Listening to the new Bowie album (pretty good I reckon, some very good songs, two songs too long maybe) has sent me spinning back to the Berlin albums and some clips of Bowie and his band playing various TV shows in the mid-to-late 70s.
Station To Station has always been my favourite Bowie album, sheer brilliance from start to finish- and there's this live performance where the Thin White Duke (or Thin Dark Green PVC Trousered Duke) stands back grinning to admire Adrian Belew nailing the riff to Stay in very funky fashion.
The video for be My Wife (from Low) is hilarious- Bowie's facial expressions throughout are a scream; looks like the video making process is akin to being offered a plate of steaming hot dogshit. Great, great song. Cool hair too.
Bowie appearing on US programme Soul Train playing Golden Years (my favourite Bowie song I think), bit of shimmying, coked to the gills.
And live in navy blue again with full band doing Five Years on the Dinah Shore Show.
Which is maybe not as good as the Whistle Test one from a few years earlier (five years earlier?).
All better than Heathens!
ReplyDeleteDead right about Station To Station, in my humble opinion (IMHO).
ReplyDeleteAlso Golden Years, have you come across the reworks by DJs at US radio KCRW?
They don't seem to have been v popular, but the fact that Bowie allowed their release makes me think he liked them. Jeremy Sole's and Eric J Lawrence's are the best, I think - not too reverential, but equally not throwing the baby out with the bath water...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72A12ACZyMs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKH9aOecmQ
It is quite possible that you may hate them, of course.
Thanks Max. Will have a look at these later.
ReplyDeleteIn my continuing need to be different, Lodger is my favorite Bowie album, but Station To Station is always nipping at it's heels (stilettoes). Bowie as drugged out wanderer is certainly his most creative period which would include Station to Station - the beginnngs of the clean up of Scary Monsters.
ReplyDeleteI never discount Ziggy, or the Thin White Duke, but the Bowie of excess out of control is defintely the most creative.
The Next Day takes so much of this period and reigns it in creating yet another amazing phase in his reinvention.
i shall never get past my little sister liking him which meant i could only despise him. never really got him at all to be honest
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Funny how that sibling music thing works isn't. My younger brother was into Bowie which meant I only really got into him after I left home
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