Month: October 2006

Juliette, Remember me, All the days of your life…

The current issue of NME (October 14th) has the latest in a long line of Bowie songs chosen for The Recommender section of the magazine. Spaceface has been keeping you up to date with the last few of these on the MBs.

The last one I posted on these pages was Brandon Curtis of Secret Machines who reckoned that Ashes To Ashes was the song that was the single biggest influence on him. (03.16.2006 NEWS: BOWIE BIGGEST INFLUENCE ON SECRET MACHINES)

This week actress and singer Juliette Lewis confesses that A New Career In A New Town is the song that changed her life. You can read what she has to say about this sublime instrumental track from 1977’s Low album in the piece above.

But, for those that can’t quite make out her comments, here’s an excerpt:

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“There’s this mystery and joyfulness to it, but it’s also kind of perverse. All of the second side of this album [Low] is instrumental, and this is the last song of side A, a sort of omen of what’s to come.

Brian Eno’s production is awesome

(Blammo note: Sorry TV, she said it, not me) – the drums sound really electronic, and there’s all these eerie synthesizer sounds. There’s something really happy about it, which is weird, because Bowie was in Berlin and going through quite a dark time at that point.”

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Actually, Bowie was at Le Château d’Hérouville, just north of Paris in France, but we know where you’re coming from, Juliette.

While I personally don’t find A New Career In A New Town happy as such, (I actually think it’s beautifully melancholic) it is without doubt a hugely uplifting track that still sounds like it belongs way off in the future somewhere. Not bad for a track, or indeed, album, that was recorded thirty years ago.

Juliette & The Licks‘ album, Four On The Floor, is out now.

A couple of songs, From your old scrapbook…

Above is the latest batch of compilation CDs released in the last few months which each contain a Bowie track. This is an occasional service provided when the mood takes me, as I don’t actually believe there are too many of you out there interested in these things.

But, there are enough people, like me, that might perhaps benefit from a little psychiatric help and still feel the need to own these bloody things! Still, I guess they are good for Beat The Intro with the missus.

I won’t bother listing every track on each CD, just the relevant Bowie track, release date, etc.

Feelgood Songs
Double CD released through Virgin TV on June 26th
Includes: Let’s Dance

Drinking Songs
Single CD released through Virgin TV on July 3rd
Includes: Alabama Song

Between the Covers
Single CD released through Legacy on September 12th
Includes: Dancing in the Street – with Mick Jagger

BBC Radio 2 Presents the Playlist
Triple CD released through Virgin TV on October 23rd
Includes: Life On Mars?

You’re face to face, with The Man Who Sold The World…

The Frieze Art Fair takes place every October in Regent’s Park in London, this year featuring over 150 of the most exciting contemporary art galleries in the world…it says here. This fourth edition of the fair will take place from the 12th to the 15th of October.

One of the works displayed in this year’s Sculpture Park is Sarah Lucas‘s 2004 sculpture, The Man Who Sold The World, which was described thus in the same edition of The Observer that published the item in yesterday’s BowieNet news:

“A lorry driver’s cab decorated with yellowing newspaper images of naked women – and fitted out with a model arm that rises and falls, mimicking the act of masturbation – has been installed in the English Garden at Regents Park. Artist Sarah Lucas’s provocative sculpture, The Man who Sold the World, is one of several works to go up in the public garden marking the arrival of the annual Frieze Art Fair, which begins on Thursday. Watched over by a guard while the Sculpture Park is open, her work will be off-limits for under-18s.”

You can read Vanessa Thorpe‘s full Observer feature here…which seems a little better researched than Oliver Marre‘s aforementioned piece.

The Sculpture Park is open to the general public as well as to Frieze Art Fair ticket holders from tomorrow.

The title of Sarah’s work put me in mind of other well-known artworks by YBAs that have clearly been influenced by a David Bowie song.

Above is Marc Quinn‘s rather enigmatic I Need An Axe To Break The Ice, 1992. The work, a latex balloon cocooned in glass, was gifted to the British public along with several other important pieces, via the Arts Council, by multi-millionaire art collector Charles Saatchi.

Finally, Beautiful, Hello, Space-boy Painting, 1995, (above) was produced by DB in collaboration with Damien Hirst. This was one of many spin paintings made by Hirst where a large circular canvas was rotated on a gigantic turntable while household gloss paint was thrown onto it from above. The technique was basically a scaled up version of the popular 60s childrens’ painting toy, SPiRO-matic.

DB described the process at the time:

“We took a big round canvas, about twelve foot, and it’s on a machine that spins it around at about twenty miles an hour, and we stand on the top of step-ladders and throw paint at it. It’s from a child’s game, you drop paint on and centrifugal force pushes the stuff out.”

Next week, so we’re not accused of favouring the Young British Artists, we’ll be looking at similar appropriations for the Young Americans and Young Americans 2 exhibitions at The Saatchi Gallery in 1996 and 1998 respectively.

Alone on a mean street…

David Bowie’s iconic 1972 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars album cover has been reproduced as a limited edition art print (in an edition of 195) by UK based company, St Pauls Gallery.

The 28″ x 27″ print has the official seal of approval, and has been signed and numbered in pencil by both David Bowie and Terry Pastor of Main Artery, (seen signing the prints below) the original artist who hand-tinted Brian Ward‘s famous photograph for the sleeve.

This beautiful edition was painstakingly reproduced from the original artwork and has been screen printed with the Ziggy Stardust type omitted, as the examples shown here.

The actual image area size is 19″ x 19″, within an overall paper size of 28″ x 27″, (as the scaled down version below) and the paper it’s printed on is 330 gsm Somerset Velvet enhanced.

Update: When I posted this news item on Wednesday evening, we were still working on getting a discount for BowieNetters. The print is retailing at £750 GBP (approx. $1,393 USD) to other folk, but BowieNetters will now receive a very generous 15 per cent discount, a reduction of £112.50! (approx. $210 USD)

You can order your print now by clicking on any of the above images and entering the code: BOWIENET1. This discount will be available for a limited time, and as the edition sells the price will steadily increase. This discount will not be available elsewhere.

As I’m sure you know, these kind of art prints are always a valuable investment. Anybody who purchased the lithograph of David’s 1977 painting, Child In Berlin, will have no doubt been delighted by the steady rise in its value.

Stay tuned for that contest to win an Artist’s Proof of Ziggy Stardust.

Rumours and lies, and stories they made up…Part 386

When I spied the above story in the Observer on Sunday, it didn’t seem quite right to me, so I ran it past DB and he confirmed my suspicions thus:

“This must be Branson going for some cheap PR. And how cheap can you get. It’s Total Tosh, of course.”

It seems that there were very few MB posters who believed a word of the story either, but just to make sure, DB reiterated there too: “What bollox, not true of course.”

I thought it worth posting his denial here, as I have already had a couple of people outside of BowieNet asking me if it’s true that David and Iman are spending £230,000 on this trip into space.

As David says, it’s not true …and so it gives me great pleasure to be able to declare the Observer piece, Officially “Total Tosh”!

While I eat my scones and drink my cup of tea…

Speaking of charity (see yesterday’s news) it seems you all voted in strong enough numbers to persuade the Whatever It Takes charity to put the above mug into production. (06.22.06 NEWS: VOTE FOR NEW BOWIE-DESIGNED CHARITY ITEMS NOW)

Stock isn’t actually expected for a month or so, but if you want to get your Christmas orders in (for those that celebrate, etc.) best get ordering now.

The reverse of the mug features David’s stick figure drawings of him and Lexi based on the work of the late British sculptor Lynn Chadwick. (06.18.2005 NEWS: DB EXPLAINS INSPIRATION FOR CHARITY ARTWORK)

Each mug comes in a gift-box with a photograph of David and a message from him.

The Mugs are priced at £9.99 (approx. ?14.82) and don’t forget it’s all for most deserving causes. David’s chosen charities, are Trade plus Aid & Save the Children.

Click on the image above to get to the ordering page. Thanx to BowieNetter msimmo for the pointer.

Like the ragged boy who races with the wind…

UltraStar staff member, erm…Staff (aka Kurt), who visitors to the BowieNet MBs all know and love dearly, is due to embark on a 109 mile charity bicycle race next month.

The race is the El Tour de Tucson and Staff will be racing as a member of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training on November 18th.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece he’s written on his sponsor page…

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I am training to participate in El Tour de Tucson XXIV as a member of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training. All of us on Team In Training are raising funds to help find a cure for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma and myeloma.

I’m completing this 100 mile race in honor of all individuals who are battling blood cancers.

Please make a donation to support my participation in Team In Training and help advance the Society’s mission.

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Staff has so far managed to raise almost a fifth of his $5,000 goal, and judging by similar appeals in the past I’m pretty sure there will be a few more of you out there willing to donate a little something to help him reach his target.

In the past, BowieNetter’s generosity has never ceased to amaze when it comes to appeals of this nature. Please go here if you wish to make a donation of your own.

You can read a whole lot more regarding this event in Staff’s BowieNet Blog, here.

Friday On My Mind…

Mad as a box of frogs Oz singer, Jeff Duff, (aka Duffo) has been in touch with the news that he’ll be performing the songs of David Bowie at two sold out shows next weekend, in Sydney, Australia.

I asked Jeff what he had in store for Friday and Saturday, and here’s what he said:

I will be joined by a few other like minded oz singers including a couple of great female vovalists. We’ll be backed by my rock combo the ‘Alien Sex Gods’ who are similar in style to the ‘Spiders from Mars’. We’ll be concentrating on most of the Ziggy Stardust album but will be performing many of the big guns from Bowie’s other 70’s, 80’s albums…I may even throw in an Iggy song or a tune from the Bowie produced Transformer album by Lou Reed.

It will be loud, stylish and very cheeky…both nites are sold out! I’ve designed a new costume especially for the show…there isn’t much to it but it looks very groovy. It’s always a great nite when I do the Bowie shows…the audience gets into the whole glam thing with outageous dress-ups…and I usually end up making a spectacle of myself getting down to skimpy leotard or worse! Ha.

Knowing how big a fan of Bowie and his music Jeff has been since way back, I asked him exactly what DB has meant to him over the years:

I think any self-respecting music loving mortal would be in denial if they suggested they hadn’t been touched or influenced by the music and style of David Bowie. I’m happy to say I’m one of the many billion who has been caught up in his spell.

In Australia in the early seventies, straight out of art school I began creating my own stage costumes a few of which led to me being arrested on stage. I guess on a smaller scale some of my early attempts to outrage were reminincent of early Bowie. He gave me courage to outrage!

I can pin point specific times or events in my life to particular Bowie songs…he has been my barometer for life. Yow. Jeff Duff.

Jeff’s last two albums, Ground Control To Frank Sinatra and Lost In The Stars, have been toungue-in-cheeck hybrids of David Bowie and Frank Sinatra with a kind of rock/swing thing going on. You can decide for yourself what you think of them by listening to some two minute snippets here.

A good starting point is the beautifully sparce arrangement of a down tempo Rebel Rebel from Ground Control To Frank Sinatra. To these ears the arrangement could almost have come straight from a 1974 Philly Dogs show. Great stuff.

And who would have guessed how esilly the likes of Changes, Space Oddity and Suffragette City would lend themselves to a pretty convicing swing arrangement?

Anyway, the upcoming shows on Friday 13th and Saturday 14th are more faithful rock arrangements in the spirit of the originals…but, as Jeff says, they’re sold out. So if you don’t yet have a ticket perhaps you’d better case the joint before Friday, to see if you’re likely to squeeze comfortably through the ladies’ powder room window!

Footnote: Sometime in the early 90s, Xfm radio in the UK put out a request for the 1979 Duffo hit, Give Me Back Me Brain, above. I dutifully trundled down to the London based radio station with my collection of Duffo records. There I was met by an upcoming DJ who remarked how some of the covers were very Bowie-esque, and he admitted to being a huge Bowie fan himself. They borrowed the single from me and broadcast it a few moments later.

You can see that DJ as he looks now, in yesterday’s news (10.06.2006 NEWS: EXTRAS ON HBO FROM JANUARY), in a picture with David Bowie that I took a few months bach at the Extras shoot.

See his pug-nosed face…

For those of you within the broadcast catchment area (whatever that means) of HBO, you will no doubt be pleased to learn that series two of Extras will be aired on HBO on Sunday nights at 10:00pm starting from 14 January 2007.

Hopefully that’s good news for those of you that couldn’t access the BBC 2 or online screenings of the second episode that featured David Bowie and his genius composition, The Little Fat Man (With The Pug-Nosed Face). (09.22.2006 SNIPPET: LITTLE FAT MAN…THE WORDS)

Somewhere there’s an ocean, Innocent and wild…

SpongeBob SquarePants has to be one of the more original animations produced in recent years, if not one of the most damn right surreal!

I have no idea how popular the crazy little cartoon is in most BowieNetter’s homes, but him and his gang of unlikely misfits are priority viewing in chez Blam Blam.

Anyway, who would have thought the show could get any more ridiculous, not me! Until I read David Bowie’s latest journal entry that is!

You can always count on DB to do just exactly that which you wouldn’t have expected, which I guess makes him kind of dependably different.