David Bowie

[Callum]

Oh no callum. This is a very good version
I like the shadow puppets a lot

[Pat Rice in Short Shorts]

Starman do you like any particular covers which other artists have done of Bowie songs?

I think Nirvana's cover of The Man Who Sold The World was superb

Wasn't impressed with Oasis' attempt at Heroes

I too love to hear the covers. Nirvana was always trying to explain Bowie to their fans...few knew. One sad chapter in my book was Bowie going on tour with Nine Inch Nails and being booed off the stage several times like some bad opening act. This was during his Outside timeframe as I recall.


Too many really bad covers came out right after his death but this one by Melissa Etheridge was moving I thought.

[starmandb]

Thats a nice version mate
I like the anecdote as well

[starmandb]

It would have been his 74th birthday today
And on Sunday it’s been 5 years since his death
4 hours on bbc 4 tonight
17 hours on 6 music on sunday

[Zenith]

Indeed, Starman: it's nearly been 5 years since his death and little did we know, at the time of his passing, that—5 years down the line—the planet would be in the middle of a global pandemic amidst (seemingly) ever-growing political tensions.



Also this month—on the 16th to be precise—it'll be the 36th anniversary of the passing of David's older brother Terry.

[starmandb]

My god
The world certainly appears to have come off its axis a little since then!

I still find it amazing there are no studio outtakes of 5 years because there aren’t any
The version on ziggy was the first and only take
Incredible

[starmandb]

Starman do you like any particular covers which other artists have done of Bowie songs?

I think Nirvana's cover of The Man Who Sold The World was superb

Wasn't impressed with Oasis' attempt at Heroes

Tom Robinson had a Bowie covers programme on 6 music on Sunday
( I have been grazing thu all the shows since Sunday)
Have just heard a version of oh you pretty things
From Lisa Hannigan
Interesting
Ethereal
With a poppy chorus
Better than the Peter Noone cover
Funny thing is I heard Noone,s version before I had even heard of Bowie
I would certainly have watched it on top of the pops where Bowie played piano( long since wiped)
Cultural vandalism or sensible use of video tape?

[Rockape]

Just listening to Hunky Dory, what an album….up to Quicksand anyway, which is a fabulous track.

[starmandb]

Here’s an old zenith post from when we were doing the Bowie odyssey thing

[Rockape]

Wonderful!

[Phil71]

Read yesterday that John Lennon co-wrote Fame.

[starmandb]

Read yesterday that John Lennon co-wrote Fame.

Yes mate and his long time collaborator Carlos Alomar
He had a couple of Springsteen songs inked in for the young Americans album ( growing up & its hard to be a saint in the city) but they were jettisoned after Lennon turned up for some sessions.
Fame was a good decision but he’s version of across the universe was a pretty bad one

[Rockape]

David Bowie would have been 75 today. Writer Mary Finnigan knew him when he was a struggling musician

I met David Bowie in the spring of 1969. I was sitting in my garden in Beckenham, south London, and heard him playing in the flat above. I was impressed and called up, and a rather thin young man with a halo of blond curls put his head out of the window – he was visiting friends there. He came down wearing an RAF greatcoat, which was too big for him, stayed for supper and played some more. At that time he was a folky, but he had something that lifted him above the ordinary.
I moved to Beckenham from Manchester in the early ’60s, after leaving my first husband and taking our two children with me. Back then it was very sleepy and very conservative, and I rented a cheap four-bedroom flat on a very quiet street, Foxgrove Road. David was really fed up with living with his parents in Bromley, so when I offered to rent him my spare bedroom for £5 a week, he jumped at it. I knew he’d never actually pay it. He was 22, struggling to get gigs and penniless. I was 29 and on a five-year holiday from the five-day week, but we scraped by.

He was a dreadful lodger. He hardly ever cooked, never washed up, and left amplifiers, guitar strings and musical paraphernalia all over the flat. But he was very good fun and fantastic with my kids. I once got my 12-year-old daughter Caroline off school so she could roadie for him, and another time she played the stylophone on Space Oddity.

With friends who lived in the flat upstairs, Christina and Barry, we started a folk club at The Three Tuns pub on Sunday nights to make some money. It morphed into Beckenham Arts Lab, a hub for artists, poets, printmakers – you name it. David hired the headline artists and compèred, and was a consummate professional from the get-go.

On 16 August 1969, we put on the UK’s first-ever free festival at Croydon Road Recreation Ground. It was terribly sedate. Everybody lay around on the grass, enjoying the sunshine, listening to the music, playing with their children and smoking spliffs. David ran the whole show, but his dad had died a week or so beforehand and he was in shock and mourning, although nobody who saw him on the bandstand would have known. He wrote a song about it, which became a hippie anthem, Memory of a Free Festival.

We were very righteous hippies and were only interested in drugs of awareness: pot, LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. Even alcohol was frowned upon, although David was quite a tippler. We are so boring these days compared to how we were then. David was definitely polyamorous and yes, there was romance between us… but I don’t kiss and tell.

Space Oddity started to get airplay during that summer and he was terribly chuffed because success had been a long time coming. After he got together with his future wife Angie, they moved up the road to a decrepit Gothic Victorian mansion, Haddon Hall, where they shared a cavernous flat with other musicians. It was basically a commune and Angie was a mother hen – she cooked, cleaned and kept the domestic wheels turning. We stayed very close, but our lives moved apart when Ziggy Stardust took off and he became a big star.

David was of that era when musicians had something important to say. He was very interested in what made people tick, and had an extraordinary knack of mining the human psyche and turning that into something artistic and beautiful.

One of my favourite memories of that wonderful year is of listening to him improvise one evening. A few of us were sprawled around his room and he sat on the floor, picked up his guitar and played spontaneously for about half an hour with incredible depth of feeling. I never heard any of that music again – how I wish I’d been able to record it.

Mary Finnigan is the author of Psychedelic Suburbia: David Bowie and the Beckenham Arts Lab (Jorvik Press)

[jayramfootball]

^that's a good story.. might have to check out that book.

[starmandb]

Happy heavenly sailor