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.

Little Cheapies

Well I'm never going to get rich publishing Obverse Books, but the payment in cheapies is ongoing and constant.  On the same day that I get hold of a physical copy of a book with a story of mine alongside stories by Michael Moorcock, Paul Magrs, Mark Hodder and George Mann, the little Iris sampler I put on Amazon last week reached number 16 in the sf short story charts.  Means nothing and makes even less, but I think that's cool :)

Yopu can buy a copy for a pound here...

Fourth Doctor Adventures!

Co-incidentally, I've read two new adventures of the fourth incarnation of Doctor Who (Tom Baker, for th eperosn readin gthis who doesn't already know!) in the past few months.  One of them is a big-money, big-splash hardback adapatation of the 'classic' lost story, 'Shada' by current tv writer Gareth Roberts, based on a script by the late Douglas Adam.  The other is a Lulu published paperback (very loose) adaptation of the even more lost, Baker and Marter script 'Doctor Who Meets Scratchman' by author and blogger Nick Campbell.

I liked them both a great deal, I must say.  The Baker-era has not been brilliantly served in novel format, I think, though the high points - Steven Marley's Managra, say - have been pretty high indeed.  But both of these examples illustrate in their own way the strength of the TV show at the time they were initally conceived and which authors should use far more when writing for the Baker Doctor now.

They are very different though.

'Shada' is an big budget production, with Gareth Roberts - an able prose writer but, I think, a better dramatist - bringing both bow strings to bear on Adams' script, to generally pleasing effect.  It's a book designed to appeal to the casual Who fan, the sort of people who watch the new series on telly and who know the name 'Douglas Adams' from somewhere or other.  It's funny at times while overly obvious at others, clever but also clumsy and well-written but unsure if it's a Target novelisation or a Douglas Adams' book.  I didn't care for the gushing over the genius of Adams towards the end, which felt forced and out of place, but for all that it's a decent rendition of a certain point in TV time and very welcome amongst the bland uniformity of much of the Who prose output since the TV series lurched back onto the screens.

'Doctor Who meets Scratchman', on the other hand, reads like the fabulous but slightly scary love-child of Paul Magrs and Terrance Dicks, midwived by Barbara Euphan Todd and Rosemary Sutcliff.  It's a Cajun stew of a novel, full of peculiar textures and odd tastes, alive with an outpouring of ideas, and so obviously in love with the whole era that it's virtually palpable as you read.  From the Target style cover featuring Vincent Price as Scratchman all the way to the last page which promises the upcoming 'Dr Who Discovers the Miners', this book is a proper wallow in something actually wonderful, in the real sense of the word.  At times while readng it, lying on my bed with the rain battering on the window, I disappeared into 1975 again, with Tom striding about, cabbage companion to hand, and Sarah and Harry to the rear, the sexiest couple on TV.  I can easily picture myself slipping this book into place on the long shelf which ran above my bed when I was ten, in between 'Revenge of the Cybermen' and 'Terror of the Zygons', then mentally hugging myself as I considered the every growing rank of spines, each little adventure mine to keep and re-visit whenever I want. There's something genuinely brilliant in a book which can conjure up that kind of memory so clearly, I think.

The Ninnies - Paul Magrs

Mum wouldn’t believe me when I told her Dad had been taken away by the Ninnies.


She thought he’d left us of his own accord. She thought he’d taken his bucket, ladder and chamois leather on his window round that Monday and simply never came back because he’d gone off us. Or that he’d imagined a better life somewhere else. ‘He could never stand any pressure,’ she sighed, eating another handful of Flying Saucers. ‘He was never any good with stress.’But I knew. I knew he’d never just up and leave us. Not with Squoosh, my little sister on the way. I knew what had really happened.He had been taken away by the Ninnies.Though Mum would not listen to a word of it. ‘You’re too fanciful,’ she told me, cramming another load of Flying Saucers into her mouth as she sat there at the kitchen table. ‘You get it from him. He was always dreaming. Making daft things up. All about the things he saw through people’s windows!’ I could tell that Mum herself was making stuff up as she ranted. She was making herself believe that we would be better off without him.

We both knew that wasn’t true.

A new YA fantasy novel from Paul Magrs, creator of Iris Wildthyme, Brenda and Effie and author of the best-selling AudioGo! Fourth Doctor adventures.  Fully illustrated throughout by Bret Herholz.

In a one time only limited edition of 100 hardback copies.  Order now for delivery in mid-May.

“A deliciously dark tale of crunchy crisps, abridged animals and merciless Mancunian monsters. When you read The Ninnies you may laugh or you may cry – but you’ll definitely sleep with the lights on…” – Tommy Donbavand, author of Scream Street

“The Ninnies whisks the reader away into the great dark stretch of some fabulous nightmare, pinned down by Paul Magrs with poetry and precision. Vivid fantasy with the warmest heart, best read by torchlight in the dark.” – Steve Cole, author of Astrosaurs

Available from www.obversebooks.co.uk...

Some random thoughts regarding telly viewed from a sick bed

Siege of Golden Hill  feels almost like it goes meta-fictional at one point, as a scene where the teenagers are acting poorly in a rehearsal of a play moves into one where teenagers who can't really act pretend to be scary gang members.

My Old Man - only point in history when high rise flats were viewed as a wonderful thing.  But funny, as you'd expect from something in which Ian Le Frenais had a hand.

Game of Thrones - didn't watch it because I suspected it of having elves in it, but Sharon convinced me too (clever girl!) and it was great, and not afraid to kill off people just like real life - i.e for no reason other than that's what happens.

Not With a Bang - only lasted seven episodes, of which I think only three were shown up here, but I've wanted to see this again since the 80s, and it didn't disappoint.  With a post-apocalypse setting and a cast including Steven Rea and Ronald Pickup, that's highly surprising, though. Network replied to my emailk to say they wouldn't be doing a DVD however.  Boo!

Mrs Brown's Boys - The episodes where Mrs Brown gave herself a bikini wax, took LSD and thought she was being put in a home are, quite geneuinely, the funniest things I've seen for years.  To the extent that the latter two were effectively turned into audios due to the tears in my eyes.

Then my back got better and I went back to work, but not before I read a pile of books too, of which more later...

Wolf's Head 1: Oath of Blood by Arthur Frazier (NEL, 1973)

Among the many and varies things I like are dog-eared New English Library paperbacks like 'Wolfs Head 1: Oath of Blood', apparently by Arthur Frazier.

I say apparently because this first book in a six book series is actually the work of prolific NEL author Kenneth Bulmer, a man second only to Wilfred McNeilly in my personal pantheon of forgotten heroes of pulp. Bulmer is better known for science fiction than this sort of Saxons vs Normans throwaway, but even so it's 108 pages of small text which never flags for a second, even while it sets up the premise for the remaining five books in the series.  This is a book that fills every page with incident and action, like an Alan Moore comic strip or a  big summer blockbuster novel, never stopping for breath or reflection, and making sure that every inch of available canvas is in play.

Attempted rape, mutilation, revenge, death and pitched battle combine with beautiful women, saxon art, good fellowship and self-sacrifice to make a book which is never dull.  That may not seem like the greatest compliment ever paid a book but there are times when incident packed is all you really want...

Mr Hudson's Diaries - Michael Hardwick (Sphere, 1973)

For all my pretentions to literary fiction and for all the nice things I might say about Umberto Eco and Ian McEwan (well, not McEwan - he bores the arse off me), my real first love are tv tie-ins.  Some of that is down to nostalgia, obviously - the Target Dr Who books for me, as for lots of people my age, were the reading materials of my youth after all - but sometimes it's because a tie-in novel seems able to do things which I can't believe the parent show would ever touch.

Books like the BBC Doctor Who novels The Blue Angel or Interference go well beyond what their parent show is even capable of imagining, let alone presenting on screen, but that's possibly to be expected.  The Virgin and first set of BBC Doctor Who spin-offs are acknowleged by all but partisan fools to be amongst the best tie-ins every created and the show is one which cries out for limitless imagination.

Other series, however, seem as though they'd be far less interesting when committed to paper - but that's an equally foolish assumption.  As I mentioned somewhere else on here (I'm sure my reader can get off his chair and go and look) the Crossroads book 'A Warm Breeze' features a Lost Horizon-style hidden valley, a boy who talks backwards and ends with actual magic taking place, but that's a genuine novelisation of several bonkers (and now tragically lost) episodes of the soap opera, so the madness lies with the script-writer not the novelist.

I've just finished one of the Upstairs Downstairs back-story novels, Mr Hudson's Diaries however, and Michael Hardwick and his wife Mollie have done as solid a job with the story of Angus Hudson's life prior to coming to 165 Eaton Place as anyone could possibly expect.  But added to the tales of Hudson's crippled father, first dalliances with women, tragic loss and eventual rise, is a chapter in which an actual poltergeist haunts the Bellamy family home until the bones of a murdered baby are found buried nearby.  Like the apparently genuine Ouija board in the Christmas 2011 edition of Downton Abbey it's this brilliant implausability which raises the book above the ordinary.  There's no need for anything so mental, but it's entertaining and interesting and improves a solid book into a memorable one.

You don't get great stuff like that in bloody Atonement, I can tell you.