bowietrackbytrack:
Track 103: Five Years (Old Grey Whistle Test version)
Five Years on the Old Grey Whistle Test is one of the most iconic moments in the Bowie corpus. Kicking off with that solo drum beat, the camera captures Woody Woodmansey from various angles before the lights come up, and there is Bowie. Hair shorn to a rough cut, in a black and grey jumpsuit with his acoustic guitar. A slow strum and the line ‘Pushing through the market square…’, behind him revealed Mick Ronson at a grand piano and Trevor Bolder on bass. Stunning. The show was named – so the legend goes – after an apocryphal Tin Pan Alley story: a song would be a hit if after hearing it only once the aged doorman in a grey suit was heard whistling it. OGWT was a show known for serious music, filmed live without an audience and with complex camerawork: zooms, fades, tracking shots. This TV performance by Bowie is the first of the Ziggy era, and the earliest footage existing of Bowie in a studio except for Space Oddity at 4-3-2-1 Musik Fur Junge Leute (1969) and the Ivor Novello Awards (1970) (see trackbytrack 47). Five Years was also accompanied by two songs from Hunky Dory: Queen Bitch and Oh! You Pretty Things (the latter taped twice and neither originally broadcast) (see more stuff below). The show went out on 8 February 1972, a couple of days before the Ziggy Stardust tour kicked off…
‘Five Years‘: 1 of 2 tracks broadcast (and 3 tracks recorded) for the
Old Grey Whistle Test. Recorded and broadcast 08-02-72. Written by David Bowie. Available on The Best of Bowie DVD.
More stuff:
Queen Bitch
Old Grey Whistle Test
on Vimeo
Oh! You Pretty Things (take 1)
Old Grey Whistle Test on Vimeo
Oh! You Pretty Things (take 2)
Old Grey Whistle Test on Dailymotion
bowie-etc:
ashes to ashes // funk to funky…
"He was very good at flirting, I remember. Iām terrible at flirting, so I learned a few tricks there. How to wink the eye, tilt the head a bit. Apart from that, on a more serious note, he basically said, āDonāt rest on your laurels, donāt get too comfortable, because your listener is very discerningā¦ and make sure to stay one step ahead of yourself."
āStefan Olsdal aboout David Bowie.
(via
placebrain)
0 plays
vividrain:
David Bowie - When The Wind Blows
Under Pressure
Queen
0 plays
reckless-tunes:
“'Cause love’s such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And loves dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves”
bowie-etc:
▻ I’m an absolute beginner
But I’m absolutely sane
◅
bowietrackbytrack:
Track 100: Shadow Man (unfinished Ziggy out-take)
Shadow Man is a fragile folk ballad concerned with a haunting – the haunting of the I by the self, the person you are now by its shadow. Bowie’s voice is tortured, and always on the edge of breaking: ‘He’ll show you tomorrow / He’ll show you the sorrows / Of what you did today’. There is thus an essential Bowie twist here: it is not the past which haunts you – but rather the future. The consequences of your actions now will necessarily impact the times to come and it is this indistinct doppelgänger of possible outcomes from tomorrow that haunts you. It is – although apparently an unfinished cut – really an acoustic track, but one accompanied by the band with a certain country-style. In this way it feels more akin to the Space Oddity period (which – as some claim – is when it was originally composed). Accordingly, it is hard to see how it would have fitted – musically at least – with the Ziggy album form which it was dropped. Though before the concept of Ziggy was guiding the selection of tracks and the later writing, the new record was looking very different if the out-takes we know of are considered: remakes from the past, covers of Brel and Berry, not to mention the other out-takes we have encountered of new compositions and those that are either lost or still in the archive (One Paper Left; It’s Gonna Rain; and even a new version of Looking For A Friend – see trackbytrack 81 and more stuff below). This version of Shadow Man would never be officially released; however, the song was re-recorded by Bowie around 2000 for the ultimately abandoned Toy project.
‘Shadow Man’: Out-take from the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album. Unreleased. Written
by David Bowie. Available on bootlegs.
More stuff:
Shadow Man on Pushing Ahead of the Dame - which also mentions One Paper Left and It’s Gonna Rain
- lost / archive tracks for the Ziggy album
