Poet Simon Armitage Gives Bowie Narration Thumbs Up

Boys like Peter aren’t afraid of wolves…

The British poet, playwright and novelist, Simon Armitage, has written a nice piece in The Guardian regarding Prokofiev‘s Peter and the Wolf, ahead of a performance of it with the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in London, from December 28th to the 30th.

Here’s his opening paragraph…

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Question: what do Mikhail Gorbachev, Sting, Sean Connery, Sir David Attenborough, David Bowie, Patrick Stewart, Sharon Stone, Terry Wogan, Captain Kangaroo, Dame Edna Everage, Mia Farrow and Bill Clinton have in common? No, unfortunately it isn’t the leaked line-up for the next series of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, in which we’ll cover our eyes as “Dave” Attenborough tucks into a par-boiled koala bear testicle.

The unlikely answer is that they have all played the role of the narrator in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, presumably with varying degrees of success. I haven’t heard every one, but the Bowie recording from 1992 is particularly good value. In a voice somewhere between Harry H Corbett and a Radio 3 continuity announcer, Bowie led us through the garden gate towards a little pond to tell us a story about a duck, a bird and a boy called Peter. Bowie: “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.”

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Simon is obviously referring to one of the CD reissues when he says 1992, as the album was originally released in 1978. David apparently recorded Peter and the Wolf as a gift to young Zowie Bowie, (who would have been just seven when the LP was released) and to children everywhere.

Initially released on green vinyl, supposedly as a limited edition, it seems both the green vinyl and the single-sided promo are both more common than the straight black vinyl version of the original release.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a couple of excerpts from the original Bowie biog album insert, bearing in mind it was primarily aimed at kids…

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Some people thought Bowie “became” the orange-haired rock star Ziggy. But if he did, he didn’t remain Ziggy for long. He produced albums for other performers, made records as different as one about a disaster city and one of his favourite songs from the late ’60s.

He had a hit record with Fame, which was played for disco dancing, and then he made music influenced by modern German expressionism and European electronic abstractionism.

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You can read the full Guardian piece here.