'The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars' - David Bowie (1972)

"You’re not alone,

Gimme your hands.

You’re wonderful,

Gimme your hands."

Happy 40th, Ziggy! My memories on the release of this seminal album? Well, I was just a year old, so everything’s a bit hazy. And I wasn’t even in my home country. I was about as far away as you could posibly be, in Australia.

In those days, you were actively encouraged to emigrate to Oz on a ten pound ticket. So my Dad found a job in Sydney and hopped on a plane a few months after I was born to set up our new home. My mum and I followed by ship. A three-month journey that called at every port on the way. The one photo of me on our travels is from a ‘Beautiful Baby’ competition they ran onboard (I'll scan it in if I find it again). I won, apparently. (I suspect there were very few babies on this long haul expedition.) Pushy mums, eh?

By the time we arrived, my Dad was already disillusioned with his new job and home. So I blew out the candles on my first birthday cake (all my presents from home were stolen in the overseas post) and plans were hatched to return to Blighty. My Dad then flew off again. And I think you can guess how my Mum and I journeyed back.   

Of course, I have no true recollection of any of these events. Even though it feels like I have some memories from the world’s shortest antipodean migration, I know those are just afterimages from our family ciné films. I sometimes wonder about the person I’d be now if we’d stayed. As a sun-dodging aquaphobic, I can only assume I’d be very different indeed. Would the Goth in me have blossomed in all that heat? We’ll never know.

Grab your best jumpsuit and you can recreate this pose
 in London's Heddon St (just off Regent St).

Spotify linky:

David Bowie – Rock 'N' Roll Suicide - 2012 - Remaster 

‘(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)’ – Beastie Boys (1986)

"Your Mom busted in and said,
‘What’s that noise?’
Aw, Mom, you’re just jealous,
It’s the Beas-tie Boys!"

It’s hard to imagine now a time when partying was outlawed. But that was the ‘80s, kids. George Michael was the first to publicly declare that he was never going to dance again (something about guilty feet having no rhythm). This was swiftly followed by local ministers around the world banning any public displays of moonwalking or b-boying on cardboard boxes taken from round the back of Spar. It was a tough time, when the only entertainment that remained was playing chicken with tractors in your friend’s cornfield. All this of course was vividly portrayed in the harrowing documentary ‘Footloose’. So perfectly does it encapsulate these dark days that it can be hard to watch, even now.

But in the rebel leader Kevin Bacon we saw hope. And it was his valiant struggles in the small Rocky Mountain town of Bomont that inspired the Beasties. Now we could finally rise up as one and fight for our right to paaaaaaarty. And steal VW badges. This last bit was what really inspired my school friend Phil. Though he didn’t really think things through that carefuly when he decided to rip a badge from a teacher’s car. I'm not sure it was even a VW one. Ten minutes later the whole school was sitting in an emergency assembly and the Headmaster played his ultimate threat card: no-one would be leaving the hall until the culprit came forward. This could get messy. Except Phil was still wearing the badge round his neck and was swiftly dobbed in by some lower sixth lad hoping to earn a Prefect badge.

  

But there’s a happy ending. Mick Jagger and David Bowie decided to reclaim the streets for dancers everywhere (Chicago, New Orleans, New York City – and even some places not in America). And soon everyone was cutting loose and kicking off their Sunday shoes – whatever that actually means. Even George Michael had turned his life around and his feet had been found not guilty. His troubles were finally behind him and he knew the best of times lay ahead. What could possibly go wrong?

Please note: Some of the above may not be historically acurate. For instance, I’m not sure if Careless Whisper came out before Footloose, and I can’t be bothered to check. And I may have made some other stuff up too. But you get the idea.

Spotify linky :

The Beastie Boys – Fight For Your Right

Now playing: ‘Station To Station’ – David Bowie (1976)

“It's too late

to be grateful."

Ever buy an album by an artist you adore and it just doesn’t click? So you put it away and go back to listening to their other stuff. And then you take it out again one day and it sounds like the most marvellous discovery. That’s what happened to me this week with ‘Station To Station’.

I bought it back in 1991 when it was reissued on vinyl with the rest of Bowie’s back catalogue. At the time, my heart belonged to ‘Hunky Dory’ and ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ so this album suffered from little time on my record player and got quickly shelved. Until last Monday when it was reissued in a glorious CD box set. Here was vintage Thin White Duke Bowie with songs I’d simply neglected. I’m a fool. I’ve played it continuously all week to make amends. And the reissue comes with perhaps the best Bowie live recording I’ve heard – captured at the Nassau Coliseum in March 1976.

I wonder what other treats are buried in my collection?

Spotify linky:

David Bowie – Station To Station

'Heroes' - David Bowie (1977)

“I …

I wish I could swim.
Like the dolphins.

Like dolphins can swim.”

Bowie popped up in my life a number of times before he really caught my attention. Not literally, obviously. It wasn’t like I’d be staring out the window in Geography class and he’d be waving furiously at me from the playing fields. Though that would have been cool.

No, the reality was more the odd song on the radio here, the odd Top Of The Pops performance there. But none of them made me want to dip into his music any further. I think this was because my Bowie was 80s Bowie. I’d just missed the real good stuff.

The first time I clearly remember hearing one of his songs was at a disco (yes, kids, a disco) on another dreaded school trip. My first and last disco. The song was ‘Let’s Dance’ which was number one at the time. It stood out because it wasn’t Duran Duran, which was about the only thing the DJ (or Mr Abbott the PE teacher, as he was otherwise known) had been playing all evening.

My second encounter of the Bowie kind was in ‘Labyrinth’. At some point, this film appears to have achieved cult status and everyone in their late 20s seems to love the Goblin King. But at the time I just remember thinking, “Who’s this guy getting in the way of all the ace muppets?”

And then, in 1990, EMI began reissuing all Bowie’s albums as he went on tour to play all his big songs (except ‘The Laughing Gnome’) one final time. (And then one final time again a few years later. And then again a few years after that, etc.) At this time, Chris Roberts (my favourite music journalist then and now) wrote a review of the ‘Sound And Vision’ greatest hits collection in Melody Maker that I can still picture to this day. I’ll thank him now for it. The way he wrote about ‘Heroes’ made me want to immediately hear early Bowie. And he even brought new depths to later songs I’d already heard, such as ‘Blue Jean’. I went out that lunchtime at college and began building my Bowie collection. Yep, even the 'Labyrinth' soundtrack is in there. But that’s another post.

Spotify linky (the full length album version):

David Bowie – Heroes