“Passionate bright young thing…”
The August 2017 issue of Uncut magazine has an 11-page cover feature in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Bowie’s Deram debut.
Here’s a bit from John Mulvey’s monthly introduction to the new issue…
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History is rarely as neat as we hope it to be, especially when sitting down to write a blog about the brand new edition of Uncut (out on Thursday in the UK, though subscribers should hopefully see their issues a bit before that).
Popular myth insists that David Bowie’s debut album sneaked out on the same day as “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” – June 1, 1967 – when in fact the Beatles’ opus had been rush-released a few days ahead of that official launch date. The timelag did not materially help “David Bowie”’s sales figures, of course. That album, along with many more of the bold schemes and fleeting projects hatched by Bowie in the run-up to “Space Oddity”, have long been dismissed as juvenilia, from a time when the singer was supposedly more of a camp follower than fearless innovator. Every Beatles song can be seen to have had its own cultural impact; there are few who would argue the enduring significance of, say, “Please Mr Gravedigger”.
Nevertheless, the music that Bowie made in the ‘60s critically influenced one superstar in the making: David Bowie himself. Our cover story this month revisits those years to uncover the invention of David Bowie as we know him, with Michael Bonner conducting deep new interviews with an extensive circle of Bowie’s early court: Mary Finnigan, Keith Christmas, George Underwood, Hermione Farthingale, Phil May, John ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, Alan Mair, Lindsay Kemp, Ray Stevenson, Herbie Flowers, Rick Wakeman and John Cambridge. “Everything David did in the ‘60s lead up to the ‘70s,” Farthingale, Bowie’s former girlfriend, tells us. “Everything was an experimental part of that learning curve.”
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In a separate piece, albeit germane to the theme of the main feature, Mark Plati discusses the creation of Toy, the unreleased album which revisited the period.
Go here for more detail regarding this particular issue.
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