Official Music Video for The Flaming Lips’ version of “Space Oddity”, I’m a massive David Bowie fan, so there was every chance of me hating this. But I’m also a massive Flaming Lips fan so this trippy, visceral “Space Oddity” cover and fucked up accompanying video – pill-popping, semi-naked nuns and all – gets my seal of approval. Being the King Of Weird, I like to think that it’d get David’s too.
Despite David Bowie’s generous offer to take him on tour, in 1983 Texas blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan declined the offer just before the start of Bowie’s “Serious Moonlight Tour” in pursuit of his own interests. Stevie Ray though did, however, participate in tour rehearsals with David Bowie and his band, and lucky for us, someone caught the entire rehearsal session on tape! Recorded live at the Las Calinas Soundstage in Dallas, Texas, this audio features Stevie Ray Vaughan running through the song “Let’s Dance” – I don’t know if it’s a case of David Bowie only working with the music industry’s best and brightest or if this is just a really, really good rehearsal session, but this rendition of “Let’s Dance” sounds just as amazing as an actual studio recording!
Some highlights of the “Let’s Dance” rehearsal include the explosive solo that Stevie plays beginning at 3:41 and running until the end of the song nearly two minutes later, and at the end you can hear Stevie, David, and the rest of the band complimenting each other on a job well done.
The final night of Bowie’s Serious Moonlight Tour fell on the third anniversary of the death of John Lennon. In honor of John’s passing, Bowie and his band performed “Imagine” that night.
On the opening night of The River Tour 2016. Bruce performs “Rebel Rebel” as a tribute to David Bowie.
Bruce Springsteen opened his “The River 2016” tour at Pittsburgh’s Consol Energy Center on Saturday. After playing 1980’s The River in full, Springsteen launched into an array of favorites, including “Badlands” and “Thunder Road.”
At one point, he stepped up to the mic and took some time for David Bowie, the rock legend who passed away on Monday, January 8th 2016.
“Not very many people know this but he supported our music way, way in the very, very beginning. 1973. He rang me up and I visited him in Philly while he was making the Young Americans record*. He covered my music, ‘Hard to be a Saint in the City’ … I took the Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, that’s how early it was,” Springsteen said.
He then launched into “Rebel Rebel” from Bowie’s 1974’s Diamond Dogs album.
In addition to “Hard to be a Saint in the City,” Bowie also recorded “Growing Up,” which was released on a 1990 re-release of Pin Ups.
Then WMMR DJ Ed Sciaky, an early Springsteen supporter, made the meeting between the two happen. Springsteen didn’t have a place to stay so he slept on Sciaky’s couch. During the time Bowie was recording Young Americans (late ’74, early ’75), Springsteen was just coming off the one-two punch of Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Born to Run, Springsteen’s break out, was released in August of 1975.
Bowie wrote, “Springsteen came down to hear what we were doing with his stuff. He was very shy. I remember sitting in the corridor with him, talking about his lifestyle, which was a very Dylanesque – you know, moving from town to town with a guitar on his back, all that kind of thing. Anyway, he didn’t like what we were doing, I remember that. At least, he didn’t express much enthusiasm. I guess he must have thought it was all kind of odd. I was in another universe at the time. I’ve got this extraordinarily strange photograph of us all – I look like I’m made out of wax.”
Director Cameron Crowe reminisced about a similar time period while speaking about Bowie at the Television Critics Association. “He was always obsessed with music and art and never the business. It was always a young artist had moved him. He would reach out to that artist. Bruce Springsteen was somebody that caught his attention on the first album. He was talking about Bruce Springsteen in … early stages of Bruce Springsteen’s career.”
This is the David Bowie television performance that no one has seen in 38 years, and which Americans have never seen at all – up to now! As the story goes, Bowie visited U.K.’s longest-running music programme Top of the Pops on January 3rd, 1973 to showcase his then-new single “The Jean Genie.” The performance was only ever broadcast once – the day after its filming, and the tapes from that TOTP episode were duly placed in the BBC vaults where they were eventually erased so that the TV company could reuse the tapes.
Because of this, it was believed this performance of the song had been lost forever. But just recently, a TOTP cameraman named John Henshall revealed that at the time of his involvement in the filming of the episode he had been given an additional copy of Bowie’s performance for himself. The British Film Institute was told of the discovery and an exclusive preview screening called ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ was held in London on Sunday 11th December 2011. As a result of this, the BBC were very keen to once again broadcast it and following talks, it was agreed that it could be included in the Christmas edition of TOTP2. The video will also be broadcast uninterrupted and in full on BBC4 in January 2012 as part of a documentary called ‘Tales Of Television Centre’.
This version here is slightly different and more complete to the one which appeared on the BBC’s TOTP2 Christmas show on 21st December 2011 because there are less captions, no voice-overs, and it includes the full beginning. This edit is also EXCLUSIVE to ZiggyStardustTV.
in January 1973, Bowie returned to Top of the Pops for a victory lap: a triumphant performance of “The Jean Genie.” Promoting a new album, Aladdin Sane, Bowie was still dolled up in his Ziggy Stardust persona, with a crepe-style plaid jacket over his bare chest, a chain around his neck, and a shock of bright red hair. The Spiders from Mars emphasized the single’s martial stomp and Bowie wailed on his harmonica like he was worried the BBC might take it away from him.
“I wanted to get the same sound as the Stones had on their first album on the harmonica,” Bowie once said. “I didn’t get that near to it but it had a feel that I wanted – that Sixties thing.”
The music to “The Jean Genie” was inspired by Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man”; Bowie wrote the song’s lyrics in the New York City apartment of model-actress Cyrinda Foxe, then a publicist for his management company and later married to David Johansen of the New York Dolls and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. But the actual subject of the song was Iggy Pop, or at least a fictionalized version of him, Bowie said. The lyrics were about somebody who “sits like a man but he smiles like a reptile.” The title of the song was an homage to French novelist/dramatist Jean Genet – Bowie has told different stories over the years whether the reference was unconscious or deliberate – while the line “He’s so simple-minded, he can’t drive his module” would, in turn, inspire the name of the band Simple Minds.
Bowie regarded “The Jean Genie” as a manifesto, not just a 45-rpm single. The following year, in a Rolling Stone interview with William S. Burroughs, Bowie said, “A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.”
Bowie’s Top of the Pops performance of the song gave viewers a wide range of lifestyle choices, from his shiny earring to the lyric “strung out on lasers and slash-back blazers” to the alarming haircut of bassist Trevor Bolder. But at some point after the broadcast on January 4th, 1973, the BBC wiped the tape to save money. The performance would never have been seen again – except that cameraman John Henshall had employed an unusual fisheye lens of his own invention. Wanting the “Jean Genie” footage for his professional reel, he had retained a videotape copy. It remained in his personal collection, unseen for 38 years, when he discovered that his copy was the only one in existence. “I just couldn’t believe that I was the only one with it,” Henshall said. “I just thought you wouldn’t be mad enough to wipe a tape like that.”
People around the world are paying tributes to the Goblin Prince in all manner of forms, and Aussie lads Gang of Youths are here in honouring David Bowie by releasing a magical rendition of Heroes. The cover replaces Bowies 70s sound with a Gang of Youths signature Kansas-esque strings backing and a marching kick drum, as well as dreamy synth and guitar hooks. Front man David Le’aupepe possesses one of the most intensely honest voices you are likely to hear, This uniquely authentic vocal soars over the whole track, something I’m sure Mr. Bowie would have been very pleased to hear.
Le’aupepe writes on the bands Facebook page, “At the risk of being trite, Heroes changed my life. The melody accompanying “I, I will be king/and you/you will be queen” is to me, not only the finest melody the Thin White Duke ever wrote but among the finest ever written period.”
i wish i had some ornate or choice words to express how sad i am at the moment but i don’t, so i figured the best way for me to remember David Bowie was to cover the first song of his that i ever heard.
at the risk of being trite, “Heroes” changed my life. the melody accompanying “i, i will be king/and you/you will be queen” is to me, not only the finest melody the thin white duke ever wrote but among the finest ever written period.
and if you listen to the synth line in the end chorus of our track “radioface” very, very closely you can hear a small nod to “Heroes”.
David Bowie had been on the British pop scene for seven years by 1972, but it wasn’t until this performance of “Starman” on the BBC that he truly established himself as a giant cultural force. It was the first time a mass audience met Ziggy Stardust and the newly formed Spiders From Mars. The appearance made Bowie an idol to kids all across England, and that fervor would soon go global as the Ziggy Stardust tour went on. This was the first time that made me a huge Bowie fan and the moment David Bowie pointed down the camera during his appearance on the BBC in July 1972 was also the precise moment that he became a major star
In the glory days of Top of the Pops you couldn’t watch things again. You retained them in the archive of your memory. People watched hungrily, believing it would be their only chance. It’s only slowly, in the years since 1972, that I realised that I wasn’t the only one for whom this was a key moment. The way Bowie pointed that finger, smilingly draped an arm around Mick Ronson, and looked beyond the camera to engage the audience sitting at home, stickily hemmed in by disapproving members of their immediate family, seemed of a piece with the new Ziggy Stardust persona we’d been reading about. It felt like an arrival long delayed.
People had been tipping Bowie for much of the previous year. His album Hunky Dory had come out just before Christmas 1971, with glowing reviews and a big marketing push from his new record company, but it hadn’t really taken. The New York Times called him “the most intellectually brilliant man yet to choose the long-playing album as his medium of expression”. In truth, Bowie was like everybody else, just trying to get a hit. The last time he’d been on Top of the Pops was playing piano behind Peter Noone on the latter’s hit version of his own Oh! You Pretty Things. Bowie’s people were furiously working the machine. His first release of 1972, Changes, was not a hit, despite being single of the week on Tony Blackburn’s Radio 1 show.
Words are inadequate when the world loses someone like David Bowie. A visionary, icon, innovator and musical genius. is rock’s greatest chameleon. Never one to sit still, he’s pointed at a new musical direction on nearly every album he’s released in his career. However, not all of them have had the same artistic and/or commercial impact,
His earliest singles, which date back to the mid-’60s, found him, like so many other London-based musicians, trying his hand at copying American R&B sounds. But his 1967 debut saw him dabble in music hall and whimsical baroque pop. Neither had any chart impact, but it still showed his willingness to experiment. It wasn’t until the “Space Oddity” single in 1969 — when he started looking towards the future instead of the past
Bowie also has a reputation as one of music’s most imaginative conceptual artists. As a writer and musician, Bowie usually attempts to convey a larger story within an album. And while sometimes that involves a total change in persona (Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke), other times it requires a shift in musical perspective (“plastic soul,” “the Berlin trilogy”).
David Bowie fans searching for answers in the days after his death might have their first clues regarding the battle with cancer that shadowed his final 18 months.
Coming mere days after his 69th birthday and the release of his new Blackstar album, and the announcement of his passing January 10th caught the world by surprise, but to those in Bowie’s inner circle, news of his condition was nothing new. The Independent quotes stage director Ivo van Hove, who’d been working with him on his new musical Lazarus musical, as saying he’d known of Bowie’s illness for “about a year.”
“We began collaborating on our show Lazarus, and at some point he took me to one side to say that he wouldn’t always be able to be there due to his illness. He told me he had cancer, liver cancer,” said Hove. “The cast didn’t know all that time, and I suspect that the musicians with whom he recorded Blackstar didn’t know either. He made every effort to complete those two projects on time, not to let his illness win. Bowie was still writing on his deathbed, you could say. He fought like a lion and kept working like a lion through it all. I had incredible respect for that.”
The NME, meanwhile, quotes Bowie biographer Wendy Leigh’s interview with the BBC, in which Leigh asserts that cancer was only one of multiple health woes that dogged him in recent years. “He didn’t just battle cancer,” said Leigh. “He had six heart attacks in recent years. I got this from somebody very close to him.”
Tucked away on compilations, hidden on B-sides or released decades after they were written, there are plenty of Bowie gems to seek out: here are 20 of the best
From the soundtrack to the Hanif Kureishi TV adaptation, the greatest lost Bowie song of all is a bravura remix of one confused suburban boy’s life story to accompany another’s. Is there anything more Bowie than the line “Englishman going insiiiiiiine?”
Balls-out single-entendre glam filth as Mr Stardust yelpingly narrates an everyday story of backstage fellatio. Lost for years and a surprise to even – ahem – hardened Bowiephiles, this is brilliantly, uniquely nasty.
While we’re on no-holds-barred polymorphous perversion, the magnificently lascivious glam B-side to Changes was something of a lost and wandering child until given a home on Bowie’s rolling reissue programme. Ends, hilariously, with a choir of vulgar boatmen.
The plushest product of his white soul period, this gospelised slice of self-examination should have been a generational anthem. Ludicrously, it was binned in favour of a hammy and otiose version of the Beatles’ Across the Universe.
A supremely odd yet supremely singable piece of hippy whimsy about pilots literally bombing a lone old man on a piece of waste ground. (Why? Who knows.)Bowie’s now-instinctive melodic sense renders a ropey vocal beside the point.
We’re all supposed to hate drum’n’bass Bowie, but there is no denying the ridiculous charm and rattling, Firestarter energy of this nonsensical squib. Bowie is speaking the lingua franca of showbiz cockney again and it’s not dissimilar from …
… bright young Bowie swaggering in his Anthony Newley mod-about-town incarnation, a London boulevardier with the future in his pocket (“Don’t like your new face? That’s not nice …”). It’s all you can do not to yell Parklife! during the chorus. For the flipside of Bowie’s swinging London, see …
He was on the side of the outsiders long before Ziggy Stardust. This poignant, perceptive early song captures the milieu of Soho mods, runaways, pill victims and queer vagabonds with uncanny precision. A distant psychedelic motif prefigures his and their shared futures.
Forecasting the disturbing Mitteleuropean scarecrow Bowie of Blackstar and Lazarus, this hastily-recorded but quite entrancing take on Brecht’s paean to amoral pleasure is a singular delight: “Nothing could be harder than the quest for fun.”
This Morrissey song – produced in the original by Mick Ronson – essentially rewrites Bowie’s Rock’n’Roll Suicide. Bowie returns the favour with an impassioned, choir assisted version. “It’s me singing Morrissey singing me,” he explained, although the performance is more wind-tunnel Bowie than torchsong Moz.
An intriguing curio from Bowie’s stillborn musical of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with a bizarre, parping proto-funk accompaniment, and a single in the US and Japan. As with even Bowie’s dashed-off stuff during the 70s, once heard it’s a total earworm.
Yes, they were pretty dreadful but in this you can hear what Tin Machine done right might have sounded like – a desperate, histrionic lyric with a sprawling metal soundtrack. Fix the production and you’ve got a fit-for-purpose grunge band.
Scuzzed-up re-recording of an anaemic early hippy-dippy single, revelling in Bowie’s fascination with Aleister Crowley and his occult sex magick. The spirit of Marc Bolan is banished and a fouler one installed.
Bowie’s industrial rock and goatee period is not his best-loved but as ever there were pearls to be had. This broadside against US cultural imperialism is a little trite and very pre-9/11 but it rocks with more confidence than much of his 90s output.
Written in 1971, during Ziggy and recorded in a pillowy string arrangement 30 years later, this is senior Bowie singing young Bowie in quite the most affecting manner.
An ugly, thwacking fiasco on Bowie’s 1987 nadir, Never Let Me Down, this Chernobyl jeremiad was a lovely song in need of restoration to its original features. Stripped back, it sounds enchantingly like the Smiths.
“Inside every teenage girl there’s a fountain / Inside every young pair of pants there’s a mountain.” Sharing almost nothing with the Candidate on Diamond Dogs but slated for his Nineteen Eighty-Four musical, this raffish stream-of-consciousness plugs Bowie’s Orwell obsessions into his more carnal imaginings. No wonder Orwell’s widow knocked him back.
Originally recorded in 1992 as a spangled-up disco pastiche, this sat in the cupboard for a decade before being reworked as a sparse piece of sinister lounge jazz. Atonal yet bewitching, it’s Bowie’s final collaboration with piano surrealist Mike Garson.
A screaming, Scary Monsters-style rock stampede telling the story of immigrants Lev and Sophie coming to the US – Franz Ferdinand and the Spiders from Mars. What the hell was this doing hidden away as an extra track?
If you want to bawl your eyes out, then consult this (and avoid the ugly Beck mixes). A simple, beautiful look back to his Hunky Dory moments, but also a defiant hymn to living without fear in the now, no matter what. Which is what he went on to do.
1 T-Rex, Hot Love February 1971
Marc Bolan’s third huge hit in a row, No 1 for four weeks. His Top of the Pops performance showed him going truly imperial, with flying-V guitar, pink trousers, silver jacket and, prompted by his friend and colleague Chelita Secunda, glitter on his cheekbones.
2 David Bowie, Queen Bitch December 1971
“There should be some real unabashed prostitution in this business,” Bowie told Cream magazine in late 1971. He did his best to make it happen with this Velvet Underground tribute, saturated in homosexuality and Manhattan sleaze. Mick Ronson’s guitar slices through everything.
3 Alice Cooper, School’s Out April 1972
From Detroit by way of LA, these hard rockers had been wearing makeup and frocks since 1969, so were well-suited to the glam imperative. School’s Out was a definitive entrant in the teenage rampage stakes and scored hard with the kids, hitting No 1 for three weeks in the summer holidays.
4 Roxy Music, Virginia Plain August 1972
With Bryan Ferry’s ultra-stylised performance and Eno’s other wordly synth shrieks, this one definitely arrived from Planet Mars in the late summer of 1972. Chock-full of pop art and pop culture references, Virginia Plain was nothing less than a manifesto for a new age: “So me and you, just we two, got to search for something new.”
5 Mott The Hoople, All the Young Dudes July 1972
Bowie may have provided the raw material, but Mott gave the definitive performance of this generation-defining song, with its sneering reference to the Beatles and the Stones. The musicians curled and uncurled around Ian Hunter’s snarling voice: “Oh is there concrete all around/ Or is it in my head.”
6 Lou Reed, Vicious November 1972
Another Bowie production, and another career revival. Vicious begins Reed’s second solo album in exactly the way that you would wish, with the poet laureate of Manhattan spitting out the Warhol inspired lyrics – “Vicious: you hit me with a flower” – while Mick Ronson, cutting through everything, embodies the song’s threat.
7 David Bowie, The Jean Genie November 1972
Bowie reached back to his 60s R&B days with this one, based on the old I’m a Man riff but updated with Ronson’s buzzing guitar, burlesque rhythms, gay double entendres – his by-now patented patch. The band did a fantastic Top of the Pops performance, recently rediscovered.
8 Slade, Cum On Feel the Noize February 1973
This was their fourth No 1 in 18 months, which gave guitarist Dave Hill an excuse – as if he needed it – to wear ever more outrageous outfits on Top of the Pops. An anthemic chorus and a lyric that’s a direct invitation “to get wild, wild, wild”.
9 Roxy Music, Editions of You March 1973
“For Your Pleasure” – with model and singer Amanda Lear on the cover – is one of the period’s few coherent albums, and this 120mph rocker is one of its hidden pleasures: a camp-saturated male bonding song, featuring ooohs, sirens, and the immortal line, “boys will be boys will be boyoyoys”.
10 Bonnie St Claire, Clap Your Hands and Stamp Your Feet May 1973
With its stomping tunes and rock’n’roll roots, glam was huge on the continent – blending, as it would, into Europop – and this is a great entrant from Holland, featuring Beach-Boys’ style backing vocals, terrace handclaps, and of course the ever-present Chuck Berry riffs.
11 T-Rex, 20th Century Boy May 1973
It could have been any of the four top-two hits that T-Rex had in 1972 – particularly Metal Guru – but this was the toughest of them all: a furious rocker with a heroic riff that showed, plain for all to see, just how well Bolan understood the nature of pop fame – 20th century toy, I wanna be your boy.
12 Iggy and the Stooges, Search and Destroy June 1973
Iggy wore silver, the Stooges were produced by David Bowie, the record sounded glam – all treble tones and slicing guitar – but Search and Destroy, like its parent album Raw Power, went much further and deeper than hardly anyone wished in 1973. Three years later, it would find its time.
13 New York Dolls, Trash July 1973
Simultaneously ludicrous and tough, sloppy and hard, vicious and tender – just listen to those soaring, girl-group harmonies – Trash was, along with Jet Boy, the Dolls‘ big pop move. It being 1973, of course, there could only have been one question: “Uh, how do you call your lover boy?” In the US, they didn’t answer.
14 The Sweet, The Ballroom Blitz September 1973
The Sweet were on a roll after Blockbuster and this may well be the archetypal glam song: teenage hysteria – check; camp interjections and beyond over the top TV costumes – check; a stomping beat, tough guitar riffs and a fey vocal – check. Unstoppable and still thrilling: the contrived becomes real.
15 Mud, Dyna-Mite October 1973
Written by the Sweet svengalis, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, “Dyna-Mite” stays firmly within the ballroom – glam’s central location – during this relentless stomper. Mud yocked it up on Top of the Pops with ludicrous flares and a spot of aceing – the biker’s dance, shoulder to shoulder – and the future Sex Pistols were listening.
16 Suzi Quatro, Devil Gate Drive January 1974
Quatro had gold-plated garage credentials – her first band, the Pleasure Seekers, had recorded What a Way to Die in 1966 – and this, her fourth hit (No 1 for two weeks), mixes rock’n’roll with a hint of the Burundi beat, while continuing the explosive club/ballroom theme of the time with a hint of autobiography.
17 Sparks, This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us April 1974
Sparks were the late great glam flash: tricky, artificial, super-hooky and high-concept, with a hard rocking band and definitive high gloss sleeves. They took a song with the lyric “you hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants and tacky tigers” all the way to No 2, and made it seem natural.
18 David Bowie, Rebel Rebel US version May 1974
Bowie’s goodbye to the youth movement he had helped to form – “You’ve got your mother in a whirl, because she’s not sure whether you’re a boy or a girl” – and his last top 10 hit for 18 months. This US mix has dreamy backwards harmonies, extra percussion and phased guitar.
19 Iron, Virgin Rebels Rule June 1974
Almost all the great glam records were hits, but this is one of the best that wasn’t: an abrasive slice of Sweetarama from a Scottish band, who toughened up the teenage-rampage meme while wearing Clockwork Orange-inspired costumes. The singer had a padlock on his crotch with the legend: “No Entry.”
20 Sweet, The Sixteens July 1974
A four-minute mini-opera on the theme of failed youth revolution, and a summer top-10 hit, this shows the renamed group – having lost the definite article – rising to the song’s complex structure with a totally convincing performance. The Sixteens is a classic of teen disillusionment, at the point of glam’s supersession.
This nearly-10-minute epic is the perfect way to announce a new David Bowie album. Swedish director Johan Renck has Breaking Bad and Walking Dead credits to his name, and Bowie himself boasts an impressive acting career, leaving this short film the perfect mix of narrative storytelling and psychedelic weirdness. Blackstar drops January 8th, 2016.
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