The incredible museum exhibition David Bowie Is included a list of 100 books that were not necessarily his favorites but rather those that influenced him the most. Author John O'Connell used that list as the basis of his own book, Bowie's Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie's Life, containing plot summaries, analysis, and his thoughts on how each text connects to Bowie. From John Quin's review at The Quietus:
O’Connell rightly reminds us that Bowie was a Mod and that his literary taste was consistently modernist: Camus, Eliot, Lawrence and Kerouac all feature here amongst others....
There are plenty of surprises here such as his love for true crime classics like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and travel narratives such as Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. We learn more about Bowie’s friendships with writers like Hanif Kureishi and William Boyd. It’s also good to be reminded that Bowie loved a laugh and rated Keith Waterhouse. Humour features strongly with Viz, Private Eye, and Spike Milligan’s Puckoon all making the cut...
The singer’s Berlin years, the time of Low and ‘Heroes’, are linked with the inclusion of Berlin, Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin with its lowlife nightclubbing. There’s pleasure too in hearing that Bowie liked the revival of forgotten classics such as John Kennedy Toole’s wonderful A Confederacy of Dunces. And Bowie’s interest in modern art is underlined by the inclusion of Richard Cork’s book on David Bomberg and Arthur C. Danto’s thinking on Warhol in Beyond the Brillo box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective.
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Footage of a 1990s-era David Bowie performing repeating poses against a plain blue set was used to create a holographic album insert, reports the BBC, but it turns out there's 30 minutes of video to enjoy.
... the film remained in storage at Leicester's De Montfort University. "He... started to do this set of amazing iconic movements that he was famous for and all his fans would recognise", Prof [Martin] Richardson said.
The footage was played to 300 lucky fans Monday.
Prof Richardson, who first met the star in 1994, recalled: "Bowie said to me, 'When you've done your bloody hologram it will be up and down the width and breadth of the country. I am going to make you famous.'
"He got back on the sound stage and said, 'Right, what do you want me to do?' and I thought, 'I am going to direct David Bowie, the super rock star I idolised as a boy."
The hologram was then reproduced for 500,000 copies of the album.
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I loved this image, posted today to promote a B3TA newsletter but originally from its photoshop thread challenging readers to create album covers for old (largely UK) TV shows. It's by christhebarker.
If you're American and Zippy Stardust is a baffling, inexplicable horror to you, be assured the same is also true of Britons. Read the rest
This lovely cover was heard in the seventh episode of the new Watchmen TV show, titled "An Almost Religious Awe." The track will appear on Reznor and Ross's album "Watchmen: Vol. 3 (Music from the HBO Series)" due out December 16.
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Andy Riley compiled and tabulated a full breakdown of jobs & occupations by the frequency of their mentions in the lyrics of David Bowie, of which the top 5 are excluded in this screenshot of his work. Can you guess them before clicking through? Read the rest
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," Mattel has announced a "David Bowie" Barbie doll. On Amazon,
it's priced at $50. From the
New York Times:
It’s a notably androgynous look for a doll that epitomized the stereotypes of feminine appearance in its earlier iterations. In more recent years, however, male celebrity depictions have not just been reserved for Ken. Over the past decade, Barbie has dressed like Andy Warhol, Elvis and Frank Sinatra.
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On January 8, 1997, David Bowie became quite emotional after hearing happy birthday message from the pioneering pop/experimental musician Scott Walker, who died yesterday. It was a touching moment then and even moreso now that both of these inimitable forces of avant-garde art/music are gone. Turns out that Walker's birthday was the following day:
"I'll have a drink to you on the other side of midnight. How's that?"
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BBC Studios Production is completing a new feature documentary, David Bowie: The First Five Years, to air next year. Its the third in director Francis Whately's trilogy that has included "David Bowie: Five Years" (2013) and "David Bowie: The Last Five Years" (2017). The film will cover the Bowie's formative years as an artist, starting in 1966 up until the birth of Ziggy Stardust. According to the BBC, the 90-minute doc "traces his interest in everything from Holst to Pinky and Perky, from Anthony Newley to Tibetan Buddhism, and how he used all these influences to create not only Ziggy Stardust, but the material for his entire career."
The film also unearths a report, deep from the BBC Archives, following a BBC audition on Tuesday 2 November 1965 of a band called David Bowie and the Lower Third. Their audition material included Chim-Chim-Cheree as well as an original number called Baby That’s A Promise. The BBC’s ‘Talent Selection Group’ describe him as having “quite a different sound”, but also “no personality”, “not particularly exciting” and “will not improve with practice”. The BBC later appears to have changed its mind...
Contributors include Bowie’s first cousin and lifelong-friend Kristina Amadeus and former girlfriend and muse Hermione Farthingale - both of whom have never before been filmed talking about him; the late Lindsay Kemp in his last filmed interview, lifelong friend and producer Tony Visconti, former girlfriend and friend Dana Gillespie, lifelong friends Geoff MacCormak and George Underwood, Bowie's producer Mike Vernon, Bowie's early producer Tony Hatch, and Woody Woodmansey, the last remaining Spider from Mars.
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German art school Bauhaus (1919-1933) had a tremendous impact on architecture, graphic design, and, yes, fashion. From Great Big Story:
The minimalist aesthetic has graced the runways of Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander Wang, adorned pop stars like David Bowie and Lady Gaga, and motivated the work of designer Anne Gorke. A native of Bauhaus’ birthplace—Weimar, Germany—Gorke pays homage to her upbringing with each stitch.
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In 1980, David Bowie did a series of Japanese TV commercials for Crystal Jun Rock, a Japanese liquor. See below. “The money is a useful thing,” Bowie later said about doing the ads.
The soundtrack was the gorgeous track "Crystal Japan" that Bowie released first on a couple 7-inch singles and then as a bonus track on the CD reissue of "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)." Bowie fan Nacho Video recut the three TV commercials into the lovely music video above for "Crystal Japan."
(via /r/ObscureMedia)
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Joel Gion of Brian Jonestown Massacre posted these images on his Instagram. Coincidence or... something else?
Well, David Bowie did help Brian Eno produce Devo's "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" (1978). But apparently illustrator Joe Heiner based the cover art on a photo of golfer Juan "Chi-Chi" Rodríguez mixed with an image Mark Mothersbaugh had "procured from a local newspaper that morphed the faces of U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford."
Still, the resemblance here is striking.
More on the cover art at Wikipedia. Read the rest
In 1963, David Bowie (then David Jones), age 16, recorded a demo song “I Never Dreamed” with his band The Konrads. Long thought lost, Konrads drummer David Hadfield found it in the 1990s in an old breadbox. Until now he's kept quiet about the find but has decided to auction it off. It's expected to sell for £10,000. Above is a short clip of the tune. From Omega Auctions:
Hadfield recalls ‘Our agent, Eric Easton, who also managed The Rolling Stones, asked us to do a demo so he could try and get us an auction at Decca. So in early 1963 I booked into R.G.Jones small studio in Morden. In preparation for the demo David and our guitarist Neville Wills wrote 2/3 songs. We had decided that we would do a couple of guitar instrumentals and one original song. I chose “I Never Dreamed” as it was the strongest, the other two were a bit weak! I also decided that David was the best person to sing it and give the right interpretation. So this became the very first recording of David Jones (Bowie) singing 55 years ago! There is no other recording featuring David as lead in existence. Decca initially turned us down, but when they eventually gave us an auction later that year, vocalist Roger Ferris was the lead voice and David sang backing harmonies.’
(Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)
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My favorite culture critic, the inimitable Mark Dery, visited the "David Bowie is" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Author of the excellent "All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Rock Matters," Dery sees the exhibit as "a burial chamber for a rock god, replete with everything he’ll need for the afterlife." From the Brooklyn Rail:
Crepuscule with Bowie, I thought, not quite groping my way through the perpetual twilight of David Bowie is at the Brooklyn Museum. The 400 artifacts in this blockbuster show—costumes (stage and offstage, because when wasn’t Bowie onstage?), handwritten lyrics, record-cover art, stage-set designs and maquettes, personal effects (including, fabulously, the Great Man’s coke spoon from the dissolute mid-seventies)—are displayed in vitrines or mounted on stagelike platforms and spotlit. The encroaching shadows give the exhibition a sepulchral feel. Taking it all in, I had an inkling of what Howard Carter must’ve felt as he got his first look, by flickering candlelight, at Tutankhamun’s tomb...
"
Ziggy's Reliquaries"
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An asshole with a spray can vandalized a bronze David Bowie statue just two days after it was unveiled in Aylesbury, England. The individual wrote "Feed the homeless first," "RIP DB," and made a general mess of the statue. Artist Andrew Sinclair created the sculpture that shows Bowie and several of his personas including Ziggy Stardust, who made his live debut in Aylesbury. Fortunately, the paint is coming off and the vandal was recorded on video (below).
(BBC)
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In October 1973, David Bowie appeared for the last time as Ziggy Stardust at the "1980 Floor Show" (Get it? 19-Eighty-Floor? 1984?), a surreal cabaret he curated at London's famed The Marquee Club. Some of the extravaganza was later broadcast on NBC TV's "The Midnight Special." Above, Bowie and Marianne Faithful performing the delightful Sonny & Cher number "I Got You Babe." Bowie later said:
There were a lot of clubs to go to in the Soho scene in the 60's but The Marquee was top of the list, because musicians did hang out there, pretending to talk business and picking up gigs - but picking up girls mostly. One of my keenest memories of The Marquee in the '60's was having a permanent erection because there were so many fantastic looking girls in there, it was all tourists, especially in summer, all flocking to London to get an R&B star. My final performance of Ziggy Stardust was at The Marquee. I wanted to go back there because I had so many good memories over the years. We changed the place completely and for 3 days we filmed what became 'The 1980 Floor Show'. I had The Troggs on with me and then got Marianne Faithfull to duet with me on a version of Sonny & Cher's 'I Got You Babe'. I dressed Marianne in a nun's habit with the back cut out and I dressed as the Angel of Death!
(via r/obscuremedia and The Ziggy Stardust Companion)
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In celebration of what would have been David Bowie's 71st birthday today, Nile Rodgers released this stunning demo recording of "Let's Dance" that he co-produced in 1982.
Rodgers says:
"I've been blessed with a wonderful career but my creative partnership with David Bowie ranks very, very, very high on the list of my most important and rewarding collaborations. This demo gives you, the fans, a bird's eye view of the very start of it! I woke up on my first morning in Montreux with David peering over me. He had an acoustic guitar in his hands and exclaimed, 'Nile, darling, I think this is a HIT!'
...This recording was the first indication of what we could do together as I took his 'folk song' and arranged it into something that the entire world would soon be dancing to and seemingly has not stopped dancing to for the last 35 years! It became the blueprint not only for 'Let's Dance' the song but for the entire album as well.
(Rolling Stone)
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In 1975, Thelma Ross of UCLA's parapsychology lab gifted David Bowie a Kirlian photography machine to capture images of peoples' "auras." This machine generates a high-voltage field to a photographic plate resulting in a glowing corona discharge image of whatever is positioned on the plate. The color, shape, and intensity of the image is affected by myriad factors, from humidity to how well the object is grounded to, or, in the case of people, the amount of oil and sweat on the skin. But of course Bowie was into the occult and other high weirdness so the possibility of photographing one's "aura" appealed to him. From the Daily Grail:
Bowie’s interest in Kirlian photography was evident: some of the photos that resulted from his experimentation with the technique were published in the programme for his 1976 tour in support of Station to Station. And he used it to try and understand what was happening to his body when he took drugs: he compared two Kirlian photographs of his fingertip (beside a crucifix given to him by his father), one image taken before consuming cocaine, the other after.
Bowie liked the image so much that he used it in the booklet of Earthling (1997) and as the cover art for the "Little Wonder" single.
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