-gender issues, 'Uncle Arthur', 'Maid of Bond Street' and 'Little Bombardier' address unusual, possibly illicitly sexual, relationships and 'We Are Hungry Men' concerns itself with a dictator/Big Brother/messiah figure attempting to save a future dystopian society.

Themes of innocence and childishness, however, are very pronounced on David Bowie and are also the areas in which Bowie moves furthest away from the straight music hall and in the direction of the Syd Barrett/Gong style nursery rhymes which made up another strand of very British psychedelia.

'When I Live my Dream', 'There is a Happy Land' and 'Silly Boy Blue' set the template for a fair portion of Bowie's songs prior to his helping invent heavy metal with The Man Who Sold the World. Swooping strings and overblown and fantastic lyrics (reincarnation, slaying dragons and a 'special place in the rhubarb fields' all on one album!) combine with fears that the real world is threatening our innocence, all of which congealed in my teenage head to convince me that there was something Bowie-ish in this odd little album.

It might not have been exactly what I was expecting, but that's part of the pleasure of listening to new Bowie albums. That Bowie had discarded all music hall elements by the time he recorded his next album, Space Oddity suggests that he recognised that, even so, this particular approach was not one on which to build a career...

The Great Missing Track

Every Bowie album has a great song which was inexplicably missed off it. In the case of this album, we can stretch things a little and wonder why 'When I'm Five' only made the Love You Til Tuesday soundtrack and not this album. It's a morbid, dark song of childhood illness which ends with the wonderful couplet

"I saw a photograph of Jesus/And I asked him if he'd make me five'.

Really, it deserved to be on this album.

Side one

1. "Uncle Arthur" – 2:07
2. "Sell Me a Coat" – 2:58
3. "Rubber Band" – 2:17
4. "Love You Till Tuesday" – 3:09
5. "There Is a Happy Land" – 3:11
6. "We Are Hungry Men" – 2:58
7. "When I Live My Dream" – 3:22

Side two

1. "Little Bombardier" – 3:24
2. "Silly Boy Blue" – 4:36
3. "Come and Buy My Toys" – 2:07
4. "Join the Gang" – 2:17
5. "She's Got Medals" – 2:23
6. "Maid of Bond Street" – 1:43
7. "Please Mr. Gravedigger" – 2:35