Discover Top Posts Tagged with #bowiesongs

Never gonna fall for modern love ❤ ♡ ♥

Scattered Thoughts on The Last Five Years

1) Having watched a lot of rock documentaries over the years, including a lot of slipshod ones on Bowie, it’s nice to see these well-crafted, tasteful, obviously heartfelt “Five Years” BBC docs. If they stick very close to the party line, you expect them to---revelation and scandal aren’t in the cards. If the staging at times can be a bit dopey---e.g., the rockers playing in what looks like a disused railway tunnel---the interviewees are generally filmed well, with a medium shot used to capture their personality: Visconti at his mixing desk, Maria Schneider surrounded by piles of scores.

2) Your degree of Bowie fandom should be determined by how excited you were to see Geoff MacCormack show up on screen.

3) The Diamond Dogs tour footage was new to me; it was astonishing---not just in that you can see how some of the staging transformed into Lazarus, and so DB again had been playing with the same elements for his whole life, but it had a vivid contemporary (’74) feel to it also---some combination of dark mime and gay avant-garde theater. I really hope there’s more and better quality footage in the vault somewhere---it’s an essential piece of Bowie’s work.

4) Speaking of Lazarus, i wish they had used some stage footage. The rehearsal looked like an off-off-Broadway workshop that still needed some tailoring (& it was the London cast, so it wasn’t like it was early-stages play footage)

5) Seeing Bowie’s bands play along with his vocals brings home how much of a loss it was that he never sang the last songs live. You understand why he never wanted to tour again, but I wish he’d lived long enough to do a residency in a club/ small theater in NYC or London. Of course few fans probably could have afforded tickets so perhaps it’s a moot point. But you could see how well these songs breathed on stage.

6) Spending so much time on “Stars (Are Out Tonight)” was frustrating at first, as I consider it one of his lesser late singles, but it worked to frame just how exhausted and disgusted DB had gotten with the fame machine, and his realization that he couldn’t play off it as nimbly as he’d done in the 20th Century. He needed to retreat and work out a plan, coming up with the mysterious figure who only communicates in videos & songs.

7) The breaths between phrases on the isolated “Lazarus” vocals. Like a man climbing the face of a cliff.

#bowiesongs

Slight hiatus as I need to do justice to what’s coming next... In the meantime, check out this epic and essential tome from Chris O’Leary. Thanks @fitzrovianfella for another awesome birthday present. #pushingaheadofthedame #chrisoleary #bowiesongs https://www.instagram.com/p/CLKPpoZsr2A/?igshid=7335lwy0h259

#pushingaheadofthedame #chrisoleary #bowiesongs

David Bowie - Strangers When We Meet - Live 1995

This popped up whilst I was re-polishing for the 99th time the opening of a story where a Wagner-hating man nearly gets hit by a bus whilst humming along to Das Rheingold on his lover’s iPod ….

A fantastic pure pop song with very dark lyrics by DB and an amazing performance from 1995.

#david bowie #bowiesongs #richard wagner #reeves gabrels #carlos alomar #gail ann dorsey #mike garson #zack alford

Reading there is like getting tangled in spiderwebs- can’t stop reading. The songs of my favorite-artist-of-all-times dissected, analyzed, put into (historical) context… Even if I don’t agree with everything that’s written- there’s tons to discover! Reminding me again and again why I can’t stop listening to HIS music.

#david bowie #chris o'leary #bowiesongs

The Stars (Are Out Tonight). The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (video). At first, it sounds like a comeback single from some lost 1987. Mike Campbell-esque lead guitar; a Traveling Wilburys acoustic shuf...

As per usual, the Glass Spider is waiting at the crossroads of my pop culture web.

#Bowiesongs #Chris O'Leary #wicdiv #Pushing Ahead of the Dame #I mean come on

Bowie’s handwritten lyrics (partial) for “Word on a Wing,” Cherokee Studios, October 1975 (dedicated to Neal Slaven, who was at the studio for a Bowie vocal overdub session)

#rebel rebel #bowiesongs

contractually required to ask: top 5 Bowie tracks?

A chronology.

Age 14: “Station To Station”, I loved everything by him and I loved this most because it was grandest and longest and most unfathomable. I never even knew what drugs were, to quote the pop idol who elbowed him out the way in my affections.

Age 20: “Absolute Beginners”

Age 27: “A New Career In A New Town”, all of Low really but the instrumentals topping and tailing side 1 in particular. Living on my own in Oxford, working at a dotcom, gradually regretting it.

Age 36: “Under Pressure”, it was the most fun of his to write about on Popular (and a great example of him matching his game to collaborators)

Age 41: I think if you put me under the cosh, and you just have, I’d say my favourite David Bowie song is “Ashes To Ashes”.

(To be honest the thing by him I’ve listened to most in the last year is his sepulchral one line song-changing you-have-called-for-Tash-and-Tash-has-answered cameo in the Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor”. Oh and the chorus to “Starman”, cos bravestofthepack has it as her ringtone.)

#bowiesongs