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.

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...

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) Read the rest

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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David Bowie and Trevor Jones's soundtrack to Jim Henson's fantastical film Labyrinth, starring Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King, will be reissued on vinyl next month for the first time since its release in 1986. (These days an original pressing goes for around $75-$100.) To complement Trevor Jones's synthesizer/orchestra score, Bowie wrote five original songs for Labyrinth, including Underground, As The World Falls Down, and the classic Magic Dance.

With Magic Dance, "the song for Jareth and the baby, sung by them and the goblins in the castle throne room - I had problems,” Bowie said at the time. “The baby I used in the recording studios couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put more than two gurgles together, so I ended up doing the baby-gurgle chorus myself! It’s an up-tempo song, and visually exciting.”

Labyrinth LP (Amazon)

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In her latest video, Luna Lee, master of the gayageum, plays a stunning version of the David Bowie classic.

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The Royal Mail's David Bowie Special Stamps are now available for pre-order. The 10 stamps -- six featuring his iconic album covers and four with concert images -- will be available on March 14. A stamp with cover art from "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" was previously issued in 2010. The only other groups that Royal Mail has honored with a dedicated stamp issue like this are The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Read the rest

In November 1964, 17-year-old David Bowie (then Jones) appeared on BBC's "Tonight" to talk about his new Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, a PR stunt cooked up by his dad. Bowie was already a veteran rocker, having played with The Konrads,Tthe King Bees, and The Manish Boys. From Wendy Leigh's Bowie: The Biography:

He might have been part of the Manish Boys, but inside, David had always seen himself as a star who stood on his own. So he was heartened when his father came up with a masterstroke.... John Jones swung into action and, applying his well-honed PR skills, along with David's input, concocted a cause designed to thrust David into the limelight....

Consequently, in November 1964, at John Jones's behest, the ever-obliging Leslie Thomas [a music columnist and former Barnardo's boy who'd previously written about the King Bees, also at John Jones's behest] published an article in the Evening News titled "For Those Beyond the Fringe," announcing the formation of a new society, the International League for the Preservation of Animal Filament, whose founder and president was none other than David Jones.

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The performance is from the 1977 TV special "Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas." From Wikipedia:

Bowie's appearance has been described as a "surreal" event, undertaken at a time that he was "actively trying to normalise his career". He later admitted to having only appeared on the show because "I just knew my mother liked him". Buz Kohan was not sure that Crosby knew who Bowie was, but Ian Fraser claimed, "I'm pretty sure he did. Bing was no idiot. If he didn't, his kids sure did."

According to co-writer Ian Fraser, Bowie balked at singing "Little Drummer Boy": "I hate this song. Is there something else I could sing?", Fraser recalls Bowie telling him. Fraser, along with songwriter Larry Grossman and the special's scriptwriter, Buz Kohan, then wrote "Peace on Earth" as a counterpoint to "Little Drummer Boy". Crosby performed "Little Drummer Boy", while Bowie sang the new tune "Peace on Earth", which they reportedly performed after less than an hour of rehearsal.

A few days after the taping, Crosby said of Bowie, "clean-cut kid and a real fine asset to the show. He sings well, has a great voice and reads lines well."

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On November 11, Sotheby's will auction off David Bowie's beautiful collection of Italian designer furniture and other objects, including his incredible 1966 "Radio-Phonograph, Model No. RR126" by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. The bulk of his collection going on the block though are 1980s pieces of Memphis furniture. Over at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford writes about Bowie's deep appreciation for Memphis:

The name “Memphis” was supposedly chosen after an early brainstorming session, during which Bob Dylan’s song “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” played repeatedly on the record player. The designers appreciated the word’s disparate connotations, evoking both cheap American kitsch and the regal city of ancient Egypt.

United in their efforts to reject traditional notions of “good design,” the Memphis artists mocked the bland austerity of Modernism by mixing clashing colors, patterns, and materials on playful geometric forms that often masked an object’s intended use. Although their collaborations only lasted a few years—Sottsass left the Memphis group in 1985, and the rest parted ways in 1987—they caused an uproar in the design world. Memphis sensibilities continued trickling into mainstream design via knockoff brands that influenced interiors everywhere from movie sets to high-school cafeterias.

“It didn’t look serious. It looked like a prank,” Bowie wrote of Memphis in 2002. “It mixed Formica attitude with marble diffidence. Bright yellows against turquoise. Virus patterns on ceramics. It couldn’t care less about function.”

"Space Oddity: David Bowie's Secret Obsession With '80s Memphis Design" (Thanks, Ben Marks!)

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Apple's iOS 10.2 update contains two emoji inspired by David Bowie's Aladdin Sane character. The two emoji are named "Male singer" and "Female singer." See the new slew of emojis at Emojipedia. Read the rest