David Bowie: David Bowie - 1967
"No, I haven't much to say in its favour. Musically, it's quite bizarre. I don't know where I was at" - David Bowie
1966-67 is where it all began for David Bowie, after dabbling in contemporary r 'n' b, he proceeded to give us a seemingly endless supply of frankly bizarre, often child-like songs that did their best to hide his latent genius. A couple of perplexing years were followed by two excellent albums, however, which are now recognised as the truly beguiling pieces of work they were. Here we go, then - the great David Bowie, from the beginning, starting with this most odd collection of songs.
Firstly, I have to say that the sound is absolutely FANTASTIC. excellent remastering throughout. Clear, sharp and certainly bassy enough to keep a bass addict like me happy.
Incidentally, for many, myself included, their first experience of most of these songs was on the Decca compilation entitled The World Of David Bowie. It was re-released in 1973 with a picture of Bowie in Ziggy garb on the front, which was seriously misleading for the Ziggy-era fans who bought it, got home, eagerly played it and got the shock of their lives!
Anyway, back to the David Bowie version. In the interests of fairness, I must attempt to re-assess the album.
While it is easy to routinely dismiss this admittedly bizarre collection of songs as “vaudeville”, “music hall” and “Anthony Newley-inspired”, I guess they are worth a little more attention than that. They are very much the product of their era - the wry lyrics about various characters on the margins of accepted society are very Kinks-esque and also carry echoes of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd. Some of the songs are a bit See Emily Play and Arnold Layne in their feel, particularly There Is A Happy Land, Uncle Arthur and the slightly psychedelic romp of Join The Gang. There is also a very 1967 vibe to Maid Of Bond Street, which is one of the album's better numbers.
Then, of course, there is the massive shadow of The Beatles. How many people know that this album was released on the same day as Sgt. Pepper? Indeed, Nicholas Pegg in his biography of Bowie, The Complete David Bowie, opines, probably correctly, that those who dismiss this album’s songs as twee or vaudeville are the same that hail When I’m Sixty-Four and Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! as works of inspired genius. Similarly, those that condemned the oompah brass and references to bandstand brass bands of Rubber Band lapped up the same concept The Beatles used a few months later.
The album also contains quite a few military references dotted around - bombardier, medals, bombs, serving in the army, coming out of the army, the Nazi in We Are Hungry Men and the like - and this is not surprising, as the Second World War was only just over twenty years previous. As a child in the sixties, all our games were war ones - the war was something often talked about, by everyone.
So, oddball character-driven songs and music hall whimsical fun was very much the order of the day, so maybe Bowie doesn’t deserve quite the level of opprobrium that has been thrown his way over this album. That said, I still can’t bring myself to really like the songs, and neither, it seems could Bowie himself, calling it “cringey” and “musically bizarre”.
"Aarrghh, that Anthony Newley stuff, how cringey. No, I haven’t much to say about that in its favour. Lyrically I guess it was striving to be something, the short story teller. Musically it’s quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at. It seemed to have its roots all over the place, in rock and vaudeville and music hall and I don’t know what. I didn’t know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley."
He admitted he didn’t really know what he was trying to achieve. I can see some pointers to the near future in the acoustic, folky feel of many of the songs and, lyrically, We Are Hungry Men has plenty of signposts to the future in its many dystopian, disturbing references. Indeed, under those twee melodies lie some dark lyrics on disturbed nostalgia ones like There Is A Happy Land and Silly Boy Blue, the post-war social comment of the surprisingly Brechtian Little Bombardier, the bleak Sell Me A Coat and the seemingly wistful, guitar-picking folk of Come And Buy My Toys.
One thing that Bowie thankfully jettisoned was his witty approach, exemplified in the wise-cracking of the non-album single The Laughing Gnome and the quip at the end of Love You Till Tuesday. Throwaway wit did not really suit Bowie and he clearly soon recognised this, going the other way, towards seriousness and, dare I say, at times an arch pretension.
Nicholas Pegg says that the album has stood up to its detractors with a dignified sweetness and, while I can sort of accept that, I still don’t have much time for it. Although I have been trying hard to alter my point of view periodically, since I bought it as a fourteen year-old in 1973, there are, for me at least, many, many more odd and occasionally embarrassing moments than there are portentous, promising ones. I am sure that Bowie himself, if his subsequent quotes are to be respected, would concur with that view.
"It’s kinda fun now, actually – I see sites on the Internet where they study those areas very intimately. You can see them picking through the peppercorns of my manure pile. Looking for something that might indicate I had a future. They’re few and far between, but they have come up with some nuggets....
......So yes, the whole of my learning period is all out there, all released. It took me an awful long time to work out what it was that I did. I guess what made it so difficult was that I was never in love with one kind of music and one kind of music only. At that point, particularly, it wasn’t ‘Right’ to have an interest in all areas. It was make-your-mind-up time… I felt: well, I don’t wanna be like this. I wanna keep my options open; there’s lots of things I like. So it was: ‘How can I do this so I can try everything? How can I be really greedy?".
Some of the subsequent songs, from 68-69, are better, however - particularly the appealing and interesting London Bye Ta Ta (apparently titled after hearing a West Indian bid someone goodbye while in London one day), which has two versions - a sweeping, atmospheric strings-backed one dating from 1968 and a rockier one from 1970 that utilised Marc Bolan on guitar and Rick Wakeman on piano. As a rock fan I prefer the latter, but the former is beguilingly lovely in its jauntily upbeat way. The song was penned in as a single, before being replaced, possibly unfairly, by The Prettiest Star. The song was not that far removed in atmosphere from Conversation Piece, which heralded the Space Oddity era. It was in a song like this that a maturing David Bowie was emerging.
The (comparatively) far more punchy and rocky Let Me Sleep Beside You, the psychedelic romance of In The Heat Of Morning, The London Boys (thematically plagiarised several years later by old mate Marc Bolan) and the trippy Karma Man are also acceptable songs and give a slight hint as to the glories that lay ahead, but not too much.
The "ironic" hit The Laughing Gnome is included among the non-album songs, of course, and I have to admit to a weakness for the singles's "B" Side, the mildly psychedelic slow, insistent groove of The Gospel According To Tony Day. I remember as a teenage Bowie fan in 1973 buying The Laughing Gnome, though, and trying to accept that it was "ironic" in a sort of Pythonesque way when deep down I just thought "what the hell".
Overall, though, listening to this material, it is almost incomprehensible to wonder upon just how David Bowie became, well, David Bowie. Looking for little hints of potential future greatness here and there is all very well but it is a bit of a futile exercise as Bowie has stated himself - "picking through the peppercorns of my manure pile..". Probably the most reasonable approach to have towards the album is that it is a work-in-progress from an artist-in-progress.
I make no apologies for this early batch of Bowie material not being my thing, read on and the reviews became for more of a labour of love, as my love for him properly starts with the next album.
More interesting and far more credible are a few tracks that have been unearthed from the pre-1967 days, when Bowie was in the group David Jones And The Lower Third and also Davie Jones And The King Bees - the bluesy rock of Liza Jane and Louie Louie Go Back Home, the Who-influenced You've Got A Habit Of Leaving and the solid mid-sixties pop/rock of Can't Help Thinking About Me. All these tracks are, as far as I am concerned, superior to the 1967 material.
