“In the corner of the morning in the past...”
Here's an exclusive photograph kindly donated by writer/journalist/musician and occasional photographer, John Mendelssohn.
John took the shot during a session at the Holiday Inn in San Francisco in February 1971, while Bowie was in the city for a brief press junket in America to promote The Man Who Sold The World.
We've posted it in celebration of what is recorded as the 50th anniversary of the release of The Man Who Sold The World in the US, Wednesday, 4th November, 1970.
The accuracy of that date has been called into question recently, but we'll present the findings of our investigation to those that care about such details in the near future. If you have any actual real evidence of the release date, aside from the myriad Bowie books where the date is repeated, then we’d love to hear from you.
The inset in our montage is from John’s Rolling Stone review for The Man Who Sold The World, dated 18th February, 1971.
Here’s a short excerpt from it:
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In an album that, save for the impotently sarcastic 'Running Gun Blues', is uniformly excellent, at least four tracks demand special attention: 'Saviour Machine' demonstrates that Bowie far from exhausted his talent for quietly moralistic rock sci-fi in his earlier 'Space Oddity'. The almost insufferably depressive 'After All' contains the strangest refrain perhaps ever conceived — a haunting, mantric "Oh, by jingo". 'The Width of the Circle' is both a hallucination with religious overtones that recall both Dante and Adam and Eve and a sound of enormity.
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That last phrase was even picked up for the strapline for the only advert we've managed to find for this first release of the album.
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