David Bowie lived off a raw egg a day for 8 months. David Bowies duet with Mick Jagger was more underweaming than it should have been. David Bowie was accused of being a fascist. David Bowie has been particularly unlucky with his eyes, getting one of them damaged in a fight at school and a lollypop stuck in the other.
Thats a massive thing about David Bowie, for every time you mention his name there is an interesting story. Most of the people who read stuff like this will know all the stories and more and even if you don't there is a blog a mere googlesearch away.
David Jones has a song for every story, every bit as important, iconic and consistant as the Beatles, his more recent albums were nowhere near as legendary as his run of albums from 69-88 but 20 years releasing quality album after quality album places him among Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi and Hitler combined in terms of legendary status.
Today is his 65th birthday, retirement age, so this is a little look back at his career with a butchers at some of his best work in no particular order.
Speed of life, instrumental first track on 1977's Low. It was a particularaly intense period in bowies life, having moved to Berlin to escape a particularly drugfueled existence in New York and knocking out 3 albums in the space of two years. The album this was the first of a set that would become known as the Berlin Trilogy, although only one of these 3 albums were actually fully recorded there.
Here's another one, possibly the most epic piece of schizophrenic space funk ever, an ode to isolation, endless travel and more than possibly a passing reference to Barbarossa, the king who Hitler idolised to the point that he named his bloodiest and ultimately most disasterous campaign after.
apparently this is Bowies infamous nazi salute... could be mistaken for a wave...
...unlike Holly Willoughby's attempt at a superman, which is almost certainly a nazi salute.
The other cheeky reference in this one is to cocaine, Bowies drug of choice during this point in his life. You can almost hear it being snorted from the snare drums and rubbed into the gums between every guitar lick you get a tertiary high just from the opening kick drum possibly because the coke dust on the drum kit found its way into the soundwaves which are emited every time you put this track on. People like to paint this era as Bowie's drug hell, but I bet he had the most awesome time making Station to Station. It ranks the longest bowie song on a studio album and possibly only one of 5 that gives me an erection every time I hear it, sorry to be crude but it is musical viagra. Bowie claims that telling Earl Slick to play a Chuck Berry style riff towards the the end of the track, is the only thing he remembers about the making of this album. But for some reason he has a story about having a dream about Iggy Pop getting trapped in a TV... the name dropping bastard.
This song is about that. I have no idea why I didn't add this one to the original draft of this blog, because I had an idea that I should have 10 songs because 10 is one of those numbers that everyone gets overexcited about, because of top 10s, this isn't a top 10, its a top eleven for the day that I chose it... I do however have a top 3 of his albums, they are as follows.
1.
2.
3.
In that order.
All the rest of them are pretty good with the exception of 'black tie white noise' 'earthling' and the tin machine albums, which just didn't work.
The most singalong-able track not to appear on a greatest hits album, never released as a single, possibly because it is so littered with sex references and innuendo. There is a part of me which is dissapointed that Bowie even recorded this instead of simply saying 'bend over, you're about to get the best fucking of your life.' To be fair I would enjoy this song more than getting shagged by Bowie but it would be something to tell the grandkids. A quintessentially Ziggy track, Ziggy being just one of the many persona's which Jones hid behind, and one which fascinated journalists and fans alike. This song fuses sci-fi, sex, androdgony and special effects, probably the standout track on Ziggy, and one which influenced every band in NME from then until now and probably until the end of time itself.
We always knew David was special, but this proves it, Bowie can do something that most university students, people with DIY jobs left unfinished and the architect Gaudi know too well.
"I know when to go out, I know when to stay in, get things done."
One of my friends used this song as a yardstick to time himself getting from the train station to his place of work, and it is a pretty cracking way to start the day. Produced by Nile Rodgers, one of those living legends and a choice that reflected Bowies need to stay on the cutting edge. Rodgers cut his teeth both performing in and producing for bands like Chic, Sister Sledge and Earth Wind and Fire. Now mentioning these bands is like reeling off a tracklisting from one of those Saturday night shit TV karaoke shows, but I'm just going to reclaim disco as one of the most innovative and important forces of nature, so much so that shit bands like ABBA and the Bee Gees hijacked it to make millions, See? Disco is a powerful thing.
Lets Dance is Bowies disco album, and it represents his last truly great album.
She shook me cold, Zeppelin-esque, its not one of those tracks that gets accompanied by a story really but for some reason its one of my favourites.
Another one that is considered part of the Berlin Trilogy, an apparently dark point in his life... does this look dark to you? Here is a man, not a myth, performing on the Kenny Everett show, no Nazi memorabilia, no drugs just a man on stage with some neon lighting behind him, trademark fag in hand some moves and a microphone stand. Singing about boys. This is an enduring image of Bowie and one that comes into my head whenever people mention his name. The man has swagger, and Everett can't resist a little flirt, even though Bowie was no longer gay at this point.
Yeah, Krautrock. Yeah, Eno. Yeah, instrumental. I like that about Bowie, sometimes he let the music do the talking, didn't need to fill up songs with unnecassary words, unlike what I am doing here. Named after Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk member and genius, and the nazi terror weapon, the V2. on a seperate note, my grandmother believed that the Nazi's had supernatural powers after seeing a V2 land in a field in Berkshire, until she saw a documentary about Nazi terror weapons which changed her mind. Bowie loved Germany, nazi or otherwise.
Maybe I am showing my age but I think the Bowie tracks from the film Labyrinth are among the most vital of his career. I remember being 9 and watching the ziggy concert with my dad on some BBC2 tribute or other hoping that the band would play 'as the world falls down'. I also (barely) remember coming home from a nightclub and collapsing on the sofa of a friends house, where said friend proceded to turn on the decks and do an impromptu post club DJ set, this was the second song he played and I had one of those weird druggy moments of realization that this might be one of the best songs ever, and its clear that Bowie wasn't even trying.
It took 22 years from its inception for me to hear this. I was 14 my CD collection consisted of fear of the dark by Iron Maiden and Bitty McClean by Bitty McClean. The imagary conjured up by this song set me on a path of musical self education. The Cop, the Queer and the Priest were very vivid in my head, and there was somthing about the 'smiling and waving and looking so fine, don't think you knew you were in the song' line that grabbed me immediately, don't get me wrong, I knew of bowie before, but I hadn't accepted him into my heart as the true saviour before june 2004.
There is something so completely romantic, empowerring and all encompassing about this one, inspired by a newspaper article about a couple jumping the Berlin wall to be together, or maybe about the Producer Tony Visconti's affair with Antonia MaaB (pronounced marss) its been covered by Oasis, Rammstein (in german, of course)and Peter fucking Gabriel, this is a staple of modern music and would be a good example to beam into space as what the human race should be. The title is apparently a reference to the German band Neu! apparently (their exclamation mark, not mine.) It would be wrong to not have this in a top ten and probably best saved until last...
So there you go, for the most part I've attempted to stay away from the Ziggy Stardust's and Space Oddity's but from time to time I have needed to veer towards the Heroes and I have failed in my bid to talk about the music and not the legend but we all have our flaws, and if my gushy idolisation of an icon is a sin, then I'm going to hell, because I'll never repent for it.
Ziggy played guitar.
