David Bowie...

My first introduction to Bowie was the Aladin Sane album, or at least, my first conscious introduction. Someone has brought the album to school and was flashing it about. I'd heard the music before, I think I recall having liked Space Oddity but wasn't really aware of  'Bowie' until I saw the cover of Aladin Sane.
I recently picked up an old biography of David Bowie at the charity shop a week or so ago - by one Chris Charlesworth. Written in 1981, it was amusing to read, 30 years later, a persons account of the rise of Bowie and his, in 1981, almost retirement after his mercurial rise to fame in the early 70's.
The Seventies - perhaps its then because I transformed from a pre-teen kid to an angsty young man within that decade that I see it as an incredible period of change - and growth. It was, my time of appreciating and discovering life and, almost as a parallel, music transformed from besuited mop-tops, through rock, glam, pop and by the end of the decade, punk and post-punk. I had it all! I don't believe we've seen the like since.
David Bowie epitomises the Seventies in my mind.  The beginning of the decade saw him a whistful, naive figure who by 1974 was a rock phenominon, sparking glam, soul, punk and new romantic. What artist today has the ability to totally transform themselves, as Bowie did from the idol Ziggy Stardust to the crooning Young American and then on to the bleak dystopian vision that was 'Low ' over a period of a couple of years? But, I think, it was helped by his outlook, he eschewed fame and was not willing to compromise, not willing to create fodder for his audience. Reading the (short) biography, fame very nearly did kill him, but he was able to rise above it - or rather, skim beneath it.
So, consequently I've been listening to loads of David Bowie this week...My favourite album remains Hunky Dory, followed closely by Low, Ziggy Stardust and more recently Heathen. I wasn't keen the soul period of Young Americans, though I now thoroughly appreciate his mindset behind it  . Apart from, I think, one really miff album in the Eighties - Tonight, Bowie's albums have all been good.

Good night.

That Seventies Show

Way back then, pocket money didn't go far and even when the paychecks started rolling in R150 didn't go that far either (though, at 35c a beer at The Swan and the NME at 25c it weren't all bad). Still, shelling out for a record album was not something to be sniffed at (haha still isn't) and of course, it was the imported stuff that counted, local pressing were well crap most of the time. I still managed to spend a goodly chunk of the paypacket on music.  There was a popular photographic/electronic chain, Etkinds, around back then and at some stage they had come up with the idea of having a stand of vinyl deletions in their stores at around a Rand a platter, loads of crap but with a bit of diligence I would afford myself the prize of finding something off my usual beaten musical track. My first introduction to the likes of Rick Wakeman (Six Wives of Henry VIII), Can, Amon Duul and Faust (I distinctly remember passing up a copy of the untitled Faust album on clear vinyl through not having just a few cents more...) and others was afforded me by these racks of gems.
Some of the finds I gleaned back then have fallen by the wayside, either 'borrowed', lent out (then forgotten) or swept away by other misfortune.

I stumbled over this blog site - Orexis of Death recently (a Russian site?) and have been able to relocate some of  those lost slabs of sound, and found that these were not stand alone albums, damn, I love rediscovering seams of  music...Swiss band Toad up there one of 'em (about 5 other albums available!). Trolling through Orexis' pages I am reminded of how much bloody great music has been produced (yes, yes, crap stuff even more so) swept aside by what is deemed 'popular' by the music moguls of time past and present. Actually, as with Toad its criminal how many acts were ignored because they were not within the British/American axis. In so many cases stuff coming out of Spain, France, Italy, Japan, Argentina etc etc etc was in many ways so much better, if only through innovation and without the entrenched sound of UK/USA swamping out the music. Production may have been more polished, more professional , though I deem overproduction to be a heinous crime and in so many cases merely glosses over stuff with a lets-make-it-sound-like sheen suitable for the masses...

Rock on!!