“We’ve got five stars, what a surprise”
In the latest issue of Q magazine, David Quantick has given the David Bowie (Five Years 1969 – 1973) box set top marks.
Here’s an edited excerpt from his review with a bit from both the intro and the conclusion.
The past, in David Bowie’s case, is not so much a foreign country as an entire solar system of extraordinary planets…the albums Bowie made were each a genre in themselves, blueprints for a career and as different as Venus from Mercury.
Here they are, 10 albums – including two lives, a double rarities collection and one covers disc – in a boxed set, with a booklet introduced by Ray Davies and a general sense of wonder that this creative outpouring, this insane variety of different ideas, sounds and visions, took place roughly in the same length of time of that, say, Mumford & Sons have managed to hesitantly carve out three albums, one of which is different because it doesn’t have banjos on it.
These 10 albums are all brilliant…and it’s almost extraordinary to realise that this race to space would actually be exceeded, creatively, by the hyperdrive of the next five years.
And who are we to disagree with that?
Meanwhile, the faint image in the background of our montage was taken of the Warner Music Group building in Burbank, Los Angeles. Hard to get a scale of the Five Years hoarding they are proudly displaying, but you wouldn’t get it through your front door!
#FiveYearsBox #DavidBowie