Conscious disguises - the life and times of David Bowie

David Bowie. The gift to this blog that keeps on giving. The occasion is Moonage Daydream, the much-anticipated feature-length documentary by director Brett Morgen, which opens today. As this channel has regularly recorded, the posthumous Bowie industry has never ceased to turn in the six and a half years since the icon’s death, with a bounty of re-releases, box sets, books, pop-up shops and exhibitions all pumping the legacy of a rock star like no other. While cynics might see it as exploitation, fan - and we are many - will see it as justified deification of one of the singularly most influential artists of the 20th century, one who crafted, controlled and curated his image so consciously while alive, and even as he knowingly approached death.

Moonage Daydream is, though, the first ‘official’ documentary to be sanctioned by the Bowie estate since his passing in January 2016. Appropriately, five years in the making, Morgen’s 135-minute epic does for The Dame what Peter Jackson’s even longer Get Back film did for The Beatles. Whereas Jackson’s production distilled 21 days’ worth of consecutive footage of the Fabs trying to make what would become their Let It Be album, Moonage Daydream painstakingly pieces together “thousands” of hours of film and video - some from Bowie’s personal archive - along with 48 newly remastered live music. It is a labour of love by Morgen, a Bowie fan all his life, which attempts to penetrate the creative ambition that made the singer who he was, single-handedly defining glam rock and, magpie-like, grabbing at any genre that took his fancy - from folk to progressive rock, Philly soul to drum and bass, trite pop to, in his final outing, the prescient album Blackstar, complex jazz.

Within this broiling sea of reinvention, Morgen reflects the theatrical guises Bowie adopted throughout his musical journey, as he evolved from suburban folkie David Jones to David Bowie, the vessel for the various phases he would pass through - the alien Ziggy Stardust, the glam prince, the soul boy, even the 1980s pop star (“my Phil Collins period”). “Becoming a pop act was no different than being Aladdin Sane or being Ziggy,” says Morgen. ”It was by design. He was going to enter the mainstream. It was just another challenge.” This point blew the director’s mind. The conventional wisdom is that Bowie made the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums out of weariness (or laziness). It wasn’t, argues Morgen. It was simply another conscious disguise to be that commercial.

“I think he would like this film,” keyboard player and frequent Bowie collaborator Mike Garson said of his late friend in The Times recently. “Three quarters of it he would really enjoy,” the remaining quarter being Morgen’s visually erratic style that will bombard the viewers with a dazzling kaleidoscope of imagery, zig-zagging its way through the Bowie timeline. The film was conceived while Bowie was alive, with Morgen pitching the idea to the star unsuccessfully, and before his apparent evaporation into what felt like partial retirement in 2004. Morgen turned his attention to the Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane) and Kurt Cobain (Montage Of Heck) to satisfy his storytelling, but Bowie wouldn’t go away. At the same time, he had the desire to create music films for the IMAX format.

On hearing that Bowie had died, on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday, Morgen contacted Bill Zysblat, who’d looked after the star’s business affairs. Zysblat revealed that his client had archived a treasure trove of content. Over the next five years Morgen worked his way through boxes of footage and still images - some five million assets in all, setting himself up with the near-impossible task of turning it all into something compelling. “Not because I wanted to,” he explained recently to the NME, explaining that he was, at that stage, completely unfunded. Working 18-hour days on his own, his dedication almost cost Morgen his life. “I had a massive heart attack on January 5, 2017,” he told the NME, revealing that he flatlined for three minutes, just five days shy of the first anniversary of his subject’s own death.

From today we will see for ourselves whether this near-death experience was worth the trouble. Moonage Daydream will reward us with, Morgen promises, “the missing unicorns”: never before-seen clips of Bowie performing live at Earls Court on the 1978 tour for the Heroes and Low albums. “Two nights. 35 millimetre. 24-track audio. Possibly the greatest performance on film of David’s career,” Morgen says. The film won’t just present the visual spectacle of Bowie performing live, but the aural brilliance of it too, with Morgen employing the Academy Award-winning team that worked on Bohemian Rhapsody to turn less than great quality tape recordings into something befitting the cinematic soundstage. 

Five and a half years after his death, with a plethora of posthumous biographies and retrospectives filling up shelves (especially mine...), the cold hard truth is that we still don’t know all that much about Bowie. We know the musical milestones, some of his family story, his Brixton childhood and adolescence in Beckenham. Even now, there’s precious little of Bowie actually talking if you search for it on YouTube. There are the few chat show appearances, the uncanny prediction of the Internet in his Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, but apart from Top Of The Pops clips, Live Aid and the films he made as an actor, nothing that truly reveals the artist himself. Even Alan Yentob’s legendary 1975 Omnibus film for the BBC, Cracked Actor, leaves the viewer vague as to who it was about, thanks to Bowie appearing gaunt and clearly on drugs (“I was so blocked, so stoned,” he once admitted while talking about the documentary. “It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it. I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely”).

Morgen’s challenge with Moonage Daydream is, clearly, how much new it will reveal. So much of Bowie’s career was a guise combining distinct image and music that even his hair styles formed part of a character. After spending the 1990s trying to bury his past, attempting the thankfully short-lived grunge band Tin Machine and even trying to put his creative peak in the 1970s behind him with the Sound + Vision Tour, Bowie finally embraced his popularity. His headline appearance at Glastonbury in 2000 was a joyous jukebox of hits. But if you watch the performance film, you also see a star shorn of his lofty artistic pretences. He is Dave, the blokey, jokey feller from south London. Indeed, in the four years following that set, we saw something of the Bowie you’d be happy to hang out with in the pub - a warm, self-effacing humour exuding from the stage in the brilliant A Reality Tour DVD, or being wickedly droll with Ricky Gervais in Extras. 

Perhaps, though, we don’t want Bowie to be anything more than the slightly ethereal figure he became in the late 1960s and in his ’70s pomp. Even in his final music video, for the Blackstar single Lazarus (“Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can't be seen”, embracing his impending death, but managing to remain abstract, distancing himself from the rest of us mere mortals. And that, quite frankly, is alright with me. 

David Bowie: the Brilliant Adventure

This isn’t the first and won’t be the last time that I offer you, dear reader, thoughts on another posthumous David Bowie release, but since the old girl’s untimely demise on 10 January 2016 there hs been no shortage of reminders of why, musically, he was one of the most intriguing figures of the rock era. It’s an interest that inevitably appeals to the committed fan like me, but also provides the opportunity of discovery to those who’ve hitherto been indifferent throughout the six decades in  which Bowie spent time in recording studios.

Cynics will argue that the box sets and remastered reissues are exercises in reselling what's already been bought, but within each new package marketed since Bowie’s death there has usually been something to justify the outlay (always a tough ask - pricey editions of classic albums, offering alternative mixes and outtakes barely different from the established tracks rarely bring anything new). For some of us, of course, no justification is required, but the latest package - the fifth in a series of retrospective gatherings of original and live albums plus extras - is genuinely enticing. 

Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) covers a period in which Bowie had to compete with Britpop, a not always fruitful exercise, despite his exalted status and the fact that many of that era’s bands were consciously doffing caps to the very era from which Bowie sprang forth. Brutally, he simply wasn’t  fashionable any more. That extraordinary run of albums, from Hunky Dory to at least Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) meant nothing. By the time the 1990s came along, David Bowie was simply another middle-aged rock star, one of those superannuated Live Aid veterans with nothing new to say. In fairness, the albums that comprise Brilliant Adventure would never match the creative zenith of the 1970s, but they don’t come up short for eclecticism - as did, frankly, every album he had committed to tape. What confounded critics at the time was there appeared to be an attempt by The Dame to look relevant, with the drum’n’bass of singles like Little Wonder suggesting cultural appropriation. The truth is, being the music magpie that he was, Bowie had always drawn influence from whatever genres took his fancy.

And so, Brilliant Adventure - which includes the albums Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, Hours and the Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack - skips through a varied palette, from conventional pop to rock, electronica and other more ‘urban’ sources. They also reflect a maturing and, at times, more reflective Bowie, celebrating his marriage to Iman, and starting to loosen any residual hangups that may have been lingering about Being David Bowie. That is also reflected in Bowie’s live performances at the time, reflected on Brilliant Adventure with the terrific live album recorded in June 2000 at the BBC Radio Theatre in London as a companion to that year’s legendary Glastonbury headline performance. It was originally only available as a third disc in a limited-edition version of Bowie At The Beeb, which contained featured BBC sessions from the ’60s and ’70s. Notable to these live sets in 2000 was the breadth of ‘classic’ Bowie songs from his imperious phase, reflecting a relaxed reconnection with the big hits from that time that he’d try to move away from.

But the big draw of Brilliant Adventure is Toy, a semi-mythical album of new versions of songs from the very beginning of Bowie’s career, reworked by the singer and the touring musicians he was working with as the new century began. Recorded shortly after Glastonbury, the album was originally intended to be released in 2001, but the record company decided against it, for reasons probably best explained by them at the time. Returning to and revising early-career material is nothing new: Nick Mason put together his Saucerful Of Secrets outfit with Gary Kemp, Guy Pratt and others to perform the music of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, shedding remarkable light on the band’s early psychedelia with surprisingly current impact. Toy follows a similar philosophy, featuring new interpretations of tracks first recorded between 1964 and 1971, when Bowie was - pun intended - toying with a variety of musical styles, from Anthony Newley-style vaudeville to beat pop. 

He consciously returned to this era in 1999 when he appeared in an episode of VH1’s Storytellers and resurrected the frenetic Can’t Help Thinking About Me, the first time it had been performed in 30 years. This inspired the idea for Toy, taking his then-stage band (which included Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Mike Garson and Sterling Campbell) into the studio and playing the old songs ‘live’, selecting the tracks with the best takes for the album. “The songs are so alive and full of colour,” Bowie said in 2001. “They jump out of the speakers. It’s really hard to believe that they were written so long ago.” 

Despite his enthusiasm, the Toy tracks didn’t appear until 2011 when they were leaked online, but from today we get to hear them - for most of us - for the first time. Toy is not revelatory: it may be a ‘lost’ album, but the songs are ultimately and obviously not new. But they do represent a phase of Bowie’s life that I have taken inordinate pleasure from, when he was happy in his own skin, happy in life, and comfortable with his legacy.

“I’ve pulled together a selection of songs from a somewhat unusual reservoir and booked time in a studio,” he wrote at the time Toy was originally due to be released. “I still get really elated by the spontaneous event and cannot wait to sit in a claustrophobic space with seven other energetic people and sing till my tits drop off.” That in itself indicates the carefree nature of Toy, seemingly - and, simply - having fun, a notion that rock stars, and especially rock stars with Bowie’s history - are not normally known for. For those weaned on Let’s Dance, Heroes, Life On Mars?, The Jean Genie, Changes and more, only the utmost completist will already be familiar 1967’s Silly Boy Blue, the groovy I Dig Everything from 1966, or the cover of Here Comes The Night recorded in the early 1970s. It still gives some sense of hearing new music. Even if it’s new-old music.

You could argue that, like 1973’s Pin Ups album, a stop-gap of questionable covers, retreading old material was nothing more than an exercise in rehashing but, at risk of sounding blinkered, it doesn’t feel like that. As his statement suggested, he was really having a laugh, the side of ‘Brixton Dave’ that has endeared him to me almost as much as the music. After the Toy sessions there were two more new albums, Heathen and Reality. And then, on the German leg of the tour for that last album, Bowie abruptly disappeared from view amid health concerns, only resurfacing, seemingly out of nowhere, with the incredible The Next Day in 2013, and then the semi-mystical event that was Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday. Two days before his death.

Toy might, then, have a sentimental value, as all of the posthumous releases have. But it does plug a hole in our knowledge of David Bowie’s work. It certainly doesn’t feel like a scraping of the barrel, but it hardly represents a collection of missing gems. “Toy is like a moment in time, captured in an amber of joy, fire and energy,” says co-producer Mark Plati, who worked closely with Bowie in the 1990s. “It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music.” And he adds: “From time to time, he used to say ‘Mark, this is our album’, I think because he knew I was so deeply in the trenches with him on that journey. I’m happy to finally be able to say it now belongs to all of us.”

Toy is released today as part of the Brilliant Adventures (1992-2001) box set. An expanded three-CD edition, Toy Box, will be released on 7 January next year, the day before what would have been David Bowie’s 75th birthday.

How many times must an angel fall?

As if things haven’t been gloomy enough this week, if you want a proper wallow, track down Francis Whateley’s David Bowie: The Last Five Years, shown on Friday as part of BBC Four’s Bowie Night, in honour of what would have been the Starman's 74th birthday. It’s not about how the documentary ends - because five years ago this morning, the world found out - but for one particular period in the penultimate act of his career. 

The time in question is, in the longer history, a relative blink of the eye, but it represents a glimpse of the real David Bowie, an individual who, for a large proportion of his musical career, was shrouded - mainly intentionally - in guises and crafted personas. In October 2003, Bowie commenced the Reality Tour, a 112-date campaign that would, over five legs, snake through Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand in support of Reality, generally thought to be his best album since 1980’s Scary Monsters And Super Creeps. It was a grueling tour with shows lasting two and a half hours each as the band merrily worked their way through almost 40 years of music. In fact, around 60 songs were rehearsed for the tour, drawn from almost every decade in the Bowie canon, from singalong hits to a lesser known cover of The Pixies’ Cactus and Sister Midnight, originally found on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. 

In Whateley’s film, band members, like bass player Gail Ann Dorsey, guitarists Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard, drummer Sterling Campbell, and longtime keyboard collaborator Mike Garson, speak with fondness of the David Bowie they were playing with. They enthusiastically embrace the exhaustive song catalogue, playfully finding new ways to perform it. But it’s clear that the Bowie they were touring with was comfortable in his own skin. The tour DVD shows him having fun, smiling and wisecracking his way through gigs that, night after night, appeared to be carefree celebrations. Moreover, it’s the off-stage footage that is the most revealing - hanging out with Slick in an amusement arcade, or larking about with a cutting impersonation of Paul Whitehouse’s ‘Brilliant!’ character from The Fast Show. It felt like you were watching David Jones of 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, as any ‘regular’ bloke in the pub.

While never an aloof figure, few probably knew the real David Bowie. Even himself, something apparent in Alan Yentob’s landmark Cracked Actor documentary in 1975, when an emaciated, cocaine-addicted Bowie - The Thin White Duke - swigging from a carton of milk in the back of a limo was, by his own admission, on the road to cliché rock star oblivion. What makes Whateley’s film so heartbreaking is that the David Bowie at the beginning of his final years on this planet was the very opposite of that casualty in the limo. Rather than reject his body of work - as so many performers of a certain vintage will do - he was celebratory of it. Things weren't always so.

While he’d disparagingly referred to his ‘80s commercial success (the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums, and even 1987’s Never Let Me Down and its subsequent Glass Spider Tour, with it’s overblown choreography and theatrical bombast) as his “Phil Collins years”, the 90s proved a different decade for Bowie. Musical fashion during the Britpop age turned its attention elsewhere, despite the likes of Blur and Oasis representing a reverence for the musical legacy of Bowie’s generation. Bowie, though, had also turned his attention elsewhere. His Sound + Vision tour in 1990 had been a conscious ‘retirement’ of the jukebox (“Knowing I won’t ever have those songs to rely on again spurs me to keep doing new things, which is good for an artist,” he said). His sojourn with the punky faux-grunge Tin Machine then seemed to draw a line more fully. 

Like another Doctor Who-style regeneration, Bowie emerged with the spotlight somewhat off him with the largely electronic Black Tie White Noise album in 1993. Four years shy of turning 50, he embraced contemporary influences such as hip-hop, while also reuniting with Nile Rodgers. Some suggest this was a mild mid-life crisis, but in truth, it was simply the magpie tendency that had acquired genres throughout his career showing through once more. It also manifested itself in the understated soundtrack to BBC TV’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha Of Suburbia, which remains one of my favourite collections of Bowie music. Indeed, as the 90s progressed, Bowie explored further new avenues, with drum’n’bass and a more industrial sound, as can be found on 1. Outside, Earthling and the gentle Hours…, released in relatively quick succession between 1995 and 1999.

There is no doubt that the 90s saw a quietening of the mania that had followed Bowie since the beginning of the 1970s. And, yet, it’s something of a myth to suggest that the decade saw a complete rewrite of his character. This is attested to by Brilliant Live Adventures, a box set of previously unreleased live performances from the 1990s being progressively released like those encyclopaedia collections you used to see advertised after Christmas. 

The first, Ouvrez Le Chien (Live Dallas ’95) was released in October, with the second, No Trendy Réchauffé (Live Birmingham ’95) appearing in December, both with an eclectic line up of notably hit-light content. 

The third instalment, LiveAndWell.com appears next week, and will feature tracks recorded on the 1997 Earthling tour, and again skewing away from the traditional Bowie canon, with Hallo Spaceboy the only single and even the bleak V-2 Schneider instrumental from the Heroes album included. Brilliant Live Adventures’ six entries - the final three yet to be announced - may well prove to be collectibles for the most avid of fan. 

Previously, these 90s shows had only been available to users of Bowie’s pioneering web platform BowieNet, and it could be argued that they might well have stayed there (Bowie’s choice of songs in this period was never always met with the satisfaction of audiences who’d turned up to hear pop hits - “This is bollocks! We want Let’s Dance!”, a punter was heard saying at one gig). He had, in this period, been defiant: it had been a deliberate effort to shift away from the material that had driven the first couple of decades of his career. Bowie was also somewhat belligerent over how it would land, regarding the exercise of choosing relative obscurities as educational.

However, it wasn’t just the fanbase that grew indifferent. Even sections of the press turned, with “edgy” younger hacks making disparaging remarks, seemingly for reactionary kicks. Bowie’s former press officer, Alan Edwards, relayed to The Sunday Times late last year the story of how, in personal notes he wrote during the 1999 tour, Bob Dylan had just been made a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, but in the UK, Bowie was no longer being treated with anywhere near the reverence he once had. 

On 27 June, 2000, Bowie recorded a brilliant show for the BBC (later released as a third CD of a limited edition package of the Bowie At The Beeb compilation), during which he bound through classics like Wild Is The Wind, Ashes To Ashes, This Is Not America, The Man Who Sold The World and Let's Dance. It is still one of my treasured possessions, apart from anything else, for the vitality and freshness he brought to these songs. 

During the recording at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, Bowie enthralled the audience with hilarious stories about the set list he was performing. And, yet, Edwards couldn’t persuade a single journalist to come along. “The press wax lyrical about David now, but I had wads of tickets I couldn’t give away in the 1990s, because he was not deemed cool,” Edwards told The Sunday Times. 

Two days beforehand, Bowie had headlined the prestigious Sunday night slot at Glastonbury, delighting an enraptured 150,000-strong crowd with a 33-song romp through all the classics. Yes, the very songs Bowie had consciously rejected during his tours in the preceding decade. BBC2 aired the set in full last June, the first time it had been shown in its entirety, and almost 20 years to the day it had been staged. And it was mesmerising. The Glasto show has been rightly held up as the perfect Sunday night ‘legends’ performance, not just for the hands-aloft communal entertainment, but because we got the real David Bowie. From his baroque suit to his artfully tousled shoulder-length hair (a throwback to his late-60s folkie persona), this was a smiley, blokey Bowie. The man who fell down-to-earth, if you will. “Having a good time?” he threw out to the crowd at one point. This wasn’t the usual stage platitude. He was, genuinely, having a ball. “This is cool for us. I’ve not been here for 30 years, and it’s fucking great. I’m really hot and sweaty, I wore a stupid jacket, I’m too vain to take it off.” 

Glastonbury has been branded Bowie’s comeback, but in reality it was only a comeback from a relative wilderness. And if it was a comeback, it didn’t last all that long. For the following couple of years he withdrew into family life following the birth of his daughter Lexi. Now New York-based, he performed Heroes at The Concert For New York, the 9/11 benefit at Madison Square Garden in October 2001.  The following June came the Heathen album, another of my latter-career favourites, on which Bowie was joined by chums like Pete Townshend and Dave Grohl, as well as producer Tony Visconti, who had been a part of Bowie’s emergence at the end of the 1960s. It was a somewhat reflective record - not directly influenced by the events of the previous September, but certainly attuned to the anxious mood that emerged in America as a result. I was living in California at the time, and Heathen became a constant companion on the new contraption I was constantly plugged into. I believe it was called an iPod.

The following year Bowie released Reality which, when stood up next to Heathen, revealed a Bowie in his mid-50s and clearly contemplating the world around him. Moreover, it was an album of genuine warmth, full of ‘proper’ songs and a simpler, beginning-middle-end structure. The reception Reality met was as accepted as the comfort with which Bowie and his band went out on the road to tour it, which brings me back to the heartwarming - and heartbreaking - nature of the words at the start of this post. 

The Reality Tour, originally scheduled for ten months, came to an abrupt halt on 25 June, 2004, when Bowie experienced chest pain while on stage at the Hurricane Festival in Germany. It was a blocked coronary artery requiring an emergency bypass. And it ended his touring career. The public appearances that followed while he recuperated were few and far between, with the occasional awards show, and the odd performance, such as joining David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006 to do Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb and Arnold Layne. It was David Bowie's final stage performance on British soil.  

Earlier that year he’d pledged to take a year off - “no touring, no albums”. It was a pledge he stuck to, mostly. One notable exception was his blisteringly funny appearance in a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais’s Extras. He and Gervais had struck an unlikely friendship after Bowie had become a fan of The Office. 

“He loved comedy,” Gervais has said since. “He was amazing in Extras. I sent him the lyrics and I said: 'Do something quite retro, like Life On Mars, and he went: 'Oh yeah, I'll just knock off a quick Life On Mars then…’!”. The resulting appearance, in which Bowie, sat at a nightclub piano riffs a song about Gervais’s jobbing actor character Andy Millman (“Chubby little loser!”) is a piece of comedy gold. It was also a Bowie continuing to show his true self, though, still in character.

Extras wasn’t, of course, some kind of ironic finale. But it certainly marked an absence that would only be ended on 8 January, 2013, Bowie's 66th birthday, when we read via son Duncan Jones’ Twitter account that his dad had something new to say. And, thus, the mournful Where Are We Now? - the song which gave this blog its name - appeared without warning, with its nostalgic lookback at Bowie’s Berlin residency, itself an intentional withdrawal from the madness of 1970s fame. The following March, an entire album appeared, The Next Day. The world fell in love again with David Bowie. 

Suddenly, enigmatically, he was catapulted back into near-regal seniority, a member of rock's top team. A retrospective exhibition, David Bowie is..., went on tour after its run at London’s V&A (which I saw there and again, two years later in Paris). What we didn’t know, however, was that the show's subject was in the midst of a terrible, 18-month battle with liver cancer. This was to be the muse for two more surprises: the album Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, and his death two days later. “Look up here, I’m in heaven” he sang on Lazarus, “I got scars that can't be seen," and in the second verse, “Look up here, man, I'm in danger. I've got nothing left to lose”. Only Bowie could have seemingly stage-managed his own demise in that way. It obviously wasn’t so contrived, but to release his most personal album ever, one clearly alluding to his failing mortality, and then dying two days later seemed, well, perfectly Bowie.

Visconti maintains that Bowie had more music in him when he went, and was as shocked as everyone else by the news. But David Robert Jones had always had a vision. He even predicted the Internet. Perhaps the Major Tom of Space Oddity and Ashes To Ashes was, in reality, his alter-ego, and the Starman was simply projecting a future echo. The upshot is that it is too easy to get maudlin today on the fifth anniversary of his death. And I won’t. His career will always be the gift that keeps on giving (and the continuous output of posthumous releases seems to underpin that point). It’s just that when I look at those scenes of the real David Bowie on tour in 2003, you can't help wishing you could sit with him, one last time, in a South London pub. Having a laugh. Bowie bantz.

Classic rock über alles

Picture: Led Zeppelin/Dick Barnatt

I feel vindicated. The other night, before she went to bed, my girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter was listening to Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times, the opening track of their self-titled 1969 debut album. The next morning I woke to read that the music I grew up with, from the 1970s and 1980s, is finding new audiences along with it original listenership thanks to streaming services.

In its latest yearbook, the BPI, the British record industry association, has revealed what the nation was listening to in 2019 via streaming services, and it is reassuring - from this old head's perspective, at least - to see how pop and rock's annals from the last six decades figure in that consumption. With the purchase of physical formats continuing their long-term decline (despite sales of vinyl records - pre-lockdown - remaining robust), music streaming in the UK grew by 7.5% in 2019, according to the BPI, which also noted that there were 114 billion plays on streaming services. Of particular note is that the '70s and '80s accounted for a greater share of so-called "catalogue plays" in 2019 than anything else, with two acts more prominent than anyone else - Elton John and Queen. No great surprise, given the success of the biopics Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody: both films provided gateways to the music of two of the decades' most prolific artists, with John in particular bringing attention to both his colourful life in the 1970s as well as the extraordinary run of albums he recorded, with Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water, Honky Honky Château and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road amongst the 12 recorded between 1970 and 1979 alone.

David Hepworth's brilliant book 1971 - Never A Dull Moment pondered the rich output of that specific year (Led Zeppelin IV, Who’s Next, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, The Doors’ LA Woman, Carole King’s Tapestry, et al), but the BPI stats reveal that 1977 - the year of the Queen's silver jubilee - accounted for the most number of albums from the '70s streamed in 2019, with ELO’s Out Of The Blue (featuring the feelgood Mr Blue Sky), Fleetwood Mac’s perennial Rumours (The Chain was its most-streamed song), and The Bee Gees' Stayin’ Alive figuring heavily. As did Queen’s News Of The World, thanks to We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions.

Go back further, and the 1960s provided a steady appetite of pop, rock and soul music last year. Not surprisingly The Beatles figure prominently: the Fabs' catalogue was a relative latecomer to streaming, only first becoming available on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music at Christmas 2015, seen at the time as an important effort to maintain the band's legacy. Four years on, their latter output dominated streams of '60s material, with the 50th anniversary edition of Abbey Road prominent, along with David Bowie's Space Oddity, various Rolling Stones tracks, and a healthy slew of Motown material, including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's Ain't No Mountain High Enough (the second most-streamed '60s track), the Jacksons' I Want You Back, My Girl by The Temptations and Ben E King's Stand By Me.

Further forward, the 1980s also featured significantly in the BPI's numbers, some 9.2% of all streamed in 2019, with Queen once again demonstrating - whether you like them or not - just how much they dominated British music for the better part of two decades, and up until Freddie Mercury's death in 1991. Another One Bites The Dust was the most-streamed song from 1980. Given that many a lockdown family Zoom get together will inevitably descend into violent disagreement over which era - and generation of music - was the best, the 1980s often miss out on a fair hearing, largely due to the association people make with their own memories of shoulder pads and puffball skirts on Top Of The Pops, and the ubiquitous clatter of gated reverb (and the ubiquitous clatter of Phil Collins...). Thus, Britons helped themselves to the likes of  A-Ha's Take On Me, Bryan Adams' Summer Of '69, Kenny Loggins' Footloose, Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark and Tina Turner's The Best looming large in the 2019 streaming landscape.

So what, then, of more recent output? In any given week the most popular songs are always dominated by new material, and last year songs released in 2019 accounted for over a fifth of streamed plays, with those from 2018 slightly behind. In fact the top two streamed tracks for 2019 were released the previous year - Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved and Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road (no, me neither), along with 2019 releases from Billy Eilish, Stormzy and Ed Sheeran. Contemporary events also had an impact on streaming choices, too. Along with the Elton John and Queen biopics, songs featuring in TV and film productions drew people to streaming tracks like Bruce Springsteen's Blinded By The Light and, randomly, Limahl’s Never Ending Story appearing in the Netflix supernatural drama Stranger Things.

Picture: Twitter/Glastonbury Festival

There was also a boost caused by last year's Glastonbury Festival, with The Cure being a notable beneficiary thanks to their headline set. Given that there won't be a Glasto this year - or, for the time being, any marquee music events anywhere - it'll be interesting to see what the 2020 figures reveal. That said, with so many of us currently in lockdown and potentially exhausting physical record collections, streaming might possibly be coming into its own. "The reasons certain songs resonate with us are many and varied, says Rob Crutchley, author of the BPI's What The UK Streamed In 2019 report. "They can lift our mood, reflect how we’re feeling at a certain time, or evoke a particular happy memory. Older songs can enjoy a renaissance at any time, maybe by being used in a film or TV show, being shared online via social media or by being discovered in a playlist. A much-loved artist going on tour can spike interest and there is a wealth of catalogue classics that are always in great demand at Christmas time – we’re streaming the hits of today in huge numbers but we’re also enjoying delving into our rich musical heritage."

The full What The UK Streamed In 2019 report can be read here.

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.

JC - Superstar

The irony was not lost: a JC preaching to a rapturous crowd of recent converts about a fairer society and being kind to one another. But, then, irony is something the Glastonbury Festival does well.

For all the cool headliners that Worthy Farm has hosted down the years, the mischievous, subversive hippy in Michael Eavis (with the same traits inherited by his co-organiser daughter Emily) has always found space for acts that the largely student-age audience will treat with good-natured bonne humeur. Today we had Barry Gibb, and in the past the likes of ELO, Tom Jones, Tony Christie and, notoriously, Rolf Harris - long before Her Majesty's Prison Service caught up with him - taking the stage with his wobbleboard to do Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport. Ho and, indeed, ho.

Jeremy Corbyn's appearance on the Pyramid Stage yesterday was as contrived a piece of Glastonbury wink-wink as it was a smart booking by Clan Eavis, tapping into arguably the coolest British politician of the moment. Not that politicians are cool. Ever. But here was the 68-year-old trenchant left-winger - later described by Katy Perry (who played before a smaller crowd, it must be noted) as "the Bernie Sanders of the UK" - wearing a shirt of undeterminable vintage (but clearly right-on origin), still resembling a Haringey geography teacher at a Fair Trade rally. And yet, in front of a crowd eagerly awaiting the day's headline performance from the Foo Fighters, was a politician who might possibly have thought the Foo Fighters were a south-east Asian guerilla cause he should get behind, generating the sort of crowd reaction normally reserved for headline performers like the Foos themselves.

Throughout the day, and even during the previous evening's Radiohead set, the chant "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" had been sung as passionately as any I've ever heard from a football crowd. There was a kind of crossover and not just the ultra-ironic "Wenger out!" flag being waved incongruously in front of the Arsenal-supporting Labour leader. Glastonbury has always had its political edge, but more to do with either the artists and their agendas, or associations with worthy causes. But not even during Tony Blair's messianic rise to power, or in the Kinnock era that paved the way for Blair, has the daddy/mummy/parent-of-no-distinct-gender of all music festivals allowed a politician on The Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury's main event platform.

Corbyn's appearance was a strange - if brief - snapshot of cultism. Go back to April when the General Election was announced and you wouldn't have to go far, even within the Labour Party, to find those who felt that Corbyn was dead in the water and would be gone by June 9. But on June 24, even having failed to win the election, he appeared more popular than ever, a position emboldened by Theresa May's abject public persona which itself was worsened by her disastrous election campaign and then her shoddy initial response to the Grenfell fire.

Even I was surprised by the clamour that grew around Corbyn as the election campaign unfolded, with crowd sizes at rallies from Reading to Birmingham, and from Gateshead to his native Islington growing bigger and bigger. In fact, his 20 minute 'set' at Glastonbury felt like just another date on a national tour, delivering a rousing speech on poverty and several pet isms as part of his "for the many, not the few" agenda.

For the latter-day Glastonbury crowd, Corbyn's words fell neatly. "Politics is actually about everyday life," he declared. "It’s about all of us, what we dream, what we want, and what we want for everybody else." He thundered on about how the elites (including media commentators) "got it wrong" and spoke directly to "the number of young people who got involved for the first time. Because they were fed up with being denigrated, fed up with being told they don’t matter. Fed up with being told they never participate, and utterly fed up with being told that their generation was going to pay more to get less in education, in health, in housing, in pensions and everything else."

This was the greatest hits package, cleverly tailored to the audience. It was hardly a recreation of the punk spirit and all that "no future" nihilism, but 'ver kids' lapped it up, demonstrating an accommodation that clearly had no intention of questioning what Corbyn's lukewarm approach to Brexit did for their future chances of experiencing life outside of the UK.

That, then, is the truly remarkable - and baffling - thing about Jezza: how he could have been a no-hoper to win the election, regarded as well-meaning and principled, but with associations in his past and convictions in his present that many felt made him unelectable. Regardless, he still gets mobbed pulling pints and generating a roaring trade in T-shirts bearing his own image at a music festival.

Fair play to him, though. Clearly it would have been an irony-stretch to have invited May (who doesn't, apparently, do public gatherings larger than Cabinet meetings) or, worse, Farage who wouldn't have even been able to say "Good afternoon Glastonbury!" without getting bottled off. Nor would departing LibDem leader Tim Farron have fared much better following his botched positioning on gay marriage. Maybe the Greens co-leader, Caroline Lucas, might have endured, but not on the main stage.

And so, in a Glastobury nominally dominated by Radiohead's excellent (but somewhat Marmite...) performance on Friday, and by the Foo Fighters' storming closing set 24 hours later, the main talking point has been about a somewhat scruffy grandfather, once regarded as a member of the Labour Party's awkward squad, quoting peace, love and Shelley, and who just lost an election. Politics, eh?