Friday On My Mind #8

Being a semi-regular Friday feature wherein we take a look at three songs from the canon of Mr. David Robert Jones of Brixton, London SW, latterly of Bromley, Kent and currently of New York, New York.

Art Decade - Low
This is inventive and engaging; not necessarily everyone's cup of tea but it's short, to the point and full of economical little musical phrases that kind of creep up on you. The Low album, for those of you who just came in, is divided into two very thematically distinct sides - the first mainly vocal, the second mainly instrumental. Side one begins and ends with instrumental tracks too, but these are full band tracks. The four pieces on side two, of which this is the second, consist of two long, rambling tracks that make use of wordless, multitracked vocals, and two short purely instrumental pieces in the middle. The sounds are pretty much all made by Bowie and his chosen aide-de-camp, Brian Eno, who'd been Roxy Music's musical secret weapon before striking out all on his ownio.

Art Decade, as far as I can tell, is mostly Bowie's own work, layering bits of synth, sax, random effects and (probably) mellotron over mechanical beats from a rhythm box (or maybe even a couple of rhythm boxes). There's a romantic-sounding, complex melody that resolves itself a couple of times, but I defy anyone to try and whistle it...

I didn't hear Kraftwerk's Ralf und Florian album until a few years later, but this sounds like it could have come from there - it has a similar sense of space, and even some of the loose, improvisatory feel. Don't forget, before Kraftwerk hit it big as electro-humanoids their music was a lot more space-rock, Kosmischemusik influenced, and to this day I still maintain that their music swings mightily. Maybe this is what "Krautrock" would have sounded like if it had been invented by Englishmen...

Anyway, this isn't just pretentious wafty ambient music, it's a beguiling listen for them what has ears, and surprisingly rich and full of ideas after you listen a few more times.

Bring Me The Disco King - Reality
Heathen had managed to reassure all of us Bowie fans that the man was still doing his job in fine fashion; Reality, which is his last original album to date, only suffers in comparison because by then we know the man was still plugging away. For the most part, this album has a more pared-back sound, but the writing is, thankfully, strong and our hero is in as good shape as he's ever been. Bring Me The Disco King is rueful and contemplative, based around a Mike Garson piano comp that could have come from Steely Dan circa Pretzel Logic. Garson's accompaniment really takes off as the song develops, and weaves around a bravura vocal performance from Ol' Traffic-Light Eyes himself, his voice sounding notably more mature than, say, the dashing young blade of the Ziggy era.

Not too long ago I saw the DVD of Bowie at the Point in Dublin from 2003, and in the middle of a set pretty well balanced between old and new, this absolutely brought the house down. Our singer muses here, not only on fame and all that comes with it, but on life and memories and regrets, all the while looking onwards to... what? There's a very palpable sense of mortality in this song, and Bowie puts heart and soul into it; Bring Me The Disco King is easily up there with his best stuff. Fair dues.

Free Your Heart - Hunky Dory
Probably not the first song to escape the lips of Bowie fans asked to name their favourites... I mean, this is a cover of a Tiny Tim song, yes? So I thought, but a bit of digging I discovered that Free Your Heart was co-written by Paul Williams and Biff Rose... I'd almost forgotten about Rose, who used to do light, humourous songs in the 60s on various comedy shows. So this tune has Williams' melodic invention as well as Rose's gentle optimism, and it's quite nice if not particularly classic. Bowie takes just the right approach, gently taking the mickey and singing with tongue firmly in cheek, though there's also an easy, unhurried sense to the singing that's kind of appealing. Hunky Dory is an album of many moods, and I don't know who else would segue this into something like Andy Warhol with odd synth effects and studio chatter. I still can't stop thinking of Tiny Tim though, and wondering why there are no ukuleles on this version...

Friday On My Mind #7: "...Told her that he'd found a chum..."

Okay, now that we're well and truly into 2008, and it being Bowie Friday, let's remember that next Tuesday is an important date for us Thin White Duke fans, being the 61st birthday of the man himself. So, for the sake of celebration, and because the guy needs a bit of a break, it's time to devote this birthday blog post to three songs by other people for a change. Well, sort of...
The Man Who Sold The World - Lulu
Yes, somebody did actually cover this before Nirvana. Stateside Bowie fans have probably never heard of Lulu, which is actually something of a pity. On this side of the pond, this Scottish-born chanteuse has been pretty much ubiquitous since the mod days of the early 60s, when she brought out an absolutely stratospheric version of the Isley Brothers Shout! that made even the Who's version sound tame. (YouTube clip from Ready! Steady! Go! here.) She ended up with her own TV variety show and by some odd serendipity ended up giving young Jimi Hendrix his first TV appearance (more YouTube). Unfortunately, she also ended up representing the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest with an unspeakably awful song called Boom Bang-a-Bang.

By the time this Bowie cover version came out as a single, around the same time as the Pin Ups album, Lulu had, somewhat unfairly, been dismissed by rock fans as some sort of chirpily cute light-entertainment songstress, and the idea of her doing a song by David Bowie, the weird androgynous glam rocker guy, seemed as incongruous as you could possibly get. In fact, Lulu and young Davy Jones were contemporaries on the R&B club scene of the early 60s and would have known of each other from way back. So there.

The odd thing is that this version actually sounds more like a "typical" Bowie song than the original album track from 1970, probably thanks to the fact that Bowie and Mick Ronson produced the single, and got the Spiders in to play on it. So the original's rough mating of acoustic balladry and scuzzy, Sabbath-era metal gets replaced by some snappy latter-day Ronson guitar fills, a much more syncopated and straightforward backing track, and of course, the customary wheezy horn overdubs which serve to remind us that it's actually a relief that young David packed in the sax and took up singing instead. Though Lulu herself does a great job of interpreting a tune that sounds a bit like Brel, a bit like Brecht, a bit like the Velvets and maybe a bit like Bowie's other cronies, Mott the Hoople.

The other odd thing is, this would have fit perfectly well on the Pin Ups album. Except of course it wasn't a cover version. And had some Scottish bird singing on it. I'm sorry. Where were we? Would you like some more tea?

Saw Lulu on TV not too long ago (on the New Year's Eve Hootenanny) and was pleased to note that not only is she still keeping busy and in good voice, but she is still - let's admit it boys - damn hot at 61.

The Secret Life of Arabia - British Electric Foundation
The BEF were Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware, who'd been in the original Human League before Phil Oakey got those girls in to sing songs about waitresses in cocktail bars. After leaving, they set up the BEF as an electro outfit with a different guest vocalist for each song, and inadvertently ended up reviving Tina Turner's career with their version of the Tempts' Ball of Confusion. But enough on that: this cover version is all about a remarkable young man from Dundee, up in Scotland, named Billy Mackenzie.

Unfortunately, Billy will always be a young man in our memories now, because his life ended way too soon, but he was one of the great singers of his (post-punk, pre-New Romantic) generation. His band The Associates based their early sound on something not unlike Bowie around the Station To Station era, except more dissonant and shredded. Mackenzie's unique four-octave range swooped and soared around arrangements that sounded like all of European music being thrown up in the air and let fall wherever.

TSLOA, from the "Heroes" album, was a number the Associates would cover back in their early days. I'd never cared for the track much myself; it just made me want to flip the record over and put on Beauty and the Beast again. On the BEF / Mackenzie version, though, it gets a dramatic, cinematic, and dare I say funkier (that word again) arrangement that's more than worthy of the original. Mackenzie's inimitable voice luxuriates in the melody, intoxicated, in love with itself. I'd love to know what the composer thinks of this one.

Sister Midnight - Iggy Pop
Okay, so not really a cover version, since this is the original, and it was written by Bowie, Iggy and Carlos Alomar for Iggy's comeback album The Idiot. Not long after, Bowie recycled the same tune and put new words to it on his Lodger album with the title Red Money, with not quite as impressive results. Bowie's "own" version wasn't a bad track, well played and all, and it's always great to hear yet another one of Alomar's classic slowhand-funk riffs, but on the album it kind of palls after the Lodger's real climax, a harrowing tale of domestic violence called Repetition that's admittedly hard to follow.

Sister Midnight starts Iggy's album where Red Money finishes Lodger, and even though Bowie, Alomar and rhythm section Dennis Davis and George Murray are present on both versions, they couldn't be more different. Where Red Money sounds like a muso jam that's precision-tooled itself into a corner, Sister Midnight drips with menace and dread. Iggy dredges up words from the bottom of some psychic abyss, conjures up Oedipal and patricidal demons, and works himself into a frenzy calling out to someone he's not even sure can hear him at all. The album may be named after a book by Dostoyevsky but the sentiment is pure Beckett.

The band (which includes Bowie on keyboards) grunt and grind like machines that are just about to break down and the beat is claustrophobic, desperate, struggling with itself. The mass-produced nightmare delineated here and on the rest of the Idiot album could be happening anywhere on the globe: in Berlin, in the north of England, even in Detroit. Iggy solo will never top his Stooges work in my book, though Bowie proved a worthy mentor and collaborator, but The Idiot is a classic work that somehow manages to be more than the sum of the people who created it.

We can't, of course, forget that the eighth of January is also the birthday of Elvis Presley, who used to take his influences from everywhere around him, wear makeup, dress weird, sing up a storm, change his appearance a lot, and sometimes looked like he could have come from another planet. Fancy that.

In all seriousness, it goes without saying that if not for The King himself, David Bowie would have ended up either playing sax in some dance band or doing mime on some street corner. Who knows, he may have even given up altogether and joined the Army. So happy birthday to both of them.