David Bowie

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i liked david bowie's early stuff.

my favorite song of his is "quicksand"

i came upon a rare clip of him playing a piano singing "oh you pretty things" in a BBC studio.
that is also one of my favorites.
he can play and sing at the same time very well.

one curiosity about bowie, was that he claimed his lyrics meant nothing. but i wonder whether he only said that to perpetuate the mystique surrounding the meanings of his words.
i definitely do not hear nonsense in his lyrics.

anyway...here

just as an aside, here is a brilliant cover of "life on mars" with only piano.
this guy looks about 60, and he shows no emotion at all while playing it.
it is good to see the skeleton of some of bowie's song to realize they are masterpieces.



i tried it, but i sound more like a pianola than a person. too robotic.

https://clyp.it/nrmidtoh

He's good at playing many different instruments, including saxophone and guitar, and is also a classically trained mime.


Bowie records a lot of demos where it's just him singing and playing a 12-string guitar. I know some of the re-releases of Ziggy Stardust have demos of the title track and Lady Stardust.

I've always been a big fan of Bowie's work from 1970-76, ie from The Man Who Sold The World (album) to Station To Station. Lost interest after that period, and could never get into Low and Heroes, which some people apparently rate as among his best work. My favourite LP of his was Aladdin Sane (1973) - some amazing stuff on that.

He had a number 1 hit single in the UK in 1969 with Space Oddity, the success of which was often linked to the moon landing of that year, and he was often dismissed as a 'one hit wonder'. All that changed with his performance of Starman on the BBC show Top Of The Pops in June 1972, not just for the quality of the song, but the (at the time) 'outrageous' way he interacted with Mick Ronson.



The other controversy surrounding Bowie in the 1970s involved his apparent fixation with fascist motifs and ideas around 1976-77, which perhaps significantly coincided with his spending a lot of time in Berlin. In one interview he said something to the effect that Hitler was a superstar, or similar. That has always been put down to the effects of the vast quantities of hard drugs he was then taking. I wonder...whatever...

The only performance of his I saw after that was at the 1985 'Live Aid' concert in London. He produced a really solid and professional set, but he seemed barely recognizable as the Bowie of the previous decade. That however was always the point about him, I suppose, namely that he was a 'chameleon' who was forever 'reinventing himself', so to speak.