Month: August 2010

I like the beat of your drum…

Ahead of his appearance on the First Love TV programme on Sky Arts, DJ/drummer, Mark Radcliffe, has been given the 60 second interview treatment in METRO. Here’s one of the questions and answers from the piece.

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In your autobiography, Thank You For The Days, you describe the most memorable days of your life. If you could relive one, which would you pick?

I would have to choose meeting David Bowie. I first heard his music when I was 14 and it encapsulated everything that was great about rock?n? roll. Bowie seemed so remote and glamorous he was like an alien from a far different planet. The world he occupied seemed entirely removed from the world of someone going to school doing their O-levels in Bolton. So to then meet him and know him ? and I can still e-mail him now and he?ll reply ? just seems so far away from how I ever saw my life panning out.

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You can read the full online version of the interview here.

Born in slumber less than peace…

On the 15th anniversary of War Child’s HELP album, NME celebrates the story of the charity organisation and its musical output in this week’s magazine, (4th September issue) concluding with an item on War Child’s future plans.

There can’t be anybody that hasn’t read about the next War Child project, Manimal’s tribute to David Bowie: We Were So Turned On. (05.11.2010 NEWS: BOWIE TRIBUTE ALBUM…ANOTHER COVER AND TITLE)

We’ve been plugging the album on these pages through various incarnations and it’s great that Manimal decided to donate all the profits to War Child.

So far the album has been teased with the above four digital releases. Here’s the schedule to date…

MAY 15th: Vivian Girls – John, I?m Only Dancing
JUNE 15th: Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros – Memory Of A Free Festival
JULY 15th: Corridor – Be My Wife
AUGUST 15th: Warpaint – Ashes To Ashes

All of the above are still available via iTunes, where you can pre-order We Were So Turned On too.

Warpaint‘s version of Ashes To Ashes was also released as a split 7″ vinyl 45 with Sister Crayon‘s version of The Bewlay Brothers.

There won’t be a single in September, due to the album release, but stay tuned for exclusive details of the next release in the series along with a contest to win the 45s and the We Were So Turned On double CD.

As far as I am aware the album will be available physically and digitally worldwide on September 6th, aside from Europe which won’t get the CD release until October 11th.

I’ll leave you with the final tracklisting, including the bonus download tracks…

Disc One:
01 Exitmusic – Space Oddity
02 Duran Duran – Boys Keep Swinging
03 Megapuss – Sound And Vision
04 Warpaint – Ashes To Ashes
05 Corridor – Be My Wife
06 Chairlift – Always Crashing In The Same Car
07 Vivian Girls – John, I?m Only Dancing
08 All Leather – Fame
09 We Are The World – I’m Afraid Of Americans
10 A Place To Bury Strangers – Suffragette City
11 Tearist – Repetition
12 Halloween Swim Team – Look Back In Anger
13 Afghan Raiders – Fashion
14 Polyamorous Affair – Theme From Cat People
15 Swahili Blonde – Red Money
16 Jessica 6 – I?m Deranged
17 Aska & Bobby Evans (Feat. Moon & Moon) – African Night Flight
18 Xu Xu Fang – China Girl

Disc Two:
01 VoicesVoices – ?Heroes?
02 Carla Bruni – Absolute Beginners
03 Papercranes – Blue Jean
04 Keren Ann – Life On Mars?
05 Lewis & Clarke – Changes
06 Zaza – It Ain’t Easy
07 Genuflex – Soul Love
08 Sister Crayon – Bewlay Brothers
09 Marco Benevento – Art Decade
10 Mick Karn – Ashes To Ashes
11 Lights (NYC) – As The World Falls Down
12 Aquaserge – The Supermen
13 Caroline Weeks – Starman
14 Rainbow Arabia – Quicksand
15 Mechanical Bride – Sound And Vision
16 Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros – Memory Of A Free Festival

Bonus Tracks (Itunes Only)
01 Viv Albertine – Letter To Hermoine
02 Ariana Delawari – Ziggy Stardust
03 Gangi – Oh! You Pretty Things
04 Amanda Jo Williams – The Man Who Sold The World
05 LACO$TE – Within You
06 Universe – Heathen (The Rays)
07 Pizza! – Modern Love

Every magazine on every shelf…

“The first of what will hopefully be an avalanche of great reviews for the upcoming Station To Station reissue has landed in the shape of a four-star, two-page feature in the October edition of Q magazine.”

That’s how we started our piece about the Q review a couple of days ago, (08.22.2010 NEWS: STATION TO STATION REISSUE GETS FOUR STARS IN Q MAGAZINE) and though we’re not really expecting an avalanche, two more reviews in UK music monthlies have given the S2S reissue a jolly big thumbs up.

Not only has the package received a 5/5 rating in UNCUT, but the magazine has also made it ALBUM OF THE MONTH. Here’s a couple of snippets from the review by Stephen Troussé.

The MOJO review is by long-term Bowie observer, David Buckley.

Buckley admits that he would award the straight album five stars for it’s musical content alone, but he docked a star for this package as he feels the lack of visual content on the DVD was a missed opportunity.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with his closing paragraph that does point out the general importance of Station To Station in the Bowie canon, and also acknowledges how good this version sounds…

Sway through the crowd to an empty space…

According to an item in The Guardian by Andrew Dickson, Michael Clark’s latest presentation has been worked out to the strains of David Bowie’s It’s No Game (Part 1). Here’s an excerpt from the article…

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Although the mass participation piece has been choreographed and rehearsed to David Bowie’s It’s No Game (Part 1) ? the singer is a hero of Clark’s, and provided the exultant climax to his most recent work, Come, Been and Gone ? Clark is considering altering it all at the last minute. “I’ve made things to completely different pieces of music to what I’ve shown them to, and obviously how that piece is interpreted is completely changed.” He pauses. “But I did it with my own dancers and they were like, ‘Woah, maybe you shouldn’t try that.'”

The amateur dancers have got more than enough to worry about just getting the choreography down before Friday. “At least it’s not like Glee, thank God,” mutters Penny, only half-joking. “Maybe he’ll throw that in at the last minute ? we’ll all have to burst out singing David Bowie or something.”

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Whether the Bowie tune makes it to the first of four free performances in the vast Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern on Friday, only Clark can know.

If you’re one of the 78 non-professional volunteers participating in this new project, please do get in touch and let us know how it’s going.

You can read more about the presentation and the performance times on the Tate Modern site and you can read the full Guardian piece here.

We passed upon the stair…

BowieNetter Paul Woods sent me this great little piece from Carol Walsh in Massachusetts who wanted to give Paul some background to the above ticket, one of two he purchased from her.

The tickets were for a Bowie show at the Municipal Auditorium, Nashville, on November 20th, 1972, during Bowie’s first American tour.

It may be worth remembering that there was apparently a pre-concert demonstration against Bowie because of Cherry Vanilla hyping Bowie as the new Elvis Presley!

Over to Carol…

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Oh yes, I was at the show and one of the stubs is probably mine. I went with my best friend and, along with a bunch of other folks, we drove from Memphis to Nashville (3 hours) in a van. She had kept these stubs the entire time in a scrap book and just gave them to me to sell for her. You?ll love this story.

The concert was at the Municipal Auditorium and we stayed at a hotel across from the aud. Bowie and The Spiders were also at the same hotel. As you know, this was before they were the global sensations they went on to be.

My friend and I spent time wandering around the hotel and heard a piano being softly played in one of the banquet rooms. Now remember this was the 70’s and well, we were in an altered state. We followed the sound and came upon Mick Ronson tapping out a tune. We watched for a while and he noticed us. We talked for a while and he said we could stay. He asked what room we were in and told us that he was on the floor above and said come by after the show! Like that would happen today.

We wandered around the hotel some more until closer to the time of the show. My friends and I were in the lobby of the hotel. There was a staircase in the middle of the lobby. This hotel was where they shot the old TV show Hee Haw. Well, about the same time, Roy Clark (cowboy star of Hee Haw) camearound the corner and started up the stairs in full country outfit. Bowie is coming down the same stairs all “Bowied”. About midpoint they meet. Bowie just glances and nods and Roy Clark stops and I swear his mouth fell to the floor and his eyes bugged out. We laughed so hard.

One of the people I was with had a super 8 movie camera and got it all on film. Have no idea where that film (or my friend) is today.

Of course the show was incredible. After the concert we all went back to the hotel. I, truthfully, did not go upstairs and party because I was partied out but some of my friends did. They said it was awesome. We were just in the right place at the right time.

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Thanx Paul and Carol.

In the above picture, I’ve attempted to illustrate what may have been if Bowie and Clark had actually spoken and Clark had persuaded Bowie to appear on Hee Haw.

As Paul suggested with today’s headline, they could have done a duet and billed themselves as The Legendary Stardust and Cowboy…Yeah, OK. it was Paul’s joke, not mine! 😉

Btw, if the chap with the super 8 footage is reading this…please do get in touch!

The re-return of The Thin White Duke…

The first of what will hopefully be an avalanche of great reviews for the upcoming Station To Station reissue has landed in the shape of a four-star, two-page feature in the October edition of Q magazine.

Here’s the intro and the conclusion from the piece by Dorian Lynskey…

In their regular Q50 feature, wherein the Q folk recommend fifty of their favourite songs to download and listen to, Station To Station‘s title track is illustrated with the rather tasty picture below.

So that’s a pretty good start.

Stay tuned for some exciting S2S related doo dahs ahead of the September 27th release.

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on…

If you’re in the UK, you may have already caught this charming trailer which has been showing for the past few days on the BBC. The minute long short was made to promote the BBC’s upcoming School Season.

The ad features some kids getting ready for school with the focus on one particular young lad putting on a space suit…the next moment his mother is saying goodbye to him as he floats off out his front door and into space.

I can’t find the trailer online just yet, but you can get the gist of the rest of it from my screen grabs above.

There is no dialogue, but the film is accompanied by bits of David Bowie’s Space Oddity to great effect…it seems whoever was commissioned to produce the ad has taken advantage of the Space Oddity stems downloads which purchasers could remix on their iKlax player, or other mixing device.

Anyway, the overall effect is quite lovely and let’s just hope the young school starter’s fate takes a different course to that of Major Tom‘s!

He took it all too far…

I didn’t preview this one before it aired as I knew it would be available on listen again and there was the possibility it might have been a lot of old toffee.

In the event, BBC Radio 4’s Ziggy Stardust Came from Isleworth was a good listen, though the influence of Vince Taylor on the shaping of David Bowie’s doomed rock star creation was perhaps overstated.

Indeed, Bowie has fondly recalled, on more than one occasion, the intriguing story of his own personal encounters with an already damaged Taylor in London, (archive interview clips with Bowie were used in the documentary) and it’s no secret that Taylor was one of several colours on the pallet that helped create Ziggy Stardust.

Anyway, Elisabeth Mahoney in today’s Guardian pretty much echoes my sentiments, but you still have a few days to make up your own mind here if you didn’t listen to the original broadcast.

The painting is all your own…

We’ve featured the work of photographer Michael Putland on these pages before, albeit more than five years ago. (03.21.05 REMINDER: LAST WEEK OF MICHAEL PUTLAND EXHIBITION)

I recently stumbled upon a site where Michael explains (via a short video snippet) how those early 1972 shots of David came about.

In a nutshell, Michael supplied pictures to various publications, but having done such a good job of capturing David’s first ever Ziggy Stardust show on Saturday, January 29th, 1972, at Borough Assembly Hall, Aylesbury, he was contacted some time later with a new assignment.

Along with music journalist Rosalind Russell, Michael was despatched to Haddon Hall for an interview/feature on David for Disc magazine.

However, upon their arrival David apparently asked if he could just finish off a bit of decorating before they started. Seizing on the opportunity, the photographer knocked off a few shots of David with brush in hand up a stepladder…all while kitted out in the same outfit Ziggy had worn at the Aylesbury show some weeks earlier.

Obviously I feel the need to point out that Bowie was wearing his white boots for the photo shoot, not the red ones he wore for the gig.

Above is the feature that appeared in Disc in May 1972…it’s a fascinating glimpse at where Bowie’s head was at just before everything took off.

Beneath the feature I’ve inset two early colour posters…one of a shot from the Aylesbury show, the other from the Haddon Hall shoot.

Finally, in the bottom right hand corner is one of Michael’s rarely seen Ziggy up a stepladder shots…of course, this was all handy training for getting David accustomed to heights, as he would be clambering over scaffolding as part of his Rainbow multi-media experience a few months later…not to mention that scene in the full length Blue Jean film.

You can view aforementioned video snippet of Michael over at ZooZoom and you can purchase some of his Bowie prints at Snap Galleries.

You’ve watched your father plough the fields with a ram’s horn…*

I’m sure the great majority of you followed our advice of many moons ago (pun intended) when we suggested that the best place to keep on top of all things Duncan Jones was over at the excellent Man Made Movies site.

However, in case you’ve not visited recently, you should check it out for details of three more screenings of MOON at the NFT in London from August 28th, with Duncan doing another Q&A at the venue on the 31st.

Those of you wondering why we’ve not heard anything more about Source Code since it was first announced should read the recent interview with Duncan while you’re there.

It looks like Source Code will be released early in 2012, but my appetite was truly whetted back in April when Jake Gyllenhaal had this to say about working with Duncan on the film…

?Duncan is so awesome and he is an extraordinary director. Working with him has been that exactly and I think this movie that we are making is mind boggling. I?m telling you man, he is really quite something. His mind? he comes from quite a pedigree, just artistically, but on his own I believe he is the next generation. He is blowing my mind on a daily basis. To me, working with him, it?s surprising, his instinct, his sense of collaboration, but at the same time truly being an auteur?He?s the real deal man. Anyone who has seen MOON knows that…and this…you are really going to like it!?

Praise indeed.

* Chances are he hasn’t actually…but you try and find a relevant lyric to this story that I haven’t previously used!