night-spell:

David Bowie and Iman arriving for the Q Awards, London, Nov. 07, 1995

stardustschild:

Cher and David Bowie performing “Young Americans Medley” live on The Cher Show (1975).

bewlays:

David Bowie on the Russell Harty Show, 1973.

bowietrackbytrack:

Track 96: Velvet Goldmine (Ziggy out-take [single B-side ‘75])

‘You got crazy legs, you got amazing head / You got rings on your fingers and your hair’s hot red’ – sings Bowie breakneck-style. This is Velvet Goldmine, another out-take from the Ziggy album. The first proper sessions began in November ’71 (so, before Hunky Dory was even released in December; and the Changes single following in January ’72) – and the song exhibits the mark of this transitory period. The verses are taut electric Ziggy-style rock; while the chorus is a chic piano based jaunt in the mold of Hunky Dory: ‘Velvet Goldmine, naked on your chain / I’ll be your king volcano right for you again and again’. And – yeah – the lyrics are hot. As Bowie commented at the time of it being junked from the Ziggy album: it’s ‘a lovely tune, but probably a little provocative’. Here we go: ‘I had to ravish your capsule, suck you dry / Feel the teeth in your bone, heal ya head with my own’. Wow. Wonderful!!! And the song keeps giving. Ronson’s guitar solo is a little moment of sparkling glory, and the track ends with the chorus transforming – via a hum-along – into a Russian-style polka. Bowie at his devil-may-care best! The song would eventually see the light of day as a B side to one of the many re-releases of the Space Oddity single, in 1975.

‘Velvet Goldmine’: Out-take from the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album. Released 26 Septmeber 1975 as B Side of the Space Oddity single re-release. Written by David Bowie. Available on Ziggy Stardust – 30th Anniversary Reissue (2002).

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More stuff:

Velvet Goldmine on Pushing Ahead of the Dame

geidiprimes:

Same old thing in brand new drag
Comes sweeping into view, oh-ooh
As ugly as a teenage millionaire

soundsof71:

Ziggy Stardust’s first photo shoot, January 1972, by Brian Ward

missadler1897:

© Tony McGee 1982

bowietrackbytrack:

Track 94: The Bewlay Brothers (album version)

Allusive but affecting, bizarre but beautiful, uplifting but unsettling – The Bewlay Brothers is the tour de force that concludes Hunky Dory. From the gentle strum of the almost intangible acoustic verses to the weird, uncanny and complex choruses to the coda which feels as if it – and we – falling into the abyss in slow-mo, the song is musically inventive and lyrically elusive.  A gay hymn utilizing polari (‘real cool traders’)? A drugged up nightmare (‘Shooting up pie in the sky’)? Identity shifts (‘chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature’)? An ode to schizophrenia? Bowie himself has been somewhat evasive, saying, at different times, many different things. It is ‘another vaguely anecdotal piece about my feelings about myself and my bother’ Terry Burns. That ‘it’s so personal… I inflicted myself upon other people with that track’. That it is named after a tobacconists David knew of: ‘I used “Bewlay” as a cognomen – in place of my own’; and that ‘It’s possible I may have smoked something in my Bewlay pipe’. Even that the song is ‘Star Trek in a leather jacket’. The swirl of words are probably best seen as a collage or mosaic of unconscious thoughts rising to the surface: ‘I had a whole wad of words that I had been writing all day’. The basic track was cut late at night after everyone but Ken Scott, producer, had gone home – it was a new song, its first performance delivered that night of 30 June 1971. Scott remembers Bowie telling him at the time that ‘the lyrics make absolutely no sense’. Bowie has said ‘I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within them. It’s a palimpsest’; that ‘I can’t imagine what the person who wrote that had on his mind at the time’; and that people can ‘read whatever in hell they want to read into it’. And while in keeping with the album, in many ways it is the one track that looks back toward The Man Who Sold the World; yet at the same time looks forwards, way forwards, towards Scary Monsters: the speeded up / slowed down mockney vocal. It was not performed again in any way till a BBC session in 2002…

‘The Bewlay Brothers’: Track 11 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December 1971. Written by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).

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More stuff:

The Bewlay Brothers on Pushing Ahead of the Dame

bowie-etc:

Crack, baby, crack