the next day - the return of david bowie

I had never expected to hear anything new from David Bowie; I would have put good money him never releasing any new material ever again, and I'd resigned myself a few years back to the fact that he'd clearly retired. So this was a huge shock. The first listen to "Where Are We Now?" play was approached with quite some trepidation and to be honest I was slightly disappointed on first listen. It doesn't immediately grab your attention and I think my expectations were way too high.

But after just the second play something clicked in my brain and I realised that it was genuinely one of the most marvellous recordings I'd heard for quite some time. There's a quiet restrained dignity about it, a lack of pretension and flashiness that's both disarming and charming. And there are a couple of points which actually choked me up a bit. The understated emotion shines through the more you hear the song. And although you may read in the ill-informed press that Bowie's voice is not what is was, well I would strongly disagree with that. His vocal is actually very reminiscent of "Thursdays Child", the lovely, and similarly vulnerable, single from 1999. Both songs have Bowie singing in a slightly weary, melancholy manner. But this is clearly deliberate - it's not a showy vocal, it's intentionally low key, he's acting the song, like he's done so many times before, and if you listen to the end of the song there's absolutely no doubt that he hasn't actually lost any of the power in his voice - so pooey to the stupid hacks and the doubters!

Unsurprisingly it most closely resembles the sound on Heathen and Reality, Bowie's previous two albums, both produced by Tony Visconti and featuring many of the same musicians. The textures, the way Bowie's voice is recorded, the guitar sounds - they all expand upon techniques used by Visconti on tracks like Reality's "The Loneliest Guy" (another song with a faltering and hesitant vocal, deliberately sung in this vulnerable manner by a man in full control), or Heathen's "I Would Be Your Slave".
 

To strengthen my conviction that his voice was undiminished by time I looked at the testimony of producer Tony Visconti, who spent two years on the new album. He says that Bowie still has one of the strongest voices he's ever worked with in a studio, and that Bowie's health is extremely good. That's good to know, as the rumours - based on absolutely no proof whatsoever - over the past few years have saddled David with everything from a stroke to cancer. Visconti expressed some surprise that this song was chosen as the lead single for the album, as it is rather atypical of the rest of the album. But, Visconti noted with a smile, as always David does just what he wants and it always works out fine.

And the video was oddly compelling, and decidedly weird. And as such, it's very Bowie. Towards the end there are a couple of shots of DB standing in a messy art studio looking rather serious, but somehow, at 66 he still manages to look so damn cool that the first time I saw this I broke into such a big grin.

By tea time on that first day the song was number one in the iTunes charts! - so pooey also to the Biebers and the Rihannas - here's a proper song, played by real people and sung by a man who needs no autotune. Aside from the song itself, I think what really wowed commentators is that it came completely out of nowhere. The secrecy surrounding the new project was brilliant. Absolutely no-one knew anything until the video was distributed. In an age where Lady Gaga is giving you minute-by-minute updates via Twitter on what hat she's going to wear ('do I choose the one shaped like a toilet or the one made of beef??'), DB has recorded an entire album and NO ONE KNEW. Who else could pull this off?

 

Then the album, The Next Day came out in March. 

I know I’m biased, and I’d probably have liked almost anything Bowie came up with after ten years of silence, but really, objectively, this is such a fresh sounding, exciting, exhilarating record that it genuinely doesn’t sound like an album recorded by a 66 year old. I hope all the rumours of ill health that have dogged Bowie over the past few years are just that, or at the very least any ill health is now behind him, because on the evidence of The Next Day there’s so much more creativity and life in him yet. 14 tracks, all of equally high standard, every one a little gem, and every one intensely different from the others. It’s like 14 different facets of Bowie. Plus there's 4 more bonus tracks to be had, and they are all pretty damn good too.

On first listen I was totally entranced, and my smile grew wider and wider as the album progressed. There’s so much going on - on every song there are dozens of little nods to the past, great fun for a seasoned Bowie fan like me, yet there is absolutely no wallowing in past glories. And it grows with every listen. Every new play reveals more and more. This is an urgent album, demanding your complete attention, and it positively bristles with invention. Most of the songs are around the three / four minute mark, they are all tight, concise, no filler, no flab. Some tracks have the most fantastic backing vocals, others have stonkingly heavy guitar work, some have bizarre rhythms and frantic drumming, and all have some of the best vocals that DB has ever committed to tape.

"Where Are We Now?" had attracted a lot of press comments about how tremulous Bowie’s voice sounded. As I suspected this was intentional, Bowie was acting the song – the rest of the album finds him really belting out some tracks – for example, the angry title song opens the album with a massive burst of energy and a cracking vocal - ‘here I am, not quite dying’ snarls DB in what is surely a dig at all those who’d written him off.

I could waffle on all day about how much I love this record but here are some of the highlights -

the deceptively catchy "Valentine’s Day" has one of the sweetest melodies on the album, yet the lyrics deal with a kid shooting his classmates at school… the closing "Heat" which is moody and mysterious and is as close to Scott Walker as DB has ever come. Musically this song could have fitted onto Scott’s Climate Of Hunter.

Elsewhere there are a couple of frantically loopy songs – "If You Can See Me" seems to have every musician playing at a different speed with Bowie spitting out the vocal, yet unaccountably it all hangs together and it really sticks in your brain. And "How Does The Grass Grow?" finds Bowie la-la-ing the melody from the Shadows’ "Apache", which ought to be very silly, but comes over as weirdly sinister. Then there are the more straightforward songs like "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" or "You Will Set The World On Fire" which ROCK and slower pieces like the sinister "Dirty Boys" which is over far too quickly, or the Low-esque "Love Is Lost" which is full of Eno-style squelchy drums. "I’d Rather Be High" has a chorus that sounds like the most 1960s chorus ever, yet the verses have angular, very Tom Verlaine-esque guitars.

The band is magnificent. Bowie has used a small group of tried and tested musicians, people he knew he could rely on entirely. Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard combine to become every guitarist Bowie has ever worked with, plus a whole load that he hasn’t – here there’s a Frippian sound, over there a bit of Reeves Gabrels, or a dash of Belew, or a Mick Ronson lick. But it’s all new, so very fresh and it’s genuinely thrilling stuff.

The drumming is superb – Zachary Alford takes the lion's share, but Bowie stalwart Sterling Campbell also anchors a number of songs – Sterling has worked with Bowie for nearly 20 years, and the links go further back as his drum teacher was none other than Dennis Davis, Bowie’s drummer from Young Americans to Scary Monsters.

On bass we have the ever-wonderful Gail Ann Dorsey on most songs, with Tony Levin on a couple and producer Tony Visconti on another. Bowie himself plays a bit of guitar, and most of the keyboards, and apart from the odd saxophone overdub or strings session that was pretty much it. A small group playing much of the material live in the studio.

I bought the CD, from a real shop. I walked back to work feeling absurdly pleased with myself that I’ve bought every Bowie album since Let’s Dance (30 years ago almost to the day) on the day of release. I’ve no idea why that’s important but it somehow makes me feel good… even having the streamed version prior to the actual release date didn't reduced the excitement of picking up The New David Bowie Album off the shelf. And those are words I never thought I’d be typing in 2013.

Of course I bought the deluxe edition with the bonus tracks. These are very much bonus pieces – they probably wouldn’t fit on the album anywhere else, but I’m slightly disappointed that they’ve been added onto the end (rather than occupying a bonus disc) as they kind of spoil the brilliant ending that "Heat" provides. The darkness and mystery of "Heat" will be somewhat spoiled by the jaunty swing of "So She" which now follows.

But these are minor (and fixable) quibbles. The music itself is astonishing, the singing is even more astonishing considering the 10 year lay off, and the lyrics are by turns dark and troubling, witty and playful, and densely opaque – as all the best Bowie lyrics always are.

The sleeve design, with its rework of the "Heroes" sleeve, has grown on me, but the fold out lyric sheet is incredibly hard to read - doesn’t Bowie realise that some of us are getting on a bit and our eyesight isn’t what it used to be!

Probably the best thing about this album is that it sounds so very David Bowie, all the little touches of past Bowie songs are whooshed up into a sound which is partly new, partly familiar, but completely Bowie. It couldn’t be anyone else. As I said, every track is tremendous, every track is unique and every track is a brilliant experience. This may not be Bowie’s best album – there are just too many other candidates for that title – but it’s certainly up there with the best. I really, genuinely, mean that.

Welcome back, David, it's so good to have you back in my life again!

  

talking heads live - recent discoveries

Remain In Light, Talking Heads' 1980 album, remains one of my all time favourite albums. The complexity and density of the polyrhythmic songs is something quite unearthly, something so stunning that it's almost impossible to work out how it was done. The sheer number of overdubs and overlapping vocal lines is astounding.

Yet during the late summer and into the winter of 1980 Talking Heads not only played most of this album live, but they somehow actually improved on many of the songs, live on stage.

I've mentioned the debut show of the expanded Heads before, and if you want to hear what they could do then I recommend the brilliant The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads - one of the finest live albums ever made. But recently a soundboard from the Amsterdam show in December 1980 has circulated. It's not as slick as TNOTBITH, but in many ways it’s more fun as this was what the expanded Heads sounded like in the flesh, warts and all, having an absolute ball on stage. Adrian Belew has a real blast on "Warning Sign" and goes suitably nuts on "The Great Curve", but the whole band is really on form. "I Zimbra" is perhaps the best version I’ve ever heard and "Houses In Motion" is superb too. The only less than successful track is, oddly, "Once In A Lifetime" which appears to be played too slowly and as such it loses all it’s energy. Dolette Macdonald sounds like she’s trying to speed things up with her excellent backing vocals but to no avail. You clearly can’t get Chris Frantz to change his rock solid playing mid song! Very odd, as I’ve never heard a duff version of this song before.

Another recently discovered Dutch soundboard, from Leiden on 01 July 1982 has been tickling my ear hairs too. This was the opening show of the Heads summer 1982 tour and first night nerves are all over the place. The gig itself is full of energy and many of the songs are played with an aggression and sense of excitement that you just don’t get the following year on the far more polished Stop Making Sense. In many ways these 1982 shows are my favourite Heads gigs – Jerry gets to perform “Slink”, Tom Tom Club were the opening act (basically the whole expanded Heads band minus David) and Byrne gets to perform four new songs from The Catherine Wheel (the three “Big” Songs and “What A Day That Was”), all of which are killer live tracks. And they find time to debut the newly written but not yet recorded “Swamp”. So, out of the 14 or so songs played every night, almost half of them were unfamiliar to the audiences.

A wonderful tour and there’s a few partial radio broadcasts of some of the gigs, but this is the first complete soundboard show I’ve come across. As I said first night nerves plague the band, especially Byrne who messes up loads of words; though he rarely stuck the ‘official’ words in concert usually he sounds far more confident that he does here, repeating lines and getting verses the wrong way round which really confuses poor Dolette Macdonald who tries to keep up with him but simply can’t! Jerry’s vocal on “Slink” is mixed rather low too, though this might not be a bad thing as he’s rather off key, but the biggest problem is poor Raymond Jones. He had the unenviable job of replacing Bernie Worrell for this tour but on this opening night his synths really aren’t working properly. His burbly interjections don’t always come in on cue, and are frequently too loud or too quiet or simply wrong. Later gigs that I have are much much better, so it seems his problems were sorted out, but it’s a shame that we have, say, a perfectly good version of “My Big Hands” that is thrown off kilter by his sometimes wayward keyboards. Otherwise it’s a great show, with some surprisingly hard and aggressive playing on tracks like “Life During Wartime” and “Cities” – Alex Weir is perhaps no match for Belew when it comes to bizarre animalistic guitar noise, but he sure has a wonderfully fast, furious and funky style which works brilliantly on tracks like “Big Business”.

And speaking of The Catherine Wheel. I played some of this again the other day, and I still love every single note. I had the LP (which just had the songs) for quite some time before I was able to get hold of the cassette containing the full length work. As a consequence I perhaps love the songs slightly more than the rest of it, but the whole thing is just magnificent. And I was delighted to learn that I perfectly remembered every single word of "His Wife Refused" as I sang along in the car. Mis-spent youth? Well, at least I wasn’t smashing up phone boxes or anything. Learning the words to obscure and bizarre David Byrne songs seems like time well spent to me…

talk talk live

Talk Talk live comes in three major chunks - 1982, 1984 and 1986, and, apart from a few one offs this is the extent of it.

I recently played a bunch of 1984 shows as the band were plugging It's My Life.

First up was a show from the Hammersmith Odeon right at the start of the gigging for that year...

At this early April show the band seem rather tentative; it was one of their first performances since late 1982, and the first with an expanded six piece band (the core of Hollis, Webb and Harris are augmented by Ian Curnow on keyboards and synths, Phil Ramocon on piano an Robbie Macintosh on guitar (and at some shows percussionist Morris Pert appears to have played)). Lots of It’s My Life tunes in the show of course, but most of these would really flower later in the year as TT became far more self assured.

After a month or so of European gigs in the spring, TT played in the US for much of the summer, usually supporting other bands such as the Psychedelic Furs, Berlin, Sparks, or here, at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater, the Alarm. Macintosh had prior commitments with the Pretenders, so John Hook comes in on guitar with Phil Reis installed as full time percussionist.

This radio broadcast is magnificent, and show itself opens brilliantly with a long build up into "Such A Shame". Arguably their best opening number, so it's, ahem, such a shame that this song would more usually be played as an encore. 

Then in September the band returned to Europe and the UK for more shows. A number of these gigs were televised on the rapidly expanding European tv channels. A May show from Florence had appeared on MTV Europe (though no concessions were made to the tv audience and the performance seems very dark and gloomy on tv – these days the show would be lit differently to benefit the tv cameras), the Dutch show Veronica’s Rock Night, which was syndicated across mainland Europe, broadcast a show in September (much better filmed as the gig was set up for broadcast) and the November show in Dortmund was reshown numerous times on Germany’s ZDF network. In addition I have at least another 5 shows that were aired on European radio stations, one of the best being the Paris gig from late September (although I could do without the annoying DJ interruptions). So 1984 was a great year for TT shows, and yields a large number of very good quality recordings (plus a healthy number of pretty decent audience recordings too).

And every recording I have is uniformly excellent. This was a very strong live band, and a very consistent one too.