Still loving the alien...just

There was a Damascene moment in the lifetime of this blog's predecessor when I realised that What Would David Bowie Do?, as it was called, hadn't done much on David Bowie himself. By the time that realisation had been fully met, it was too late. Bowie was dead.

Two and a half years after his death, there is no lessening of Bowie activities to report on, thankfully. On 30 November, Glastonbury 2000 will be released, for the first time presenting - as a double CD, triple vinyl or DVD - The Dame's legendary headline set at Worthy Farm in 2000, a performance regarded by many as one of the festival's finest-ever Sunday night closing shows, and a virtual greatest hits performance (see also the Reality Tour album and DVD - easily Bowie at his most carefree). On top of this, the BBC has just announced David Bowie: The First Five Years, the final part in a trilogy of posthumous documentaries and one that will explore the formative years before David Robert Jones from Bromley became David Bowie. BBC2 will broadcast the film next year, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Space Oddity.

For now, however, we have David Bowie - Loving The Alien (1983-1988). Released yesterday, it's the fourth in a series of box sets chronologically reissuing Bowie's albums (the others so far being Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), and A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982) ), throwing additional exclusive material into the mix. Of course, these box sets are for the completist - any self-regarding Bowie fan would already own these albums - but in the case of this latest package, covering easily Bowie's weakest output (or, put it another way, his most commercial), affords the opportunity for some revisionism.

Let's Dance, the Nile Rogers-produced, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin boogiefest leads off the box set, but it is the following Serious Moonlight live album that will be the most enticing from that 1983-84 period. Less so, possibly by a considerable margin, will be Tonight. Produced by Hugh Padgham, then in vogue for his work with The Police, Phil Collins and Genesis, it remains a somewhat soapy album. The single Blue Jean will never be regarded in the same breath as classic Bowie hits, while Loving The Alien does have a lugubrious charm. However, as Bowie himself testified, Tonight was an unhappy experience all round, and it showed.

Things didn't really improve in 1987 with Never Let Me Down, an ironic title if ever there was one. "My nadir," Bowie described it in 1995, adding "It was such an awful album." Critics agreed, but there is fresh interest with a "brand new production"of the album included in the box set and featuring new new instrumentation by the likes of guitarist Reeves Gabrels (who joined Bowie in Tin Machine) and bassist Tim Lefebvre, who was part of the New York jazz collective to play on Blackstar. If nothing else, the reworking will address a once-expressed desire by Bowie himself, "Oh, to redo the rest of that album". Of mixed emotion for me will be the live album from the 'Glass Spider Tour' that promoted Never Let Me Down. I went to see the messy, over-complicated Glass Spider show at Wembley Stadium. Being Wembley in the British summer, I took an oversized golf umbrella. When it started to rain, as it usually did, a couple of girls asked if they could share the covering. Unbeknownst to me, one of the girls - with whom I'd hoped to have been on a promise - had been drinking and promptly threw up copiously over my box-fresh All-Stars, thus ensuring a 10-yard exclusion zone for the rest of the afternoon. I may need to skip this entry in the new package.

As with the previous Bowie boxes there are a couple of discs featuring alternative versions of singles and album tracks, as well as music from the film projects Bowie was involved in during the mid-80s, Labrynth, Absolute Beginners and the Raymond Briggs nuclear holocaust tale, When The Wind Blows. As is obligatory, there's a luxurious booklet with both the CD and vinyl packages, featuring
previously unpublished photos by Denis O’Regan, Greg Gorman, Herb Ritts and others, as well as  technical notes about the albums from their producers including Rodgers, Padgham, Mario McNulty and Justin Shirley-Smith.

At £99 for the CD package, Loving The Alien is just about justifiable, but probably only for...well, me, essentially. It's hard, really, to see how the period covered truly adds to the Bowie oeuvre. The '70s output, from Hunky Dory through to the Berlin trilogy, really delivered the Bowie legend, of experiment, of swagger, of rock'n'roll as high art. And, like many of Bowie's contemporaries (Elton John comes to mind), the rate of output during this period was extraordinary, especially when you consider that Let's Dance came out only 14 years after Space Oddity. It was, though, an unashamed pop album, blessed with hits like the title track and China Girl, but could easily be viewed as the star taking his foot off the creative pedal. It would take the purgatorial diversion of Tin Machine to see Bowie start to reapply the invention that made him in the first place, with the mid/late-90s output of Outside, Earthling, Hours and, into the new Millennium, Heathen and Reality, surely enticements for the next Bowie box set to come.