Month: February 2013

“We like dancing and we look divine…”

Next Friday (Feb 8th) Tate Liverpool launches Glam! The Performance of Style and in celebration of that fact The Guardian newspaper in the UK has been glamming it up a bit.

First up, author and journalist, Jon Savage, picked his favourite glam tracks for the paper. Among the twenty selections were four Bowie compositions and two other tracks that the young Ziggy had a hand in. 

These are the Bowie and related tracks with Jon’s annotations.

2 David Bowie, Queen Bitch December 1971 “There should be some real unabashed prostitution in this business,” Bowie told Cream magazine in late 1971. He did his best to make it happen with this Velvet Underground tribute, saturated in homosexuality and Manhattan sleaze. Mick Ronson’s guitar slices through everything.

5 Mott The Hoople, All the Young Dudes July 1972 Bowie may have provided the raw material, but Mott gave the definitive performance of this generation-defining song, with its sneering reference to the Beatles and the Stones. The musicians curled and uncurled around Ian Hunter’s snarling voice: “Oh is there concrete all around/ Or is it in my head.”

6 Lou Reed, Vicious November 1972 Another Bowie production, and another career revival. Vicious begins Reed’s second solo album in exactly the way that you would wish, with the poet laureate of Manhattan spitting out the Warhol inspired lyrics – “Vicious: you hit me with a flower” – while Mick Ronson, cutting through everything, embodies the song’s threat.

7 David Bowie, The Jean Genie November 1972 Bowie reached back to his 60s R&B days with this one, based on the old I’m a Man riff but updated with Ronson’s buzzing guitar, burlesque rhythms, gay double entendres – his by-now patented patch. The band did a fantastic Top of the Pops performance, recently rediscovered.

12 Iggy and the Stooges, Search and Destroy June 1973 Iggy wore silver, the Stooges were produced by David Bowie, the record sounded glam – all treble tones and slicing guitar – but Search and Destroy, like its parent album Raw Power, went much further and deeper than hardly anyone wished in 1973. Three years later, it would find its time.

18 David Bowie, Rebel Rebel US version May 1974 Bowie’s goodbye to the youth movement he had helped to form – “You’ve got your mother in a whirl, she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl” – and his last top 10 hit for 18 months. This US mix has dreamy backwards harmonies, extra percussion and phased guitar.

Read the full list and listen to all the tracks here.

Also in recognition of Glam! The Performance of Style, painter, comedian and TV face, Noel Fielding, dived head first into the glitter to recreate the look of some of his favourite glam rockers for The Guardian’s Culture magazine.

Here’s a bit from the interview he did for Culture.

Today, Fielding is dressing up as David Bowie, Brian Eno and German performance artist Ulay as a tribute to a new glam rock exhibition at Tate Liverpool. “I make an all right Bowie,” he says, then changes his mind. “Actually, I look more like Cilla Black with that wig. He’s got that amazing body… he just ate raw eggs and took cocaine, didn’t he? He’s so thin, you don’t know what he is – sort of male, sort of female. There’s something about him that’s a bit alien.”

You can view the rest of his brave attempts in the Culture gallery.

“Everyone Says ‘Hi’, again”

The ever-enigmatic Beck is currently remaking and remodelling David Bowie’s Sound And Vision for the Lincoln Motor Company‘s Hello Again campaign.

Originally a #3 UK hit for Bowie in 1977 when it was released as the first single from the classic ‘Low’ album, Sound And Vision in Beck‘s hands might not end up sounding like a carbon copy of the original song. Not that that‘s the intention of course.

On past form alone it‘s apparent that Beck has a unique approach to other people‘s work. Remember his insane remixes for Bowie‘s Survive single or his excellent version of Diamond Dogs which appeared on the ‘Moulin Rouge!’ OST?

So it’s no surprise to learn that he plans a completely new arrangement of Sound And Vision, with an added chorus and extended jam sessions, utilising layer upon layer of musicians performing separate pieces of the song together on stage.

He is working with Chris Milk on a special one-time performance of the song that will experiment with the possibilities of perspective and sound movement, surrounding an audience that will be seated within a circular orchestra of 170 different musicians.

A 360-degree recording of the performance will be broadcast to an online audience, giving them the feeling of actually being there. Viewers will be able to move within the 360º environment and change the direction of the audio in real time.

The Lincoln Motor Company is no stranger to Bowie’s music either. In August 2008 a promotional film entitled ‘Lift Off’ was created for the Lincoln MKS. The film employed a specially commissioned cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity by Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power.

And again less than a year later in March 2009, the band Shiny Toy Guns performed a cover of Peter Schilling’s Major Tom (Coming Home) for a Lincoln MKZ television commercial. It’s a tenuous link, but the song was touted as a sequel to Space Oddity. We thought Ashes To Ashes made a better fist of that particular job, frankly.

Beck’s performance of Sound And Vision will be broadcast on Hello-Again.com on February 10th, the day before the 36th anniversary of Bowie’s original single release.

Meanwhile you can watch a teaser with Beck talking about (and working on) Sound And Vision here.

“The latest LOVE is quick and clean, like a well-thumbed magazine”

Issue #9 (The Clean Issue), of LOVE magazine has a twelve page article previewing the upcoming V&A ‘David Bowie is’ exhibition.

The item has eight full-page photographs of some of the Bowie outfits that the V&A curators have selected for inclusion in the show.

Beautifully photographed by Craig McDean, the feature has an excellent accompanying text by Tim Blanks, who writes a ‘highly personal meditation on the way the rock icon came to exercise such a decisive influence on fashion history’.

Pictured here is one such example, a costume designed by Willie Brown that Bowie wore for the 1979 ‘DJ’ video.

The physical edition of LOVE is on the shelves on Monday and if you’re not already acquainted with the magazine, this is the perfect opportunity to get familiar with it.

LOVE is a very stylish publication that looks great on iPad and that version is available now.

We’ll leave you with a quotation from Gucci‘s Frida Giannini regarding our man, taken from Tim Blanks’ article.

There are many looks that at one point or another have been my favourites. I think of him doing his make-up by himself in the mirror or cutting his own clothes and dressing himself. Each and every one of his appearances was a performance in and of itself.