Month: July 2004

All The Young Dudes…

The latest edition in the excellent NME Originals series is a Glam special due next week on July 27th. You’ve probably guessed the series draws heavily on the NME archives, and this particular issue covers “the glory years of Glam Rock” between 1970 and 1975.

As you all know, David’s own “Glam” years were pretty much over after little more than two years as the undisputed King of Glam (in my house at least), from the first public appearances of Ziggy in early ’72 to the first performances in June 1974 as Halloween Jack when David had the good sense, and, more importantly, a natural instinct to forge ahead with yet another new sound and look for the Diamond Dogs tour of North America.

There are those that would argue that David unwittingly invented Glam with his performances with The Hype in 1970 as Rainbow Man. By all accounts one person at the front of the stage during a memorable performance by the flamboyantly dressed Hype at The Roundhouse was a young Marc Bolan looking for a new angle himself… perhaps he found one that night.

In a December 1998 BowieNet chat, David himself suggested another possible originator thus: “Wee Willie Harris* started Glam. And I’m not joking”.

Whatever the true origins of the movement, it was a great time for rock music that, apart from David, saw the rise of the likes of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, Eno, T Rex, New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, Cockney Rebel and Sparks… all covered in this NME special. Not to mention (shame they had to) Rod, Elton, Slade, The Sweet, Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, and, according to NME, the Bay City Rollers!

An ad for the publication claims the NME Glam special boasts: “Ravishing rare photos”, “Original 70s interviews” and “Eye-witness reviews”. Who among you can resist temptation like that?

*Fifties rocker who dyed his hair pink. By the sixties he’d dyed his hair platinum and got religion!

Where the sailors all meet…

The competition I set on the BBC’s 6 Music Bowie Day last Saturday ends at noon UK time tomorrow. If you need to refresh your memory click on the image above and forward to 1hr 20minutes to listen again to my chat with Marc Riley.

The question was simple enough: Name three Bowie recordings that contain the word sailor or sailors. They don’t have to be original Bowie compositions and there are actually many more than three instances to choose from.

Send your answer to rocketscience@bbc.co.uk with a subject line of Mike Adamson …sorry, an in joke there with no Bowie relevance whatsoever.

There are three lots of prizes for three different winners so here’s a handy breakdown to tempt you in to making a last-minute entry… surely not an offer you get every day:

1st Prize
Free subscription to BowieNet for one year.
Official American tour poster (see above) signed by the artist: David Bowie, the designer: Rex Ray and the photographer: Blammo
Sound + Vision 4CD box set
Peter and the Wolf reissue CD
RNGO promo CD and badge
Other assorted goodies for the discerning Bowie collector

2nd and 3rd prizesAs above, excepting BowieNet subscription and Sound + Vision 4CD box set

The three winners will be announced here and on Marc Riley’s Rocket Science tomorrow.

NB: Today’s planned announcement on BBC 6 Music of the winners of this competition has been postponed until next week. This follows the news that Marc Riley was involved in an accident in the studio where a kettle of boiling water was knocked over his groin area.

Though the accident was not apparent to listeners, (due to an emergency tape being played to cover for Mr Riley) the burns were considered bad enough for the hapless DJ to require hospital treatment.

Suggestions that the injury was self-inflicted, due to Marc’s continued frustration at not receiving a hospital appointment for gender reassignment, are unfounded and mischievous. Mr Riley’s treatment was already well underway.

Good luck Marc… here’s to your speedy recovery and your eventual re-emergence as Marcia.

Can’t we give ourselves ten more chances…

I was surprised to see that copies of the Rebel Never Gets Old promo CD single are still going on eBay for up to £40 ($75) a pop. (See here and there)

I’m sure most BowieNetters are aware of a German issue of Reality that has a copy of the 4-track RNGO CD bundled with it, and though this bundled version of RNGO is not a promo, it’s identical in every other way… apart from the price of course.

And so, for around a quarter of the eBay auction price, you can get the CD, along with a copy of Reality, delivered right to your door by a reputable company such as Amazon.de. If you don’t particularly need another copy of Reality, give it away and turn somebody else on to it instead.

However, if you simply must have the promo pressing, (and I do sympathise) but you missed your chance in the last competition we ran to win one of ten copies, (05.26.04 NEWS: RNGO IS GO: MORE FORMAT DETAILS… WIN PROMO CD) then you now have another chance thanx to those generous Sony types who have given me another ten copies to distribute among the faithful hordes.

This one is easy enough, simply drop me a line at TotalBlamBlam@DavidBowie.com with a brief explanation (50 words or less) of why your life feels empty without a copy of the 4-track RNGO promo CD, with a subject line of: Life without RNGO.

This contest is only open to BowieNetters, which is why you must send from your BowieNet account.

I’ll announce the ten winners on the MBs at 20:30 UK time on Saturday 7th August, but be warned, I may use a few of the winning begging letters along with the winning usernames of the BowieNetters who did the begging.

My prayer flies like a word on a wing…

BowieNetters Susans and Regina are back from a fun weekend in Scotland where they attended the T in the Park festival. They both alerted me to the Scottish Sunday Mail which carried some touching tributes and get-well wishes from artists performing over the weekend. Here are a few of the quotes from the piece:

Pink: I’d like David Bowie to know that we other artists miss him greatly. We were all looking forward to seeing him at T in the Park and hope he feels better very, very soon. He is in my prayers.

Justin Hawkins of The Darkness joked: ‘Don’t rush back David. We need these headline slots. As they say… every cloud. Everybody needs a day off occasionally. We hope David gets better real soon. We were honoured to even be on the same bill as him. While it’s great we’re now headlining, it was by default. It was David’s show. We wish him the best.

James Walsh of Starsailor: I was very shocked when I heard what was wrong because initially we all thought it was just a trapped nerve in his back. To find out it was actually something wrong with his heart was a lot more serious. It’s a real shame he couldn’t make it today. We’ve got to all send him our best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Katie Melua: I want to see David get better soon and see him back in good health and on stage.

Regina tells me that, as further tributes to David, The Charlatans played a snippet of “Heroes” and Starsailor sang “The sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party” from Memory Of A Free Festival at the end of their last song. She also pointed out that despite David’s absence there were many Bowie T-shirts in evidence among the crowd and indeed Bowie placard waving.

You can read the whole of the Scottish Sunday Mail piece online by clicking on Pink’s tongue.

Good God! Was it really yesterday?

Well, as suspected, yesterday’s BBC 6 Music Bowie Day was a great success. But, if you missed it you will no doubt be glad to learn that you can listen to the whole thing again.

As we said yesterday, first up was Liz Kershaw who interviewed both Tony Visconti and Mick Rock …you can listen to her show here.

Next up was Marc Riley’s Rocket Science that started with an entertaining interview with John Peel regarding David’s pre-fame days up to and including the BBC Ziggy-era sessions. There were also interviews and sessions from Elbow and Ian Mcculloch who played exclusive versions of The Bewlay Brothers and Changes respectively.

Some character apparently called Mike Adamson (aka me, but with a new name Mr Riley cleverly dreamt up… That boy’s as sharp as a new pin!) popped in to plug this place and set a competition for a “bulging sack” of goodies.

Marc’s show concluded with an exclusive and quite hilarious interview with DB. You can hear all of that and much more here.

The evening continued with an hour of David’s show from the John Labatt Centre in London, Ontario, in Canada on May 14th earlier this year. Here are the tracks that were broadcast:

01 New Killer Star
02 Cactus
03 Sister Midnight
04 All The Young Dudes
05 The Loneliest Guy
06 Under Pressure
07 Station To Station
08 Ashes To Ashes
09 Quicksand
10 Modern Love
11 I’m Afraid Of Americans
12 “Heroes”

You can listen to the whole thing here. I’m not sure how long any of this stuff will remain online, so best listen quick if you haven’t already, as it may be taken down by the weekend.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a few words from another 6 Music presenter, Mark Sutherland, on “Why every day should be Bowie day”…

Total Blam Blam – (BowieNet News Editor)

————————————————————————————————————-

Why every day should be Bowie day

A couple of years back, some cleverclogs marketing type decided to promote Elvis Presley?s collection of Number One hit singles with the slogan: ?Before anyone did anything, Elvis did everything?.

Well, not quite everything. He never invented electronica, defined glamrock, designed the ?rock star as brand? concept, made bisexuality fashionable, painted a stupid lightning strike over his face or any of the zillion things that David Bowie did to make him, in a very real sense, the Elvis of the Seventies. Minus the burgers, obviously. True, Elvis never formed Tin Machine but ? hey! ? nobody?s perfect.

You see, whenever anyone describes a modern day pop star as ?a maverick? or ?experimental? or ?androgynous? or ?a genius?, what they actually mean is ?trying to rip off David Bowie?. He may have had his dodgy years in the Eighties and Nineties but then, if you?d made Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Station To Station, Low, Heroes and Scary Monsters, thereby eclipsing Bob Dylan and Mr Presley as the most important solo artist of all time, you might have decided you deserved to rest on your laurels for a bit as well.

Nowadays, Bowie is the very model of a modern major recording artist, clean of vices, smart of suit and a regular releaser of ?quality? ?product?. But back in the day, he was madder than a bottle of chips and released records so dazzlingly innovative that it sent his eyes wonky and made sure that successive generations of British youth had a compulsory ?Bowie period? (essentially like National Service, but gayer).

No one will ever have a career like Bowie?s again. No one will be allowed to. And even if they were, no one else would be able to handle it. He hoovered up experimental musical genius like most Seventies rock stars (including himself) hoovered up drugs. He invented the whole concept of ?image? but, tellingly, never needed a stylist to tell him which ludicrous trousers to don. He lurched from genre to genre like a coked-up magpie but, crucially, did them all better than anyone.

And, incredibly, he?s done all this without turning into such a parody of himself that look-alikes plague every karaoke night in Las Vegas – just one more thing Elvis didn?t quite manage. Forget old burger chops: bow ye down to the real King Of Rock?n?Roll?

Mark Sutherland

It’s happening now…

A final reminder on this one. We posted details of the BBC 6 Music Bowie Day last week. (07.03.2004 NEWS: BBC 6 MUSIC BOWIE DAY DETAILS) Well, if you’re tuned in, you will know the buzz has already started with Bowie trailers and Kevin Greening announcing the commencement of Tin Machine Day! Of course, he was joking, but anybody who plays Soon by My Bloody Valentine at five past eight in the morning and then The Cocteau Twins‘ Pearly Dew Drops Drops a couple of records later can say whatever they want as far as I’m concerned.

As I said in my earlier piece, the day starts proper with Liz Kershaw at 11:00 (UK time), who now has interviews with Tony Visconti and Mick Rock and you all know about the treats that birthday boy Marc ‘mama’s boy’ Riley has in store from aforementioned news piece.

Television and Radio listings bible The Radio Times here in the UK has the event as pick of the week… and rightly so. I’m off to get my train in attempt to get to Manchester in time for my own contribution. Wish me luck kidz.

On a final note, if you contact the show, please do mention that you’re a BowieNetter. Click on the LISTEN LIVE button above to do just that.

Looking For Satellite…

I’m sure you’ve all heard about this one by now, even if you haven’t actually heard the track itself yet. It’s looking perfectly feasible that Lou Reed may enter the UK charts with a version of a song that he first recorded as a demo with The Velvet Underground 35 years ago. As you know, the track, Satellite Of Love, eventually saw the light of day on Lou’s second solo album, the classic Transformer.

Along with the better known Walk On The Wild Side and Perfect Day, the song was one of the standout tracks on the album, not least of all because of a beautiful backing vocal contribution from David Bowie. Those familiar with the original version will understand when I say that David’s contribution is the climax to Lou’s foreplay …if I can draw such comparisons, but this 2004 version is pretty much David’s climax over a dance track.

Satellite Of Love 2004 finally gets a legitimate release as a 4-track CD and a 3-track 12″ through NuLife on July 19th. But, it already has a bit of a history with more bootleg and promo versions than you can shake a stick at.**

Above are two different bootleg 12″ pressings that started the buzz, and as far as I can tell these original versions were the work of production team Groovefinder. Apparently this version was the track that took this year?s Miami Winter Music Conference by storm. It was then picked up by an outfit called The Dab Hands… here’s a bit from the Popjustice message boards to explain:

One of the tunes at WMC this year was a remix of Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite of Love’ courtesy of producers Leo Elstop, Mark Wilkinson and Richard Searle also know as ‘The Dab Hands’. The trio were working under the title of ‘The Mud Men’ last year (working for Renaissance Records at the time) and were asked by BMG Records to do the Reed remix.

Speaking in the latest DJ Mag, Mark said “It’s Kinda official .. it’s probably going to come out through a BMG-affiliated label soon and we’ve adopted the production name The Dab Hands for the project” They remix the Bowie/Reed outro and vocals and gives it a stomping house beat. Mark adds: “It’s is basically the outro to the track that’s the main part we used… the little break down that we do in the middle there, there’s a little bit of the verse in there as well”

The track has been played by everyone from Pete Tong to Chris Moyles and is set to be one of this years biggest dance music tunes.”

Pictured above are the NuLife stock and promo 12″ singles and the stock CD, plus a European version that includes mixes of Walk On The Wild Side too. Here’s a bit more from the NuLife website where you can also listen to a one minute forty second sample of the Dab Hands Re Touch Radio Edit:

NuLife are thrilled to announce the signing of the hottest dance track to emerge this year! Satellite Of Love 2004 was the track of this year?s Miami Winter Music Conference and a DMC Buzz chart #1, and widely tipped to become this year?s ‘Lazy’.

The track is already being championed on acetate by the ?Dons of the Dance floors?, Pete Tong, Sir Norman Jay, Ed Chemical Brother and X Press 2 to name but a few, as well as Chris Moyles from Radio One. DJ?s and enthusiasts have been so overly eager to get their hands on this tune that it has been bootlegged twice over in exchange for large sums of money. Currently (w/c June 7th) it’s Radio 1’s Record Of The Week on the Colin & Edith show (1-3pm).

The track is a remix of the Lou Reed original. Born out of an idea from South Coast production team Groovefinder, the track was finally brought to life by London remix collective Dab Hands. The remixes were crafted from the original multi-track recording of the song, which also feature backing vocals from David Bowie. Approval for the release was given after a keen record exec sent the track to Lou Reed, who gave it the thumbs up for a full commercial release.

Lou had this to say about the track in a brief interview with Chris Roberts in the current edition of UNCUT magazine, Lou’s answers are in Bold:

“Satellite Of Love” is set to be a massive summer dance record, as remixed by Dab Hands. Everyone’s saying it’s going to be this year’s “Lazy” (the David Byrne crossover hit). What was your initial reaction on hearing it?

Well, I really liked it. It’s well done. No, I had no trepidation. I knew it could be good, bad or mediocre.

You’ve given it your blessing?

I said I liked it. As I’m not in the UK I have no idea what they’re saying about it, whoever ‘they’ are.

Does it bring back memories of originally recording Transformer in 1972?

No. Why would it do that? But it’s really fun to hear somebody else’s version of it, done by somebody else’s brain. If they’re good. Of course, it’s not fun if they’re bad. No way.

Strange to think it’s never been a single here…

That’s true. But then I’ve never understood these things as long as I’ve lived. I never even saw “Walk On The Wild Side” as a single, not at all.

Last time we spoke, you said you were thinking of remixing the whole of Transformer…

Huh? No. I never said that…

But you… aw, fuck it.

Wait, that is a great idea, though! I’ve worked with this Italian remixer about ways of looking at “…Wild Side” with MP3s. You may be thinking of that. And that may be on this new version of the NYC Man album that’s coming out. But really – transform Transformer? What a great idea. You call me like this and give me that idea! Thank you, my friend. We could mess about with David Bowie’s saxophone, put it way back in the mix… that is really fun! That is such a great idea. I thank you.

So there you have it… A remixed Transformer? I’ll reserve judgement, but I think DB may have something to say about that saxophone!

Here’s the tracklisting for the Satellite Of Love 2004 CD single:

01 Satellite of Love – Dab Hands Re-Touch Radio Edit
02 Satellite of Love – Dab Hands Re-Touch 12? Version
03 Satellite of Love – Groovefinder Full Length Version
04 Satellite of Love – Video

The 12″ has the same tracks excepting the video, because they’ve not worked out how to get videos on to vinyl yet. You can view some of the stills from the South Park style video here.

As I said about two hours ago, Satellite Of Love 2004 is released through NuLife on July 19th.

*The longhand version of this headline, for those that can’t work it out, is: SATELLITE OF LOVE 2004, BBC RADIO 1 SINGLE OF THE WEEK, RELEASED A WEEK NEXT MONDAY

**This theory does hold true, as I tried to shake a stick at six different versions this morning, but only managed four.

Everyone Says Hi…

I can’t imagine there are too many of you that will be getting this information for the first time by reading this. Tomorrow’s newspapers will be filled with the story (that’s a few of the early editions above) and news stations on TV around the world have had this as their lead item throughout this evening.

This media frenzy doesn’t quite get across the fact that David is convalescing at home with his family, as outlined in this official statement which I posted on the BowieNet message boards a few hours ago:

DAVID BOWIE STATEMENT

British pop legend David Bowie underwent heart surgery in Germany last month prompting him to cancel his European tour. Bowie sought medical treatment after performing at a festival in the north-western German town of Scheesel (June 25) reportedly for a pinched nerve in his shoulder. It was discovered that the 57-year old rocker had an acutely blocked artery requiring emergency surgery (the procedure is known as an angioplasty).

Bowie, who was able to leave the clinic early this week, is now convalescing with his family and hopes to start work next month. Said Bowie, “I’m so pissed off because the last 10 months of this tour have been so fucking fantastic. Can’t wait to be fully recovered and get back to work again. I tell you what, though, I won’t be writing a song about this one.”

Typical of DB to lighten the mood with a touch of humour. If you’re reading this David, you know all of our thoughts are with you and your family… please take it easy… we don’t want to hear a peep from you until you’re feeling fully rested and well enough to communicate again. Much love from everybody at BowieNet.

They tell me “Son, we want you, be elusive, but don’t walk far”…

For those of you that missed David’s interview with Virgin Radio’s Ben Jones on Virgin Superstars on Sunday evening, (07.01.2004 REMINDER: DB ON VIRGIN SUPERSTARS ON SUNDAY) BowieNetter Susans has very kindly transcribed the whole thing just for you. Here’s a couple of quotes from DB:

On being relaxed and chilled out

Yeah, yeah I’ve got a day off between gigs. We’re off to Norway and it’s nice to get a day off. I went out yesterday and just spent the day walking, walking and walking… four or five hours something like that.

Really and you don’t get bothered, people don’t…..?

Well it’s just in the hotel, you know.

On motivation and his prolific songwriting

Yeah, it’s not a problem for me to write, I get such a lot of satisfaction out of putting music together, I suppose it is my forte. It is not a terribly important job but it’s one that I think I do well and I just enjoy doing it. I don’t really see myself doing much else.

On rumours of him staying at the Travel Inn at IOW

I’ve still got me key

The interview was punctuated with several Bowie tunes, including live versions of “Heroes”, I’m Afraid Of Americans and All The Young Dudes from the Isle Of Wight Festival. Hopefully the broadcast will soon be uploaded to the Virgin archive site, but in the meantime you can read Susans’ transcript here.