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.

Lost and found: tomb raiding or celebration of a legacy?

© Simon Poulter 2021

My entry to the blogosphere happened by accident: a foul mood one Monday morning resulting from England’s latest humiliating exit from a football tournament led to a 1,000-word rant written on a train and in need of an outlet. Thus, this blog’s predecessor, What Would David Bowie Do? was born. It was never meant to be about The Dame (it’s title came from a throwaway remark by a former girlfriend) but over the course of its lifetime, my love of David Bowie’s music was progressively rekindled as I found myself dipping into the extraordinary body of work he had recorded. His death on 10 January, 2016, brought that blog to an abrupt halt. It just didn’t seem right to continue with that title, which was simply a nod to a throwaway, Jägermeister-fuelled quip in a Yosemite boozer. So I wrote my own obituary and WWDBD? ended there. 

Of course, I wouldn’t stop blogging, and there was only going to be one source for the new one’s name, hence the reference you see at the top of this page. Even now, people think I’m a Bowie blogger, but I haven’t actually written anything specifically about him for a couple of years. Today might change that, as I kick off what I’ve presumptively declared David Bowie Month, for no other reason than the 26th will see the release of the latest box set of Bowie reissues, Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001). The package will feature remasters of output in a period where Bowie may have struggled, remarkably, to fit into the Britpop wave that was going on at the time, but in Black Tie White Noise, The Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack, Outside, Earthling and Hours, still produced utterly compelling material. 

The period also covers a phase of live performances, where Bowie had a white-hot band and was seemingly comfortable in his skin performing all the old classics. Thus, a BBC Radio live recording from 2000 (originally released as part of the limited-edition three-disc Bowie At The Beeb) - a warm-up for his legendary Glastonbury headline performance - is included in the set, along with a collection of odds and sods called Re:Call 5. The true draw to the package, however, is Toy, the semi-mythical record featuring new versions of Bowie songs from the very beginning of his career, but which wasn’t deemed by the record company to be releasable in 2001. I can assure you there will be more on Brilliant Adventure nearer its release date.

© Simon Poulter 2021

Last week I indulged my fandom with a visit to the new ‘Bowie 75’ pop-up shop in London’s Heddon Street, opened (along with a sister branch in New York) to provide an outlet for devotees to gorge themselves on merchandise, music and other paraphernalia (such as a Stylophone with which to recreate the iconic middle-eight of Space Odyssey). I won’t deny that purchases were made (high-quality vinyl reissues of the ‘second’ David Bowie album and The Man Who Fell To Earth, plus the scintillating Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 recorded on the Station To Station tour - Bowie in his absolute ’70s pomp). 

In the shop’s basement you can listen to vintage songs spruced up with ‘360 Reality Audio’ (Sony’s new ‘spatial’ audio technology), as well as play around with magnetic lyrics stuck to a pillar, composing songs as Bowie once did with cut up newspaper headlines. There’s also a red telephone box in which you can have your picture taken, a hat-tip to the shop being located across the road from the building featured in the cover art for The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, setting the scene for the alien Ziggy’s arrival on Earth.

If people think all this is fan gouging, then that’s up to them. After all, people appear to be paying significantly north of £80 for Adele tickets next summer, so no one has the right to judge what people spend their money on when it comes to pop music. Most of the merchandise on sale in the shops is available on the official Bowie website, but there’s more to it than simply a couple of glorified souvenir kiosks. The London and New York stores (the latter located close to Bowie’s SoHo home of 20 years) have been opened for a strictly limited period, leading up to what would have been the artist’s 75th birthday, on 8 January next year. 

“I’m really emotional,” 35-year-old fan Nikky Smart told The Times the other day while visiting the Heddon Street store. “It’s kind of like they’ve brought him back again.” I can’t say that it was really like that for me, but it was all very tasteful. And seeing most of a back catalogue of 27 studio albums, live sets and compilations on sale, alongside the T-shirts (yep, I bought one), baseball hats, jigsaw puzzles and all the rest, was a poignant reminder of the sheer body of work Bowie left behind when he succumbed to cancer in 2016.

Picture: The Rolling Stones/Bravado

The Bowie 75 shops are just the latest retail ventures opened by heritage acts to interact with fans. The Rolling Stones opened their own ‘Official UK Store’ in London’s Carnaby Street in September last year - a brave move given that it was that brief period of 2020 when normality resumed and people went shopping again, albeit tentatively. The Stones previously had a limited-period concession at Selfridges in Oxford Street to provide the template for the Carnaby Street shop, making it largely a platform to flog somewhat expensive T-shirts bearing the legendary ‘lips’ logo and various pieces of Stones album art. The Bowie shops also arrive a few weeks after Queen opened their own store, also in Carnaby Street, and dedicated to the band’s five-decade career, selling limited edition music releases, fashion collaborations with brands like Champion and Wrangler, Johnny Hoxton jewellery and other ‘lifestyle products’, whatever that means. 

All these band-based retail concepts appear to have two types of punter in mind: tourists that (in theory) throng to London’s West End, and in particular, social media-savvy youngsters looking to post their visits to Instagram and TikTok (that said, the Bowie shop seemed to be mostly customised by middle-aged blokes…er…like me). “We’re really looking at two things,” entertainment consultant Lawrence Peryer explained to The Times last week when talking about how the Bowie shops came about. “We wanted to create a place for the long-term Bowie fan to come in and find out something about Bowie that they didn’t know before, and have an experience they’d not had before, but also to connect with a young audience. David was always ahead of his time, always changing to connect with the younger crowd, and we’re hoping this will carry on the tradition.” 

Bowie certainly was ahead of his time: many will have seen on YouTube his highly prescient interview in 1999 with the BBC’s Newsnight in which he told a sceptical Jeremy Paxman that the Internet - then in relative infancy - would affect society beyond all recognition. “The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” he declared. The year before, Laurence Peryer had helped Bowie create his BowieNet website, widely considered one of the earliest pioneers of online music. It’s just one facet of Bowie that makes him still fascinating today, even before you start delving into the myriad characters and guises he quite consciously invented as avatars for his music. That was something he effectively did up to his dying day, with the morbid, out-of-body experience that was Blackstar, with its conscious references to impending death, which eventually occurred, uncannily, two days after his 69th birthday and the album’s release.

Bowie had a history of prescience. Invariably depicted as an inveterate Mod magpie throughout his life, appropriating music and fashion from wherever and whatever took his fancy, he also kept an unearthly beady eye on technology trends. In 1997 Bowie hatched a plan to monetise the master tapes of his recordings, foreseeing the rise of online streaming services that, as we now know, would only generate paltry revenues for artists compared to what they were used to with sales of physical formats. In the end, Bowie struck a deal with insurer Prudential to issue ‘Bowie bonds’ which used future royalties from his material as collateral, effectively enabling him to borrow against his back catalogue. The deal raised $55 million - shortly before Napster and the file-sharing boom came along, heralding the online music revolution that the industry has been coming to terms with ever since.

Today, as the online platforms Bowie predicted in his Paxman interview have eaten dramatically into sales of physical music formats, many artists have turned to striking deals with companies like the investment vehicle Hipgnosis. In the last year it has bought the rights to the catalogues of artists as diverse as Neil Young, Beyoncé and Blondie. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon have also sold their songwriting for eye-watering sums. Now, the Bowie estate is looking to get in on the act, with the Financial Times reporting last week that it is negotiating a deal for the artist’s albums that could raise anything up to $200 million, to be distributed between the artist’s widow Iman, son Duncan Jones and daughter Lexi, an agreement that would complement another signed recently with Warner Music for the recorded music catalogue.

Posthumously, Bowie continues to merchandise his work with a steady stream of reissues and deluxe packages, including the compilation box sets Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982) and Loving The Alien (1983-1988), each containing respectfully tarted-up versions of original studio albums along with recordings that encapsulated Bowie’s stage magic. There has also been a series of live albums, released one by one to build up a box set of their own, Brilliant Live Adventures, and drawn from Bowie’s so-called ‘wilderness years’ in the 1990s when he was, incredibly, not in vogue (all these recordings had been officially available online previously, but lucratively making the available physically, with a limited edition slip case drew in the likes of me - and I haven’t been disappointed, either). Indeed, I’ve had no problem buying any of the these Bowie packages, even if they mean owning the same albums over and over again. Each - as will the forthcoming Brilliant Adventure - contain enough trinkets of genuine appeal to the fan and, if bizarrely, such people exist, provide an entry point to the work of one of popular music’s most richly artistic and charismatic figures. Yep, I know: I’m a record company marketing manager’s dream. Sue me.