Friday On My Mind...
Mad as a box of frogs Oz singer, Jeff Duff, (aka Duffo) has been in touch with the news that he'll be performing the songs of David Bowie at two sold out shows next weekend, in Sydney, Australia.
I asked Jeff what he had in store for Friday and Saturday, and here's what he said:
I will be joined by a few other like minded oz singers including a couple of great female vovalists. We'll be backed by my rock combo the 'Alien Sex Gods' who are similar in style to the 'Spiders from Mars'. We'll be concentrating on most of the Ziggy Stardust album but will be performing many of the big guns from Bowie's other 70's, 80's albums...I may even throw in an Iggy song or a tune from the Bowie produced Transformer album by Lou Reed.
It will be loud, stylish and very cheeky...both nites are sold out! I've designed a new costume especially for the show...there isn't much to it but it looks very groovy. It's always a great nite when I do the Bowie shows...the audience gets into the whole glam thing with outageous dress-ups...and I usually end up making a spectacle of myself getting down to skimpy leotard or worse! Ha.
Knowing how big a fan of Bowie and his music Jeff has been since way back, I asked him exactly what DB has meant to him over the years:
I think any self-respecting music loving mortal would be in denial if they suggested they hadn't been touched or influenced by the music and style of David Bowie. I'm happy to say I'm one of the many billion who has been caught up in his spell.
In Australia in the early seventies, straight out of art school I began creating my own stage costumes a few of which led to me being arrested on stage. I guess on a smaller scale some of my early attempts to outrage were reminincent of early Bowie. He gave me courage to outrage!
I can pin point specific times or events in my life to particular Bowie songs...he has been my barometer for life. Yow. Jeff Duff.
Jeff's last two albums, Ground Control To Frank Sinatra and Lost In The Stars, have been toungue-in-cheeck hybrids of David Bowie and Frank Sinatra with a kind of rock/swing thing going on. You can decide for yourself what you think of them by listening to some two minute snippets here.
A good starting point is the beautifully sparce arrangement of a down tempo Rebel Rebel from Ground Control To Frank Sinatra. To these ears the arrangement could almost have come straight from a 1974 Philly Dogs show. Great stuff.
And who would have guessed how esilly the likes of Changes, Space Oddity and Suffragette City would lend themselves to a pretty convicing swing arrangement?
Anyway, the upcoming shows on Friday 13th and Saturday 14th are more faithful rock arrangements in the spirit of the originals...but, as Jeff says, they're sold out. So if you don't yet have a ticket perhaps you'd better case the joint before Friday, to see if you're likely to squeeze comfortably through the ladies' powder room window!
Footnote: Sometime in the early 90s, Xfm radio in the UK put out a request for the 1979 Duffo hit, Give Me Back Me Brain, above. I dutifully trundled down to the London based radio station with my collection of Duffo records. There I was met by an upcoming DJ who remarked how some of the covers were very Bowie-esque, and he admitted to being a huge Bowie fan himself. They borrowed the single from me and broadcast it a few moments later.
You can see that DJ as he looks now, in yesterday's news (10.06.2006 NEWS: EXTRAS ON HBO FROM JANUARY), in a picture with David Bowie that I took a few months bach at the Extras shoot.
