david bowie - leon

Today I'm in Oxford Town, investigating pretentious Art Crime with Nathan Adler, Leon Blank and old Mr Touchshriek, hot on the trail of Ramona A Stone. Yes indeed, this is 71 minutes of (apparently) 3 hours or more of the group improvisations recorded in the autumn of 1994 by David Bowie, Brian Eno and the band which eventually led to 1.Outside.

About 10 years ago this CD of music was rumoured to be in the hands of a select group of uber-fans, but it was never leaked out to the great unwashed. All we had was about 20 minutes of snippets of this material, uploaded onto the web in pretty low quality mp3. For years this is all that has circulated. But late last year a fan on one of the Bowie message boards was sent a disc anonymously marked "Leon". He thought it would be the same old recycled snippets and did nothing with it until someone else suggested that he should at least give it a listen! He eventually did and was astounded to hear that it contained the full 71 minute Disc One of this material, previously only available, apparently, to the fabled 'inner circle' of fans. Very kindly he uploaded it for everyone to hear. 

Bits of this are familiar - some of the segues on 1.Outside were edited out of this improvised, supremely pretentious nonsense. For example the "Baby Grace" passage is here, though much longer and instead of "Hallo Spaceboy" crashing in at the end when Grace says 'something is going to be horrid' it continues with lots of guitar noodlings from Reeves Gabrels.  "I Am With Name" appears almost unchanged on the finished album, but apart from this and the reworked segues it's all unreleased stuff - mostly Bowie doing silly voices, strange monologues, lots of Enoid squelchy drums, Mike Garson playing fractured piano, all that sort of thing. 

But even if you're familiar with the long available snippets, the full length disc is something else. Some of the songs are just superb - "We'll Creep Together" builds from a mechanised drum pattern and eventually dissolves into some lovely keyboards some 10 minutes later. The stirring keyboards remind me of the lengthy ending to "Absolute Beginners" actually.  "I'd Rather Be Chrome" is more menacing, with a very Eno-esque style funky rhythm. The spoken passages are bonkers - Ramona is a syllanibal, don't you know, she 'eats her own words…' Told you it was pretentious! There are many different voices used by Bowie, many more than appear on the final album.

It sort of all washes over you, swirling around. It would have been marvellous if Bowie had actually had the nerve to release this 20 years ago, but with hindsight you can see why he watered down 1.Outside with a lot more 'proper' songs.

The last time I got so excited by a new piece of music was the day "Where Are We Now?" suddenly appeared - good Bowie music must have that effect on me!