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:

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

Part of my Past - Simon Dupree and the Big Sound (2004)

Once upon a time I bought two singles from Bruce's Records in the west end of Edinburgh. 'Sunday Girl' by Blondie (which my Auntie Lorna then sat on and broke) and 'Bright Eyes' by Art Garfunkel, which remains one of my favourite singles. Not that anyone should really care about this fact but those two purchases led, thousands upon thousands of records later, to my listening to Part of the Past, the best of the often over-looked Simon Dupree and the Big Sound.

It's not hard to see why they're usually over-looked, to be honest. For a start, they were British but not particularly long-haired or psychedelic (at least to start with). Originally called The Howling Wolves, they played R&B and blues covers and only switched to flower power, stripy shorts and sunglasses after their first couple of R&B singles died a death and they were ordered to change their name and sound by their record company.

Not that Simon Dupree and the Big Sound was the absolute best name for a pseudo-San Francisco psych band to have. The Big Sound are a mid-fifties group, dressed in matching suits and ties, booked to play the 'Enchantment Under the Sea' dance in Back to the Future. They're not a sixties psych band in home knitted kaftans, riffing off Love and the Great Society, they're a covers band, doing note perfect renditions of Pat Boone and Johnny Ray with occasional dips into the down and dirty proto-rock of Bo Diddley.

Or at least that's what the name suggests.

Which is a real shame as some of the tracks on Part of My Past (a double cd which collects pretty much everything they ever recorded), stand in decent comparison to anything on the majestic Arthur Lee and Love's seminal Forever Changes. A track like 'It Is Finished', with it's odd intonation and rushed lyric, would slip onto Forever Changes and nobody would blink an eye - but that's another one of the problems with the band as a whole. While I was listening to this in the car, I found most tracks reminding me of something else - a track or a band or just a general sound.

So 'It is Finished' is classic Love, 'Reservations' is early Kinks, 'Kites' is Scott Walker and so on. It's not necessarily a bad thing at this far remove, where a song which sounds like one of Scott Walker's better efforts is to be applauded, but at the time it must have made marketing the band a bit of a nightmare. 'Kites - the chorus sounds like the weird one from the Walker Brothers!' isn't an obvious promo poster in 1967, after all.

Still 'Kites' made the UK Top 10, even while it died a death in the States, but while the follow-up single got in the top 50, that was as close to mass success the band ever got. Within a couple of years they had recorded a single under the name The Moles, disbanded and then two of the mainstays of the band went off to found the far more dull prog rock band, Gentle Giant.

Interesting fact - one Reg Dwight briefly joined the band as keyboard player on a tour of Scotland. He didn't hang around but changed his name to Elton John and went solo instead.

Part of my Past is available here (under 'Easy Listening', which really just sums up the problems The Big Sound have had).