Upon completing the record, he spent several weeks in a Scottish Buddhist monastery. Once he left the monastery, he studied with Lindsay Kemp's mime troupe, forming his own mime company, the Feathers, in The Feathers were short-lived, and he formed the experimental art group Beckenham Arts Lab in Hooking up with his old friend Marc Bolan , he began miming at some of Bolan 's T.
The band quickly fell apart, yet Bowie and Ronson remained close, working on the material that formed Bowie's next album, The Man Who Sold the World, as well as recruiting Michael "Woody" Woodmansey as their drummer. Produced by Tony Visconti , who also played bass, The Man Who Sold the World was a heavy guitar rock album that failed to gain much attention.
Following its release, Bowie began to develop his most famous incarnation, Ziggy Stardust: an androgynous, bisexual rock star from another planet.
Before he unveiled Ziggy, Bowie claimed in a January interview with Melody Maker that he was gay, helping to stir interest in his forthcoming album. Taking cues from Bolan 's stylish glam rock, Bowie dyed his hair orange and began wearing women's clothing.
The album and its lavish, theatrical concerts became a sensation throughout England, and helped him become the only glam rocker to carve out a niche in America. Ziggy Stardust became a word-of-mouth hit in the U. Bowie quickly followed Ziggy with Aladdin Sane later in Not only did he record a new album that year, he also produced Lou Reed 's Transformer, the Stooges ' Raw Power, and Mott the Hoople 's comeback All the Young Dudes, for which he also wrote the title track.
Given the amount of work Bowie packed into and , it wasn't surprising that his relentless schedule began to catch up with him. After recording the all-covers Pin-Ups with the Spiders from Mars, he unexpectedly announced the band's breakup, as well as his retirement from live performances, during the group's final show that year.
He retreated from the spotlight to work on a musical adaptation of George Orwell's , but once he was denied the rights to the novel, he transformed the work into Diamond Dogs. The album was released to generally poor reviews in , yet it generated the hit single "Rebel Rebel," and he supported the album with an elaborate and expensive American tour.
As the tour progressed, Bowie became fascinated with soul music, eventually redesigning the entire show to reflect his new "plastic soul. The change took fans by surprise, as did the double-album David Live, which featured material recorded on the tour.
Young Americans, released in , was the culmination of Bowie's soul obsession, and it became his first major crossover hit, peaking in the American Top Ten and generating his first U. While in L.
Soon, he decided Los Angeles was too boring and returned to England; shortly after arriving back in London, he gave the awaiting crowd a Nazi salute, a signal of his growing, drug-addled detachment from reality.
The incident caused enormous controversy, and Bowie left the country to settle in Berlin, where he lived and worked with Brian Eno. Once in Berlin, Bowie sobered up and began painting, as well as studying art. He also developed a fascination with German electronic music, which Eno helped him fulfill on their first album together, Low.
Released early in , Low was a startling mixture of electronics, pop, and avant-garde technique. What more could you ask for, at this bizarre, unnerving and outlandish time, than a roundup of the greatest hits of one of the most bizarre, unnerving and outlandish musicians of all time.
Uniformly strong, the songwriting on Heathen stretched from the prosaic — the letter-to-adult-son of Everyone Says Hi — to the baffling. Its highlight sits somewhere between: ostensibly a love song that gradually reveals itself to be about God. The melody is beautiful, the arrangement — very Visconti strings over electronic beats — perfectly poised.
A strange, genuinely great song about religion smothered by overproduction. A remix helps matters a little, and the stripped-back 00s live versions available online are better yet. The demo version — much talked up by Bowie in later years — remains unheard. Hailed as a return to peak form on release, Black Tie White Noise was nothing of the sort, but its first single was authentically fantastic. A stark, brass- and woodwind-assisted depiction of those — like Bowie himself — left with their noses pressed against the glass of the Swinging London party, it feels like a monochrome kitchen-sink drama compressed into three minutes.
The album Lodger opened with that rarest of things in the Bowie canon, a protest song. Inspired by the ongoing cold war and its attendant nuclear paranoia, its combination of anger and fatalism still sounds pertinent. The music meanwhile is essentially a gentle reworking of Boys Keep Swinging: same key, same chords, only slower. Either way, its leaps from eerie atmospherics to blasting, wall-of-noise chorus are really exhilarating: an overlooked triumph.
Another overlooked 90s gem, from the coolly received Hours, Something in the Air is both limpid and melancholy. The lyrics are filled with regret, the vocal parched and pained behind a liberal sprinkling of electronic distortion — and, when it hits its chorus, anthemic in a way that hints at All the Young Dudes.
So set aside a few days and take this journey with us through the catalogue of one of popular music's most undeniable geniuses. It would be harsh to suggest Bowie got off to a false start — artistically, at least — but the mids were more formative for the young musician than critically successful.
After his debut album David Bowie failed to chart in , two years passed between the release of Love You Till Tuesday — the second single from that record — and Space Oddity on 11th July It reached number five in the UK charts, and his second self-titled album was released that November and re-released in as Space Oddity. The s began with a signal that Bowie was unafraid to experiment, with the release of Regazzo solo, ragazza sola , a reworked version of Space Oddity with Italian lyrics.
And so his most fruitful decade continued. The album Live In Santa Monica 72 , released in , was recorded on the 20th October that year, capturing Bowie and the band at a giddy height — but that gig was surrounded by releases of work he'd done largely on the other side of the mixing desk.
Bowie's first production credit for another artist came on the 8th September , with the release of Mott The Hoople's All The Young Dudes — he also played sax on the record and wrote the title track — and was quickly followed two months later with Lou Reed's sensational Transformer , which he and Reed co-produced.
Not yet done for the year, he recorded the Ziggy Stardust motion picture in July released as a soundtrack in and on the 19th October released Pin Ups , his seventh studio album. David Live was Bowie's first live album release in October. It was recorded that summer, shortly before a show in Los Angeles that was released in as the live album Cracked Actor. In January it was the turn of Station To Station , with a concert at Nassau Coliseum recorded on the 23rd March that was released as a live album in , before another double album year in This pair of classic albums sandwiched two tracks produced for and with Iggy Pop.
First came Bowie's Low , on the 14th January, then on the 18th March Iggy released The Idiot , with Bowie producing, co-writing and contributing vocals, guitar, keys and sax. The album Scary Monsters In October, he scored another another No1 single, thanks to a collaboration with Queen on Under Pressure. Though Bowie released his Baal EP and contributed to Giorgio Moroder's score for the film Cat People in , we'd have to wait until for another studio album.
Let's Dance , released on the 14th April and was preceded by its title track reaching No1 in the singles charts a month earlier, his last number one as a solo artist. He wasn't done for the year, however, finally being able to release Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture recorded in in October, with 's live album Serious Moonlight being recorded the month before. And Bowie made it three UK No1 albums in a row when he released Tonight in , bringing his total to six.
The following year was one of co-production and soundtracks, contributing three tracks to the feature film Absolute Beginners before scoring Jim Henson's Labyrinth alongside Trevor Jones and co-producing, co-writing and mixing Iggy Pop's Blah-Blah-Blah.
0コメント