Month: December 2005

Became the special man…

Duran Duran members Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes have individually expressed the importance of David Bowie’s music and style in helping make them the men they are today.

First up, in one of the Saturday newspaper supplements in the UK, Simon had this to say about our man in a regular feature entitled: I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today Without…

David Bowie

“He’s always been God to me. I love everything he’s done. He was so important to me growing up, and helped me towards a sense of identity. And having been lucky enough to get to know him a little, I can say that he’s a proper gentleman and hasn’t in any way disappointed me.

He’s a proper artist. It’s all about the music, and the attendant fame means nothing to him. He always conducts himself perfectly too, which is inspiring in itself. You worry about meeting your heroes, but with David there’s been nothing at all to fear.”

How lovely. That’s a very cool thing to say, Simon. According to the piece by Alan Jackson, the other things that helped get Mr Le Bon get where he is today were: His mum and dad, the spirit of punk, keeping perspective and being satisfied with his lot.

The fabulously flamboyant Nick Rhodes expressed similar sentiments on the TV earlier in the year when he appeared on the Orange Playlist in the UK. For those not familiar with the format, Orange Playlist was presented by the delicious Lauren Laverne (a wasted talent if ever there was one) who invites a celebrity guest to choose five tracks that best suit five different categories, and these were Nick’s choices:

Past = Kraftwerk – The Robots
Present = The Killers – Somebody Told Me
Future = Snoop Dog & Pharrell – Drop It Like It’s Hot
Dedication = The Velvet Underground – Venus In Furs
All Time Favourite = David Bowie – Life On Mars?

Mr Rhodes praised DB a few times during the show, but he explained his reasons for choosing Life On Mars? as his all time favourite song thus:

“I think David Bowie owned the 70’s. When you think of what he did it’s just such a mind-boggling amount of work. I think David, more than anyone, allowed artists the luxury of being able to experiment.

For his bravery alone I think we should play a David Bowie song. I could have picked any one of them but I’ve picked this one because of the video. It’s a great song.”

Well, David Bowie may not have made the best music of his own career during the eighties, but the best music of the eighties certainly couldn’t have existed without his influence.

Apart from Duran Duran, how would the eighties have been without U2, Echo and The Bunnymen, Simple Minds, The Smiths, Frankie Goes To Holywood, Japan, Adam and the Ants, The Eurythmics, Bauhaus, The Associates, Boy George, Gary Numan, Ultravox, Soft Cell, Spandau Ballet and a whole bunch of other characters who have readily admitted their debt to David Bowie.

Tin Machine, Tin Machine…

Received lots of e-mail from BNetters asking about the Diamond Dogs tin (above) when I posted a bit about recent additions to the BowieNet store last week. (12.08.05 NEWS: NEW MERCHANDISE IN THE BOWIENET STORE)

And so now, you can view a few more of these handy Bowie album cover tins, above. Not sure if they’re in scale to each other, or even how big they are to be honest…but they are nice, aren’t they?

Oh, almost forgot, you’ll actually be able to purchase them shortly too. Keep an eye on the BowieNet store where, I’ve been informed, they should go live on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Surely the perfect Christmas present or holiday season gift for the Bowie fan in your life that needs to tidy away all those little bits that normally get lost in the laundry, such as spare buttons, brooches, socks and jam.

It was cold and it rained, so I felt like an actor…

BowieNetter jungtheforeman has been in touch with news regarding the launch of The Living Room W1 on Heddon Street in London’s West End.

The Living Room W1 is a bar, lounge and restaurant set over two floors in the former Post Office, made famous by its appearance on the cover of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album.

The latest issue of Living Venture’s large format, glossy magazine, Living, (see above) features the Ziggy sleeve on its front cover in celebration of the launch. Inside there’s a feature on the Heddon Street opening in which designer Shideh Shaygun talks about the decor of The Living Room W1: “A Ziggy look? Well, we should at least have a good print of the album cover on the wall, but I think that will be all.”

Despite the lack of a “spaceship theme”, it does look like a particularly stylish establishment, which you can judge for yourself by clicking on the cover above. There’s even the opportunity to download a 20 per cent discount voucher if you like the look of the place.

Elsewhere in the mag, the Ziggy album cover is pictured again in a feature about Nick DeVille‘s new book, Album: Style and Image in Sleeve Sleeve Design…and rightly so, seeing as it has been scientifically proven to be the best album cover of all time.

Sold them to the likes of you…

It hardly seems like a whole year since the compilers of the British Hit Singles & Albums book announced the annual Top 100 Most Successful Acts Of All Time list…and that’s probably because it isn’t! (05.18.2005 NEWS: DB STILL IN ALL-TIME TOP 10 BRITISH RECORD SALES CHART)

Anyway, the top ten artists remain the same, albeit in slightly adjusted positions, with last year’s placings in brackets:

1 (1) Elvis Presley
2 (2) Cliff Richard
3 (4) Queen
4 (3) The Beatles
5 (5) Madonna
6 (6) Elton John
7 (7) The Shadows
8 (8) Michael Jackson
9 (10) U2
10 (9) David Bowie

You can view the full Top 100 on the Xfm website.

Meanwhile, those of you who like to keep up to date with the UK hit parade, may want to consider the British Hit Singles & Albums Interactive CD-ROM rather than shelling out for each new edition of the book.

The package comes “complete with a 24 page book and CD-ROM that will enable you to receive weekly chart updates, music news and reviews and much more.” Lovely.

I live above the BowieNet store…*

If you haven’t already, you should all be receiving an e-mail shortly regarding lots of lovely new stuff in the BowieNet store.

The e-mail will include details of a holiday offer for free shipping to U.S. addresses, using Standard Shipping, with purchases over $75

* Not true, actually.

The Mysteries…

“So you guys have been on the job for over fifty years, and in all that time you’ve never come across a real unexplained mystery? Can that be true?”

David Bowie looked shocked. “We never said that!”

That’s just one little snippet of the dialogue that involves David Bowie in Stephen King‘s latest crime mystery, The Colorado Kid. BowieNetter jungtheforeman who pointed me in the direction of this item, sent this in…

Stephen King is verified as the biggest selling living author, and his latest book is a story of an unexplained mystery as told by two old pro newspaper journalists – Vince Teague and one David Bowie.

Sadly, the name is where any resemblance to our David ends, but we thought we had better point it out in case you were wondering.

This club’s called The Webb, it’s this month’s pick…

The review above appeared in the media section of The Independent newspaper in the UK yesterday, with the following heading…

ANALYSIS ONLINE OSCARS
Straight from the star’s mouth
Founder of the Webby Awards, Tiffany Shlain, selects the best celebrity sites ahead of this year’s awards.

Thank you, Tiffany. Kind words indeed. Good eh, folx?

Got to keep searching and searching…

The contest for The Criterion Collection The Man Who Fell To Earth double DVD box that we set last week proved to be particularly popular. (11.25.05 NEWS: WIN TMWFTE CRITERION DVD BOX SET)

Having said that, there was a high percentage of wrong answers…and understandably so. Not sure I would even have got this one right without trawling back through the film.

I asked you to study the animation above and list the stills in the chronological order they would actually appear in the film. As some of you pointed out, (especially with G) the exact stills don’t strictly appear in the film at all.

As I’m sure you all know, this is because the stills photographer’s job (David James on The Man Who Fell To Earth) is to capture the scene for use in promotional material. So it’s very rare for the stills photographer to be taking shots from the same viewpoint as the movie camera man. The images I used were original lobby cards that would have been on display in the cinema foyer when TMWFTE was originally released.

However, every still represents a particular scene, and here’s the order those scenes appear in the film. The number in brackets is the time the closest scene to each still appears in this Criterion Collection version of the DVD.

E = 1 (11:30)
D = 2 (60:45)
F = 3 (69:45)
G = 4 (90:17)
B = 5 (96:40)
A = 6 (117:15)
C = 7 (124:22)

As I’ve already admitted, it would be hard to enter this contest if you didn’t already have access to a version of TMWFTE. I didn’t have a problem with this notion, as I believe that the kind of person who desperately wanted, and indeed deserved, to get their hands on a copy of this release would no doubt already have one of the myriad videos, laserdiscs or DVDs released thus far…if not all of them! (I know I have.)

These are the five BowieNetters that The Random Generator selected, four of whom have usernames beginning with the letter J. Bizarre…

jackalope
jayway
jazzfyr
jungtheforeman
wlrook

If you would all please forward your real names and addresses to me, you’ll each receive a copy of this wonderful Criterion Collection DVD pronto.

Please be sure to include the country you live in when sending your address.

They say there´s always music in the air (on Broadway)

David and Iman attended the opening night of Oprah Winfrey‘s presentation of new musical The Color Purple at The Broadway Theatre in New York City last night.

Apart from the fine looking couple above, the event attracted a whole bunch of big names including: Debbie Allen, Toni Basil, Angela Bassett, Noami Campbell, Sean Combs, Ashanti Douglas, Kimberly Elise, Jamie Foxx, Isaac Hayes, Quincy Jones, Star Jones, Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier, Chris Rock, Donald Trump, Tina Turner, Alice Walker and Stevie Wonder, to name just several.

The classic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker has been adapted for the stage by Marsha Norman and directed by Gary Griffin, and is presented in this form by Oprah Winfrey who played Sofia in Steven Spielberg‘s 1985 movie version of the book.

Read more at the official The Color Purple website and on Oprah’s minisite about the musical.