Month: March 2010

You gotta act tall, think big…

Released on this day forty five years ago was David Bowie’s second stab at storming the hit parade: I Pity The Fool, the follow up to the previous year’s debut, Liza Jane. (06.05.2009 NEWS: LIZA JANE IS FORTY FIVE YEARS OLD TODAY)

The single was notable for having the first ever released Bowie composition in Take My Tip on the B-side, (good to see a spider reference in his first ever published lyric) and both sides were recorded and issued under the name of The Manish Boys, with David again taking care of a very enthusiastic and convincing vocal.

We have written much about this release and The Manish Boys on these pages over the past few years, here’s a few more recent examples: 01.01.2007 REMINDER: DB 1965! AND BAAL DOWNLOAD EPs AVAILABLE NOW & 04.12.2007 NEWS: NEW MOD COMPILATION TAKES NAME FROM BOWIE TITLE & 01.04.2009 NEWS: MANISH BOYS PHOTO SPREAD IN THE WORD MAGAZINE.

As you might suspect, this record is far more sought after now than it was forty five years ago, with the most recent stock copy up for auction, that I’m aware of, fetching £672 (approx. $1,022 USD at today’s conversion rates) and with A-label demo copies reaching around the £500 mark (approx. $760 USD).

However, all that glitters is not gold…

In the March edition of Record Collector, (issue 373) some poor sap has written in with details of the above four track EP, excited in the knowledge that a “well-known German Bowie collector said it could easily be worth £3,000, or even £10,000-plus, because of the picture sleeve and demo-release status.”.

I Pity The Fool and Take My Tip by The Manish Boys take up one side of the disc, while the flipside has You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving and Baby Loves That Way, both credited to Davy Jones.

While there’s no crime in a non-Bowie fan thinking they had something special here, (all of the tracks were originally released in 1965 on Parlophone after all) the aforementioned well-known German Bowie collector should have spotted that the label looked nothing like a typical Parlophone red A demo disc, and worse, the Bowie drawings on the sleeve are not from the right period. The front cover depicts Bowie in ’66 and the reverse in ’67.

Of course, the record is a bootleg. Released in 1978, you don’t see it very often these days and it probably goes for a little bit more than the tenner Record Collector valued it at…particularly if it’s complete with its insert, which my copy doesn’t have. 🙁

Just about the best you can get…

In the words of manmademovies.com itself: “Duncan Jones has received, perhaps the highest accolade in the British film industry. The coveted Kermode award for Best Director, for MOON.”.

Although extremely busy on the first week of filming his second feature Source Code in Montreal, Canada, Jones took time out to record a heartfelt and moving acceptance speech.

But, even before that, Jones expressed his delight via his Twitter account…though he made an embarrassing faux pas trying to identify the mysterious personality used for the distinctive Kermode statuette: “That’s a very special one! And the award’s a looker? A model of Ed Sullivan!”.

Though the statuette’s true identity has never been officially revealed, it’s generally reckoned to be of Kurt Russell, (conjoined on the right of Kermode, above) the star of Kermode’s all-time favourite movie, possibly, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

Anyway, congratulations to Duncan Jones for yet another prestigious award. You can view his acceptance speech here and Kermode’s virtuoso musical tribute to Moon Music, here.

All you’ve got to do is win…

Those of you that signed up to the service should be getting an e-mail from the the folks at EMI and The Ultimate David Bowie Fan Page about now. We first told you about the Bowie UFP a year ago, give or take a week or two. (03.18.2009 NEWS: EMI LAUNCHES THE DAVID BOWIE ULTIMATE FAN PAGE)

Well now those generous EMI types have launched a pretty impressive Bowie EMI back catalogue contest in which you could win the twenty six Bowie albums above, thirty CDs and two DVDs in total.

Here’s the treasure trove (can’t say booty these days) of musical delights listed in an alphabetical manner…

Aladdin Sane (1CD)
All Saints (1CD)
Black Tie White Noise (1CD)
Bowie At The Beeb (2CD)
Buddha Of Suburbia (1CD)
Christiane F (1CD)
David Live (2CD)
Diamond Dogs (1CD)
“Heroes” (1CD)
Hunky Dory (1CD)
Let’s Dance (1CD)
Live In Santa Monica ’72 (1CD)
Lodger (1CD)
Low (1CD)
Never Let Me Down (1CD)
Pin Ups (1CD)
Scary Monsters (1CD)
Space Oddity (40th Anniversary EP) (2CD)
Stage (2CD)
Station To Station (1CD)
The Man Who Sold The World (1CD)
The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1CD)
Tin Machine – Tin Machine (1CD)
Tonight (1CD)
VH1 Storytellers (CD+DVD)
Young Americans (CD+DVD)

That little lot would set you back a couple of hundred nicker in the shops.

Click on the image above to get to the contest page and visit the Bowie UFP by utilising the fancy widget below…

Became the special man…

The irrepressible Jeff Duff, (pictured above at a recent Ziggy show at The Vanguard) has been in touch to announce that he is taking his Ziggy show all the way to the Sydney Opera House.

It’s apparent that the former Duffo is proud of this fact, as he makes clear here: “It’s amongst the most prestigious venues on the planet to perform and not many rock acts have performed there. For me it’s a great honour and especially because we’re paying homage to DB.”

Stay tuned for more details as we get them.

So I hang both his bags in the hall…

When we told you about Morgan Howell‘s painting of the Ziggy Stardust 45 recently, (02.22.2010 NEWS: GREAT BIG BOWIE 45 PLUS WIN SIGNED REBEL REBEL CARD) I had a minor grumble in that the single wasn’t in the correct era RCA bag.

Morgan has kindly corrected that and his latest version is now in the classic green and orange 70s bag, pictured with the original RCA bag above. Check it out here in the store.

See our original story to join in the vote for the Bowie 45 you’d most like to see reproduced like this and as a T-shirt. You could even win a spare signed 35th anniversary Rebel Rebel card and 45 just by taking part.

Speaking of things pretending to be Ziggy Stardust…

Ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, changes…erm…I mean cherry bomb!

The upcoming Runaways biopic has two Bowie songs featured on the film soundtrack, with one of those making it to the film’s official soundtrack CD, due in stores in the US on March 23rd with the download version being available a week earlier on the 16th.

Here’s the tracklisting for The Runaways…

01 Nick Gilder – Roxy Roller
02 Suzi Quatro – The Wild One
03 MC5 – It?s A Man?s Man?s Man?s World
04 David Bowie- Rebel Rebel
05 Dakota Fanning – Cherry Bomb
06 The Runaways – Hollywood
07 Dakota Fanning – California Paradise
08 The Runaways – You Drive Me Wild
09 Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart – Queens Of Noise
10 Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning – Dead End Justice
11 The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog
12 The Runaways – I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are (live)
13 Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant
14 Joan Jett – Don?t Abuse Me

The other Bowie song in the film is the sublime Lady Grinning Soul from the 1973 album, Aladdin Sane.

Meanwhile, the original Cherie Currie (that’s Dakota Fanning playing Cherrie on the right in the picture above with Kristen Stewart playing Joan Jett on the left) isn’t too keen on the way the judges on American Idol seem to want to take away the individuality of performers on the show. Here’s a bit from an interview on usatoday.com…

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“Instead of seeing what I see in these performers ? the star in them ? it just seems like they’re [the judges] making one bad note into an issue. To me, they’re missing the point of what’s happening. Trust me, if I was on that panel, it’d be a little bit of a different show.”

“It’s easy to say, ‘You need more self-confidence, but we don’t like the style of clothes you’re wearing,'” she says. “The kid that’s doing the Jim Morrison thing, that’s what makes him feel comfortable. But they just stripped that away from him. Now’s he’s got to go to the mall! And that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Currie believes that kind of advice would have been devastating to her in her early days, when she idolized and mimicked David Bowie.

“I needed David Bowie when I started in The Runaways,” she says. “That was my jump-off point. If I could embody him, then I could find my way. But if you had taken David Bowie away from me in the very beginning of The Runaways, I never would have found myself. It would have crushed me. But through that, channeling whatever that was, really turned me into quite a good performer.

“He got me through those first few months out on the road. I was too young to know who I was, like a few of these guys. Really too young.”

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Directed by Floria Sigismondi, (who you will remember directed the brilliant Little Wonder and Dead Man Walking videos) The Runaways is in US theatres on March 19th…check out the official site of the movie here.