FAME 90 RELEASED 35 YEARS AGO TODAY

“Fame. What’s your name?”

Fame 90 was released as a single in the UK on 26th March 1990, on the very day that David Bowie’s SOUND + VISION World Tour continued its globe trot with a 3-day stint at the London Arena.

CHANGESBOWIE, the best of compilation LP from which the track came, was at #2 on the official UK album chart that day, reaching the top spot later that week.

Fame 90 was released on the following formats in the UK: • 7" • Cassette • 7" Limited Edition Changes Envelope Pack with three prints • 12" • 12" Shrink Wrap Pack • CD • 7" picture disc.

Despite the formats and different mixes, not to mention a brand-new video, the single only just scraped into the Top 30.

Watch the Fame 90 (Official Video) over on the David Bowie YouTube channel:

#BowieFame90 #BowieSOUNDandVISION

DAVID AND TINA’S LIVE 'TONIGHT' DUET IS 40 TODAY - SONG STORY By Jason Draper

‘Tonight’: How Iggy Pop’s Meditation On Mortality Became David Bowie’s Swansong For Doomed Lovers

Originally recorded for Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life album, ‘Tonight’ would unite David Bowie and Tina Turner on record in the mid-1980s.

By Jason Draper

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When David Bowie and Iggy Pop made their second trip together to Berlin, in April 1977, they sought to continue the rehabilitative lifestyle they’d embarked upon the previous year, while also building on the creative partnership that had seen Bowie help the former Stooges frontman establish himself as a solo artist. Just as the recording of Pop’s debut album, The Idiot, was followed swiftly by sessions for Bowie’s Low, at the famed Château d’Hérouville facilities, in a village in the north of France, Pop’s follow-up record, Lust for Life, provided a warm-up of sorts for Bowie’s “Heroes”, recorded in the fresh surroundings of Hansa Tonstudio, in West Berlin.

Worked up during Pop’s first solo tour, and completed during the Lust for Life sessions, was a song called ‘Tonight’, in which Pop reflected on one of the more desperate passages in a life lived on the edge following the implosion of his first band. One of many Pop co-writes that Bowie would return to later in his career, the song would be given a very different interpretation by Bowie when he re-recorded it as a duet with Tina Turner. That version, which would lend its name to Bowie’s 1984 album, would be received by Rolling Stone magazine as “one of the most vibrantly beautiful tracks he’s ever recorded”. But before that, ‘Tonight’ took listeners on a trip into Pop’s darker past, on an album which Bowie described as being “far more like the old Iggy than anything he’s done for a long time”.

Iggy Pop’s version: “This is a song about my girlfriend, who’s dead”

Recorded in the summer of 1976, Pop’s debut album, The Idiot, was finally released the following March, a little under three weeks into a tour Pop had launched to promote the record. For Pop’s solo shows, Bowie, who’d been instrumental in revitalising his friend’s career, first as producer of The Stooges’ third album, 1973’s Raw Power, and now as creative lead on The Idiot, cheerfully settled into the role of sideman, providing keyboard and backing vocals as part of a group that also included Low guitarist Ricky Gardiner and the straight-up rock’n’roll rhythm section of sibling duo Tony (bass) and Hunt (drums) Sales.

Looking healthier than he had in years, Pop confidently mixed Stooges classics with highlights from The Idiot, and even previewed ‘Tonight’ during some of the tour’s early shows. “This is a song about my girlfriend, who’s dead!” he told a hometown Detroit crowd on 25 March, before the wailing vocals of Bowie and the Sales brothers set the scene for Pop’s startling declaration: “I saw my baby/She was turning blue/I knew that soon, her young life was through/And so I got on my knees/Down by her bed/And these are the words/To her I said…”

As the Sales clattered into action and Bowie added elegiac keyboard lines on top, Pop moved from despairing bellow to his newly developed croon, seeking to console his doomed lover – and possibly also himself – with the assertion that “everything will be alright tonight”.

Having been honed on the road, ‘Tonight’ was quickly captured on tape in Hansa, where Bowie, Pop and their crew settled after finishing the tour in April. Again, Bowie was content to play support, reprising his role as backing vocalist during the wordless intro, and harmonising with Pop’s alternately anguished and imploring vocals on a recording that finds a meeting point between the loose-limbed rock instincts of Pop’s rhythm section and the considered New Wave of Bowie’s Low and “Heroes” aesthetic. For his part, Pop pulled round-the-clock shifts in order to outpace his creative partner and reach this balance. “During that album, the band and Bowie’d leave the studios to go to sleep, but not me,” he admitted. “I was working to be one jump ahead of them for the next day… See, Bowie’s a hell of a fast guy. Quick, quick. Very quick thinker, very quick action, very active person, very sharp. I realised that I had to be quicker than him, otherwise whose album was it gonna be?”

David Bowie’s version: “I really wanted to work with Iggy again”

From its stark description of a fatal overdose to its resigned acceptance of the dangers of drug use, there was no mistaking that ‘Tonight’ was the work of Iggy Pop. “It’s out of that specific area that I’m not at home in,” Bowie would tell NME, shortly after recording his own version of the song. “I can’t say that it’s Iggy’s world, but it’s far more of Iggy’s observation than mine.” And yet, seven years on from the Lust for Life sessions, Bowie had sought to bridge those two worlds when he recorded the follow-up to his gargantuan Let’s Dance album.

“What I suppose I really wanted to do was to work with Iggy again,” he explained, while also acknowledging that, without having too much new material to hand, he appreciated taking “a chance, like Pin Ups did a few years ago, to do some covers that I always wanted to do”. Indeed, five of Tonight’s nine songs would be covers, and, of those, three would be Pop co-writes, with Pop also receiving a credit on two of the album’s original numbers, ‘Tumble and Twirl’ and ‘Dancing with the Big Boys’.

A new approach: “I guess we changed the whole sentiment around”

Years later, Pop would call Bowie “a benefactor” who “went a bit out of his way to bestow some good karma on me”, and Bowie’s decision to include so many Pop co-writes on Tonight has been seen as an attempt to shore up some funding for Pop at a time when his career had hit a low point. Travelling companions once again, Bowie and Pop had spent time together in Bali and Java ahead of sessions for what would become Tonight, and Pop was only too happy to see what happened when they decamped to Le Studio, in Morin-Heights, Quebec, to begin work on the album. Fired up by the return of his old creative foil, Bowie recorded a reggae-fied version of ‘Tonight’, complete with marimba solo by Guy St. Onge, in a nod to the gamelan music that had captivated him while travelling through Indonesia.

In a collaborative mood, Bowie also extended an invitation to Tina Turner, whose presence would make for another radical alteration to this new version of ‘Tonight’. Now framed as a duet between lovers, the song could be heard as a cautious plea for reconciliation as much as it was a reckoning with mortality – an interpretation encouraged by Bowie’s decision to remove Pop’s opening pronouncement from his version. “That was such an idiosyncratic thing of [Iggy’s] that it seemed not part of my vocabulary,” Bowie told NME. Adding that he didn’t want to “inflict” the original overdose narrative on Turner, he noted, “I guess we changed the whole sentiment around. It still has that same barren feeling, though.”

Issued as a single on 26 November 1984, two months on from the release of its parent album, ‘Tonight’ was singled out for particular praise by Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder, who, in his review of the album, called the song “an inspired and blessedly spare reworking of an old Iggy-and-Ziggy collaboration” on which Turner provided “grit and sinew” as a counterpart to one of the “sweetest and most human” vocals of Bowie’s career.

The live duet: “Says everything about our feelings together”

Bowie had been thrilled to have Turner guest on his album. “As iconic as he is, he wanted this to be an amazing experience for her,” Carlos Alomar, who’d played guitar on both the Lust for Life and Tonight versions of the songs, later told Uncut magazine. Joining Bowie and Turner for dinner after the recording, Alomar and his wife, Robin Clark, would note that Bowie “wanted all things covered. ‘Let there be no stone unturned to make this woman feel at home.’”

Bowie had long been a fan of Turner: the powerhouse performer on vintage soul hits such as ‘River Deep – Mountain High’ and ‘Proud Mary’ was, he’d told Capitol Records execs, his “favourite singer”, an appraisal that all but led a stampede of label heads to see her perform at New York City’s Ritz club in early 1983. Turner would forever consider Bowie’s support to have been “very special and significant”, and the reason that she got a record deal at a make-or-break stage in her career. She would acknowledge her return respect by recording one of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs songs, ‘1984’, for Private Dancer.

It was ‘Tonight’, however, which “says everything about our feelings for each other”, Turner later wrote in her memoir My Love Story. At an arena-filling peak of her own in 1985, Turner invited Bowie on stage to perform the song with her during her two-night residency at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, across 23 and 24 March, as she rode the unstoppable wave of Private Dancer’s success. Released on the Tina Live: Private Dancer Tour video, the 23 March performance, which was followed by a jubilant run through Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, made clear the close bond that had formed between the two stars – not least when Bowie, looking, in his white tuxedo, every inch the elegant suitor to Turner’s leather-clad rock siren, leaned in mid-song to whisper something that made Turner howl with laughter. “They got on really well; they were very comfortable with each other,” Paul Cox, Turner’s photographer on the tour, told this writer for the liner notes to the 40th-anniversary deluxe-edition reissue of Private Dancer. “Her energy was such that all those people looked at her and went, ‘I want to be a part of that.’ She always pulled people along.”

For Turner, the feeling was mutual. “He’s got so much knowledge,” she would say of Bowie. “He really is like the man who fell to Earth, for me. You can’t put your finger on David… I’ll be ever thankful to him.”

Buy the ‘Private Dancer’ 40th-anniversary deluxe-edition reissue.

YOUNG AMERICANS AT 50 A TRACK-BY-TRACK GUIDE

“Never been known to fail...”

David Bowie’s ninth studio album, the Bowie/Visconti/Maslin produced Young Americans, was released fifty years ago on this day in 1975.

A top ten album in both the US (#9) and the UK (#2) it also furnished Bowie with his first ever #1 US single in the shape of the Bowie/Lennon/Alomar composition, Fame.

Young Americans still sounds a remarkable work today and Jason Draper’s enthusiasm for it shines through in his latest epic, posted below: ‘Young Americans’ at 50: A Track-by-Track Guide to David Bowie’s “Plastic Soul” Album.

The image here is from the shoot for the Young Americans TV advert.

#YoungAmericans50

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‘Young Americans’ at 50: A Track-by-Track Guide to David Bowie’s “Plastic Soul” Album By Jason Draper

Full of slick grooves and sparkling riffs, the eight ‘Young Americans’ songs gave life to David Bowie’s vision of “plastic soul”.

David Bowie had been edging towards soul music as early as 1973, when he opened his US TV special, The 1980 Floor Show, with a new funk-indebted song, ‘1984’. With wah-wah riffs slicing their way through the following year’s Diamond Dogs album, a wholesale reinvention as a blue-eyed soul singer seems, in retrospect, like a natural development for Bowie – although the pace at which he was evolving remains staggering. As proven by this guide to all eight songs on Young Americans, his immersion in the music coming out of Black America in the 60s and 70s – not least the floor-filling sounds of Philadelphia International Records – made for one of the biggest creative about-turns of his career. Slick, soulful and full of daring, Young Americans is vintage Bowie.

‘Young Americans’: A Track-by-Track Guide to Every Song on the Album

‘Young Americans’

The time: 1975. The place: A downtown discotheque in Anywheresville, USA. A crack of drums, and the band slide into the slinkiest groove yet heard on a Bowie record, with David Sanborn’s in-your-face saxophone calling hormone-fuelled adolescents to the floor. “My Young American was plastic, deliberately so,” Bowie said of the inner-city characters he placed at the centre of Young Americans’ title track, opening his love letter to Philadelphia soul with a narrative of nervy newlyweds seeking to find their way through mid-70s North America, with all its capitalist traps and political murk. Doing for his target audience of soul boys and soul girls what ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ had done for the burgeoning glam scene of the early 70s, ‘Young Americans’ was an astute clarion call that truly broke Bowie stateside when it went Top 30 on the Billboard Hot 100. “It worked in a way I hadn’t really expected,” Bowie later said of the song. “Because while my invention was more plastic than anyone else’s, it obviously had some resonance.”

‘Win’

“Plastic” may have been Bowie’s preferred descriptor for the eight songs that make up Young Americans, but ‘Win’ reveals how malleable the concept could be. Twinkling guitar and reverbed sax characterise this impassioned ballad, whose fluid time signature, slipping seamlessly between 6/8 and 4/4, reject any notions of uneasy rigidity in the material. “The chord structures are much more of a European thing than an American thing,” Bowie once said of this slow-rolling triumph. “But it imbued the muscular qualities of soul music pretty accurately, and I got these pretty heavyweight American musicians working on it. It gave it some sound of a kind of a fake authenticity to it.” Emotionally, too, the song marks a triumphant early high point on the album. Calling it “a ‘get up off your backside’ sort of song”, Bowie gave ‘Win’ some of the most affecting lyrics found on Young Americans. Seemingly a shot across the bows of all those who would sit and hope – in vain – for Bowie’s failure, ‘Win’ hits the mark and then some.

‘Fascination’

After making a casual comment about ‘Young Americans’’s backing vocals, a fledgling singer by the name of Luther Vandross found himself thrust into the role of arranger, leading Ava Cherry and Robin Clark, wife of guitarist Carlos Alomar, through harmonies on many of the album’s tracks. Then only 23, the future ‘Never Too Much’ hitmaker also displayed his nascent songwriting chops, loaning Bowie an original tune he’d penned, titled ‘Funky Music (Is a Part of Me)’. Rewriting it as ‘Fascination’, Bowie had his band dig deep into the song’s groove, with plenty of squelchy low end sitting beneath elliptical lyrics that speak of desire. “He said he didn’t want to be so presumptuous as to say ‘funky music’, since he was a rock artist,” Vandross later explained of Bowie’s lyric changes. “He said, ‘Do you mind?’ And I said, ‘You’re David Bowie, I live at home with my mother, you can do what you like.’” Two years later, when recording the self-titled debut album by his own band, Luther, Vandross re-cut the song under its original title and using his own lyrics.

‘Right’

Reflecting on the Young Americans recording sessions in the BBC documentary David Bowie: The First Five Years, Robin Clark explained the difficulties of capturing the call-and-response vocals that elevate Right from a strong groove – what Bowie described as “putting a positive drone over” – to one of the most distinctive songs on the album. “That was so hard,” she said. “David had like a puzzle. He brought this paper to us, and he said, ‘This is how I want you to sing this.’ It wasn’t a straight, ‘Just sing it linearly and melodically.’ It was, ‘I want it to jump in here, and I want you to jump out there, and jump back in here.’ That, too, was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that in my life.” The vocal acrobatics he teased from his trio of singers during the song’s mid-section were almost impossible to replicate live. On record, however, they goad Bowie on as he redefines himself yet again: “Never no turning back,” he sings. “Never been known to fail.”

‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’

With it’s gospel-tinged uplifts and softly crooned backing vocals, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ masquerades as a slow-dance number (“He’s so divine, his soul shines”), but it harbours more urgent concerns. It was a “Watch out, mate, Hitler’s on his way back” song, Bowie told NME shortly after the release of Young Americans, adding, “It’s your rock’n’roll sociological bit.” He had already walked the line between rock idol and messianic leader on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, and, with a prescient eye on the ways in which politicians manipulate the media to their own ends, Bowie ensured that lyrics such as “He’s got his eye on your soul, his hand on your heart” carried altogether more sinister undertones. Building in intensity over its six and a half minutes, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ sounds like a rise to supremacy in itself, as requested by Bowie in his handwritten notes to producer Tony Visconti: “The sound throughout this [last] section should become more and more Spectorish and powerful.”

‘Across the Universe’

Originally recorded by The Beatles for their final album, Let It Be, the John Lennon-penned ‘Across the Universe’ had always been a favourite of Bowie, who would call it “a portrait of the spiritual heart of where Lennon was at”. After befriending Lennon in New York City, Bowie invited him to Electric Lady Studios in January 1975, specifically to cut a cover of ‘Across the Universe’ during what would be one of the final Young Americans recording sessions. “I thought, Great, because I’d never done a good version of that song myself,” Lennon told Melody Maker the day after the album’s release. Dropping the Sanksrit mantra of Lennon’s original (“Jai guru deva om”) and upping the intensity with his own rich vocals and layered guitars, Bowie, by his own estimation, “hammered the hell out of” the track. He would go on to remove three songs from the album’s planned tracklist – ‘John I’m Only Dancing (Again)’, ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ and ‘Who Can I Be Now?’ – in order to make room for this cover, plus an original number worked up with Lennon in a flash of inspiration that would provide the album’s unforgettable closing track.

‘Can You Hear Me’

Originally cut with Lulu for an aborted project with the Scottish singer, ‘Can You Hear Me’ is, like ‘Win’, another deeply emotive Young Americans song that belies the album’s “plastic” tag. An early Bowie version – later released on the “lost” album The Gouster – is a sparse soul ballad with Bowie’s vocal front and centre. In its final guise, ‘Can You Hear Me’ floats on conga and Visconti-scored strings, the fullness of the arrangement doing nothing to deter Bowie from delivering a delicately poised performance. “This is a real love song. I kid you not,” he told NME, although he refused to say who it had been written for.

‘Fame’

It’s perhaps no surprise that one of Bowie’s most enduring songs dealt with one of his life-long preoccupations: celebrity and its artifice. Developed from a riff on ‘Foot Stomping’, an old R&B number by The Flares, and reflecting conversations that Bowie had had with John Lennon (“We spent endless hours talking about fame, and what it’s like not having a life of your own any more,” he later told Musician magazine), ‘Fame’ takes an acerbic look at life lived under the media’s glare, where “what you get is no tomorrow” and “what you need you have to borrow”. Recorded immediately after committing ‘Across the Universe’ to tape, ‘Fame’ features Lennon on piano, acoustic guitar and backing vocals, although the former Beatle’s biggest contribution, as Bowie later put it, “was the energy, and that’s why he got a credit for writing it. He was the inspiration.”

Indeed, ‘Fame’’s distinctive guitar riff is unmistakably the work of Bowie’s latest recruit – and soon-to-be crucial collaborator – Carlos Alomar, while its cut-up, fuzzed-up deconstruction of fame could only have come from Bowie’s brain, his pitch-shifted vocals seeming, by turns, mocking and disorientating as they cascade towards the ultimate snub for a “sleb”: “What’s your name?” His first-ever US No.1, the song cemented Bowie’s profile stateside, and its stock would remain high throughout his career, appearing in his setlists right through to the tour for the Reality album. With covers by artists as diverse as Duran Duran, Scott Weiland and Smashing Pumpkins, samples in tracks by Public Enemy and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and syncs in TV and cinema, ‘Fame’ – which Bowie himself would revisit in a ‘Fame ’90’ remix – has spoken to everyone who’s found that having a public profile isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “There’s very little about it that anybody would covet,” Bowie told Q magazine in 1990. “I still have my favourite times when I’m not recognised, or at least left to my own devices.”

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Buy the ‘Young Americans’ 50th-anniversary vinyl reissues and merch at the David Bowie store.

YOUNG AMERICANS 50TH ANNIVERSARY OUT NOW

Purchase here.

#YoungAmericans50

RIP DAVID JOHANSEN

Following our post on 12th February, we are sad to learn that David Johansen has now passed at the age of 75.

Our thoughts are with his wife Mara Hennessey, daughter Leah and anyone else that knew him.

Here follows a tribute posted on his fund page yesterday...

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David Johansen passed away peacefully at home, holding the hands of his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers.

After a decade of profoundly compromised health he died of natural causes at the age of 75.

David and his family were deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support they’ve experienced recently as the result of having gone public with their challenges. He was thankful that he had a chance to be in touch with so many friends and family before he passed.

He knew he was ecstatically loved.

There will be several events celebrating David’s life and artistry, details to follow.

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FOOTNOTE: Our picture is a snap of the two David’s in New York in February 1973 from our archive. The original is signed by Johansen, who had also mischievously drawn a moustache on Mr Bowie.

#DavidJohansenFund #NewYorkDolls

YOUNG AMERICANS SONG STORY BY JASON DRAPER

Young Americans: Behind David Bowie’s Generation-Defining “Plastic Soul” Anthem

Surpassing even its creator’s own expectations, Young Americans was the song that proved David Bowie could master any musical genre he chose.

By Jason Draper

Ever since his first visit to the US, in January 1971, David Bowie had been fascinated with the country. “I focused all my attention on going to America,” he later admitted, adding that he was drawn to what he called the “subculture” of the place: everything from the late Hollywood icon James Dean to rock’n’roll music and Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs. Channelling this fixation into an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative in the song ‘Young Americans’, Bowie would seek to express the world view of a new generation of US youth in the same way that he’d waved a flag for the “pretty things” of the UK’s queer underground in the early 70s.

“My Young American was plastic, deliberately so,” Bowie later reflected. “We worked really hard to make that record come alive.” Ushering in a whole new era for Bowie, and leading the charge for a breed of white pop singers with soul music in their hearts, ‘Young Americans’ served notice of the ever-changing star’s most radical reinvention to date.

The backstory: “I was through with theatrical clothes”

Bowie had long drawn upon US culture for his music: avant-garde rock experimentalists The Velvet Underground had informed his Hunky Dory track ‘Queen Bitch’, while the experience of touring The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars across the States in the autumn of 1972 coursed through the wired paranoia of the following year’s Aladdin Sane. Yet it would be the Diamond Dogs Tour of 1974 that set Bowie on the path towards the Young Americans album and its impassioned title track.

A move in this soulful new direction had been clearly signposted. Bowie had opened his revue-styled TV special of 1973, The 1980 Floor Show, with a funk-fuelled new song, ‘1984’, whose frenetic wah-wah guitar sliced through the latter half of the Diamond Dogs album. Now, in the summer of 1974, while touring Diamond Dogs with an ambitious theatrical stage show, he sported sculpted shorn hair and blasted everything from roof-raising Aretha Franklin numbers to the slick dancefloor grooves of the Philadelphia International Records hit machine from his car stereo as he cruised through the States between shows.

Fitting, then, that his first-ever live album, David Live, would be recorded in Philadelphia. Hitting the shelves that October, it featured an image of Bowie looking every inch the soulful crooner on its sleeve. “I’d got this thing in my mind that I was through with theatrical clothes and I would only wear Sears & Roebuck, which on me looked more outlandish than anything I had made by Japanese designers,” he later told Q magazine, referring to the muted suits he came to favour over the brightly patterned kimonos he’d worn as his Ziggy Stardust alter ago. The Ziggy-era’s songs were also given makeovers, with the dramatic album closer ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’ re-emerging as a Southern soul ballad. Soon, Bowie would set up camp in the ‘City of Brotherly Love’, taking over Philadelphia International’s recording base for his next creative leap.

Rock 'N' Roll Suicide (Live)

The recording: “That’s a great idea. Put that down”

Booking Sigma Sound Studios, where PIR’s house band, MFSB, had laid down many of the label’s classic cuts, Bowie spent a break between tour legs recording much of what would become his Young Americans album. Having written the album’s title track before entering the studio, Bowie launched straight into it on the first day of the sessions, 11 August 1974. Right behind him was a brand-new band featuring former James Brown sideman Carlos Alomar, whose fluid guitar work would be crucial to Bowie’s seamless switch from rock god to strutting soul boy.

In a move he would repeat 40 years later, when bringing saxophonist Donny McCaslin in to underpin his surprise 2014 single, ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’, and, later, the sessions for his final album, ★, Bowie enlisted a hotshot young jazz saxophonist, David Sanborn, to play a style of music outside of his established realm. Setting the scene for Bowie’s tale of wary lovers, Sanborn’s saxophone glistened like a mirror ball. And while the group polished their performance across a week’s worth of sessions, another newcomer listened on from the control booth, ready to put his distinctive stamp on the song.

“What if there was a phrase that went, ‘Young American, young American, he was the young American – all right!” a 23-year-old singer named Luther Vandross, brought to the studio by Alomar, said to Alomar’s wife, Robin Clark. “Now, when ‘all right’ comes up, jump over me and into harmony.” Overhearing the conversation, Bowie told Vandross, “That’s a great idea. Put that down.” Before long, Vandross, Clark and backing singer Ava Cherry were singing Vandross’ parts not only on Young Americans’ title track, but also on most of the album’s songs, among them ‘Fascination’, a number Vandross himself had written under the original title of ‘Funky Music (Is A Part Of Me)’.

Fascination (2016 Remaster)

The vocals: “A lot of David’s vocals were live because of this wacky idea”

With bass from recent Donny Hathaway and Randy Newman collaborator Willie Weeks, and drums and percussion from Andy Newmark (Sly And The Family Stone, Carly Simon, Rod Stewart) and Larry Washington (MFSB, Salsoul Orchestra), respectively, Bowie ensured that his excursion into blue-eyed soul would cross as easily into the white pop market as he himself had transitioned into the world of Black music. Alongside the newcomers he’d brought in, regular Bowie pianist Mike Garson underpinned the recording with Latin-tinged piano (“I was playing straighter because his music was not was weird as it was in the Aladdin Sane period,” Garson later said) while producer Tony Visconti was back at the helm for his first full project with Bowie since The Man Who Sold The World.

Visconti arrived at Sigma Sound a few days after the Young Americans sessions started. Earlier in the year, he’d helped Bowie mix ‘Rebel Rebel’ for inclusion on Diamond Dogs, but now, jet lagged and severely sleep deprived following a months-long engagement working on Thin Lizzy’s Nightlife album, he was ill-prepared to launch himself into another intensive stint at the controls. Nevertheless, Bowie had his old friend get straight to work solving a technical challenge: how to capture Bowie’s vocals live in the studio while avoiding having his microphone pick up sound from the musicians surrounding him.

“I applied a special technique that was only described to me but I had never used before,” Visconti recalled in the liner notes to the 2016 box set Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976). “I put up two identical vocal mics, one in front of his mouth and the other in front of his neck. They went through identical channel paths except one was switched out-of-phase on purpose.” Betting that the two microphones would cancel out the sound of the band on the vocal track, Visconti hoped that Bowie’s vocals, picked up by the mic placed in front of his mouth, would come through clearly on the recording. “Damn it, it worked!” Visconti wrote. “A lot of David’s vocals in the final mixes were live because of this wacky idea.”

Young Americans (2016 Remaster)

The lyrics: “It’s about a newly-wed couple who don’t know if they really like each other”

The producer also had an indirect influence on the ‘Young Americans’ lyrics, with Bowie referencing a theatre trip the pair had taken together in the song’s opening line, “They pulled in just behind the fridge.” While many listeners puzzled over why Bowie’s young couple would seek a tryst under cover of a kitchen appliance, the “fridge” in question was actually a nod to Behind The Fridge, a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore show that Bowie and Visconti had been to see in London’s West End the previous year.

The remainder of the song’s lyrical touchstones are, however, undeniably North American. Shifting his focus from the hazardous ghettos of Diamond Dogs’s Hunger City to the metropolises of the United States, Bowie has his references tumble into one another like so much cultural detritus. A Barbie doll, Afro-Sheen hair-care products, the soul-music TV show Soul Train and makes of car (Cadillac, Ford Mustang, Chrysler) all provide the backdrop to – and, perhaps, distraction from – a world in which civilians go about their day under the watchful eye of an intrusive government. “Have you been the un-American?” Bowie asks, referencing the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee. “Do you remember your President Nixon?” he probes further, in a lyric written just days after the disgraced commander-in-chief’s resignation.

“It’s about a newly-wed couple who don’t know if they really like each other,” Bowie told NME of the meaning behind ‘Young Americans’. Considering the “predicament” he’d put his couple in – an anti-climactic opening encounter (“It took him minutes, took her nowhere/Heaven knows, she’d have taken anything”) leads to ruminations on ageing and the civil-rights movement – Bowie added, “Well, they do, but they don’t know if they do or don’t.”

No wonder. With ‘Young Americans’ Bowie created a world in which truth and cynicism collide, and emotional fulfilment is scarce. “I heard the news today, oh boy,” Vandross, Clark and Cherry sing at one point, in a canny lift from The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’, although the effect is less a tribute, more resigned acceptance that an era of peace-and-love optimism has long since faded. Turning from his couple, Bowie directly addresses the listener in a near-breathless outpouring that ends with the band dropping out as he makes a final pained entreaty: “Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?”

Young Americans (Live in Detroit)

The release: “Bowie’s most commercial sound to date”

Hysteria of a different type took hold when Bowie invited a small group of fans into Sigma Sound to hear his work-in-progress. Dubbed the ‘Sigma Kids’, this most committed set of devotees had been hanging outside the studio ever since word had spread of Bowie’s presence in the building, and their reaction to the Young Americans material was unequivocal: it spoke directly to the needs of Bowie’s burgeoning US fanbase.

That fanbase gathered to welcome him back to the stage in September, as the Diamond Dogs Tour morphed into The Soul Tour for the remainder of the year. And a nationwide TV audience would be introduced to ‘Young Americans’ when Bowie performed it on The Dick Cavett Show. Filmed on 2 November 1974 and aired on 5 December – more than two months ahead of the song’s release as a single – Bowie’s appearance on the late-night talk show underscored the confidence he had in his new direction. Opening his musical segments with Diamond Dogs’s ‘1984’, he closed the show with a souped-up version of The Flares’ 1961 R&B cut ‘Foot Stomping’, a track which would inspire his John Lennon co-write, ‘Fame’, and followed that with a performance of another Young Americans highlight, ‘Can You Hear Me?’, which was left out of the final broadcast.

All this hard graft on North American soil paid off. Released in a single edit in the US, backed with his David Live version of Eddie Floyd’s Stax Records stormer ‘Knock On Wood’, ‘Young Americans’ would hit No.28 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Bowie’s first US hit since a Ziggy-era reissue of ‘Space Oddity’ broke the Top 20. Not that his homeland wasn’t listening. After the full album-length version of ‘Young Americans’ hit UK stores on 21 February, fans took it to No.18 on the charts, the transatlantic success underscoring Record Mirror’s observation that the song boasted “Bowie’s most commercial sound to date”.

Knock on Wood (Live)

The legacy: “It worked in a way I hadn’t really expected”

Half a century on from its release, ‘Young Americans’ barely seems to have aged. Routinely hailed as one of the best David Bowie songs, it has also appeared in Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’ list (No.204 in its 2024 update) and Pitchfork’s survey of the 200 best songs of the 70s (No.44). Deeming it the seventh-best Bowie song of all in a Guardian countdown, music critic Alexis Petridis affirmed that “Young Americans represents the point in Bowie’s career where it became apparent he could take virtually any musical genre and bend it to his will”.

Much more genre-bending would follow as the 70s unfolded. But Bowie would return to his “plastic soul” template in 1983, for the world-conquering Let’s Dance album, produced by Chic’s disco architect, Nile Rodgers. Reprised during that era’s Serious Moonlight Tour, ‘Young Americans’ would also get airings throughout the Glass Spider Tour of 1987 and Bowie’s career-spanning Sound+Vision Tour of 1990, before being put to bed for good – to the chagrin of some of his longtime band members, who, in the words of bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, “would just die and go to heaven” for the chance to play the song again.

David Bowie - Young Americans (Live, 1983)

“It worked in a way I hadn’t really expected,” Bowie would say of his Young Americans era. “It made me a star in America, which is the most ironic, ridiculous part of the equation. Because while my invention was more plastic than anyone else’s, it obviously had some resonance. Plastic soul for anyone who wants it.”

Buy the ‘Young Americans’ 50th-anniversary vinyl reissues and merch at the David Bowie store.

DAVID BOWIE BY DENIS O’REGAN DUE IN JULY

“Photograph king, watches you go...”

Denis O'Regan has kindly given us the opportunity to share some of the images and details from his upcoming David Bowie by Denis O'Regan hardback book.

See the images over on the Instagram version of this post.

Available at all the usual outlets, you can register your interest for the slipcase edition and more at ACC ART BOOKS as they become available here.

We’ll be posting more exclusive content in the run up to the publication on 22nd July 2025 along with details of a contest to win signed copies.

Keep reading for the official blurb.

#BowieByDenisORegan #DavidByDenis

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David Bowie by Denis O'Regan

Official photographer to David Bowie, Denis O'Regan presents his superb collection of photographs of the music legend, from the 1970s through to the 1990s

Denis O'Regan has photographed Bowie more than any other photographer

Stunning photographs taken across two decades at over 200 concerts worldwide

O'Regan captures David behind-the-scenes as well as David Bowie the showman

O'Regan provides a first-person account to accompany each chapter of his photographic journey

Official photographer to music legend David Bowie, Denis O’Regan presents a personal edit from his unrivalled collection of photographs. Accompanying Bowie on two world tours and enjoying a decades-long relationship with the star, no one photographed Bowie more than Denis O’Regan.

As Bowie himself once remarked, ‘Denis, Rock ‘n’ Roll is in your blood’.

From the door of Olympic Studios, where Bowie recorded Diamond Dogs in 1974, to live stadium shows in the 1990s, Denis’s full archive is at last opened and many unseen images revealed for the first time.

David Bowie by Denis O’Regan tells Bowie’s musical story in pictures, with O’Regan’s own words relaying his experience of documenting that incredible journey.

Author of the hugely successful Ricochet: David Bowie 1983 (Particular Books, 2018), O’Regan has toured with the biggest stars from The Rolling Stones and Queen to Pink Floyd and Duran Duran, to name a few. But it is his photographs of David Bowie, taken over two decades at over 200 concerts worldwide, that he is best known for. David Bowie the showman and David behind-the scenes, O’Regan has captured it all in this showcase of one of the world’s most talented performers.

Denis O’Regan documented the punk explosion of the mid 1970s, toured Europe with the Rolling Stones on their only tour of the eighties and covered David Bowie’s entire Serious Moonlight world tour. In the nineties, Denis shot Pink Floyd’s final tour, and into the 21st century was commissioned as the official photographer to the Coachella, Download and Glastonbury festivals.

He has been published and exhibited globally and produces limited edition books and fine art prints, which are available at his London gallery. His Ricochet: David Bowie boxset is featured in the Victoria & Albert’s permanent collection.

Denis’s other books include Ricochet: David Bowie 1983 (Particular Books, 2018) and Duran Duran: Careless Memories (ACC Art Books, 2022).

David Bowie by Denis O'Regan

9781788842846

ACC Art Books

Hardback

325 mm x 285 mm

276 Pages - 110 color, 61 b&w

Publish date 22nd Jul 2025

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📸 Denis O'Regan

#BowieByDenisORegan #DavidByDenis

HEAR AND SEE NEW KILLER STAR FROM READY, SET, GO!

“I discovered a star...”

As outlined in our previous post, READY, SET, GO! (LIVE, RIVERSIDE STUDIOS' 03) will be released on 12th April 2025, for Record Store Day.

Listen to and watch the live version of NEW KILLER STAR, the opening song from the show, here.

#BowieRSD #RSD2025 #BowieReadySetGo #NewKillerStarLive2003

READY, SET, GO! (LIVE, RIVERSIDE STUDIOS ’03) FOR RSD 2025

“I got a better way, Ready, set, go!”

Parlophone Records is proud to announce the release of a David Bowie limited double vinyl LP and CD: READY, SET, GO! (LIVE, RIVERSIDE STUDIOS' 03) which will be released on 12th April 2025, for Record Store Day.

Keep reading for the full press release.

#BowieRSD #RSD2025 #BowieReadySetGo

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DAVID BOWIE - READY, SET, GO! (LIVE, RIVERSIDE STUDIOS ’03)

LIMITED 14-TRACK VINYL DOUBLE ALBUM & CD

RELEASED BY PARLOPHONE EXCLUSIVELY FOR RECORD STORE DAY 12th APRIL 2025

Parlophone Records is proud to announce the release of a very special David Bowie limited double vinyl LP and CD READY, SET, GO! (LIVE, RIVERSIDE STUDIOS' 03) which will be released on 12th April , 2024, for Record Store Day.

On 8th September, 2003, David Bowie made history at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, with the biggest ever live and interactive music satellite event the world had seen to that point. The special one-off live concert was beamed simultaneously to fans in 86 cinemas in 26 countries, from Hong Kong to Helsinki, and 14 screens in Paris alone were dedicated to the show.

Bowie and his band unveiled the first-ever live performance of his new album REALITY, released a week later. Now, for the first time, the eleven-song main set, the REALITY album in its entirety, plus three previously unreleased tracks from the encore, will be available on double vinyl and single CD exclusively for Record Store Day 2025.

The event marked many firsts in technological terms; it was the biggest ever non-TV satellite broadcast, the first ever interactive cinema event via a Q&A element hosted by Bowie fan and broadcaster Jonathan Ross and the first live satellite event in 5.1 DTS surround sound, which was overseen by longtime collaborator, Tony Visconti.

The precedent-setting event also went live across Asia a day later with a live Q&A between David and fans in Japan, Australia, Singapore, and Southeast Asia. The event was also beamed to North and South America, and Canada the day the album was released, with David doing brand new live Q&A sessions for those broadcasts.

DAVID BOWIE - READY, SET, GO! (LIVE, RIVERSIDE STUDIOS ’03)

2LP

Side 1

New Killer Star

Pablo Picasso

Never Get Old

Side 2

The Loneliest Guy

Looking For Water

She’ll Drive The Big Car

Side 3

Days

Fall Dog Bombs The Moon

Try Some, Buy Some

Reality

Side 4

Bring Me The Disco King

Hallo Spaceboy

Cactus

Afraid

CD

New Killer Star

Pablo Picasso

Never Get Old

The Loneliest Guy

Looking For Water

She’ll Drive The Big Car

Days

Fall Dog Bombs The Moon

Try Some, Buy Some

Reality

Bring Me The Disco King

Hallo Spaceboy

Cactus

Afraid

Produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti.

Vocal, Guitar: David Bowie

Keyboards: Mike Garson

Bass, Vocals: Gail Ann Dorsey

Guitars: Earl Slick

Guitars, Vocals: Gerry Leonard

Drums: Sterling Campbell

Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals: Catherine Russell

DAVID BOWIE - READY, SET, GO! (LIVE, RIVERSIDE STUDIOS ’03)

LIMITED 14-TRACK VINYL DOUBLE ALBUM & CD RELEASED BY PARLOPHONE EXCLUSIVELY FOR RECORD STORE DAY 12th APRIL, 2025

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GO WELL MARIANNE

“I got you to kiss goodnight...” *

Very sad to learn of the passing of Marianne Faithfull in London today at the age of 78.

It seems somehow appropriate to republish the words she posted following David’s death in 2016, as they could have been written for her...

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January 12, 2016

We had great fun (doing the 1980 Floor Show TV special back in 1973). He was a huge artist. All my love to his family. RIP & go well Dave! you are one of the greatest Artists of our time, or at any rate my time; Go well

xxxxx Marianne.

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Brian Aris captured this beautiful portrait of Marianne with David in 1991.

* The lyric here is from the Sonny and Cher song I Got You Babe, which Marianne performed dressed in a backless nun’s habit in an unforgettable duet with David during The 1980 Floor Show.

#RIPMarianneFaithfull #BowieFaithfull

RIP DAVID LYNCH

“And the rain sets in, It's the angel-man, I'm deranged...”

We’re deeply saddened by the passing of David Lynch. Bowie himself cited Lynch’s work as an influence and who could forget seeing DB as FBI Special Agent Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DE5ksQbMYwq/?img_index=1

#RIPDavidLynch #TwinPeaks

RIP DAVID LYNCH

“And the rain sets in, It's the angel-man, I'm deranged...” *

We’re deeply saddened by the passing of David Lynch. You’ll be aware of his work through the incredible body of films he directed.

Bowie himself cited Lynch’s work as an influence and who could forget seeing DB as FBI Special Agent Phillip Jeffries, first introduced to viewers in Lynch’s 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, with further appearances by the special agent in Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces and Twin Peaks: The Return.

Here’s his family’s Facebook announcement...

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It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.”

It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.

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“In heaven, everything is fine...”

* Our lyric quotation is from I’m Deranged, two different edits of which appeared on the soundtrack of Lynch’s Lost Highway.

#RIPDavidLynch #TwinPeaks

YOUNG AMERICANS 50TH ANNIVERSARY VINYL DUE IN MARCH

“Young American, young American, you want the young American...”

DAVID BOWIE YOUNG AMERICANS

50th ANNIVERSARY HALF SPEED MASTERED LP

50th ANNIVERSARY PICTURE DISC LP WITH POSTER

LIMITED EDITION RELEASES

AVAILABLE 7th MARCH, 2025 ON PARLOPHONE

PRE-ORDER HERE (Link will be updated throughout the day)

#BowieYoungAmericans #YoungAmericans50

7th March 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of David Bowie's ninth studio album, YOUNG AMERICANS.

On the exact day of its Golden Jubilee, YOUNG AMERICANS will be issued as a limited edition 50th anniversary half-speed mastered LP and a picture disc LP pressed from the same master. The picture disc comes with a poster of the album cover.

The album saw Bowie broaden his musical horizons once more, embracing what he called 'Plastic Soul' and would give Bowie his first number one single in the U.S., ‘FAME’, co-written with John Lennon and Bowie's then guitarist, Carlos Alomar.

The album was partly influenced by the 'Philly Sound' and recorded in Philadelphia at Sigma Sound studios during a break in the DIAMOND DOGS tour with a band that featured amongst others Bowie stalwart Mike Garson on keys, along with the late Luther Vandross on vocals and David Sanborn on saxophone.

During the Tony Visconti produced sessions at Sigma Sound, Bowie immersed himself in soul music and created a new persona called The Gouster, a slang term for a hip street character. An early version of the album using this title was issued on the boxset WHO CAN I BE NOW? (1974-1976).

When the tour recommenced, Bowie radically reworked the setlist to incorporate the new material and stripped the elaborate production of the tour back to reflect a radically new musical direction. At the end of the tour in December ’74, sessions continued at The Record Plant and, while recording in New York, Bowie connected with John Lennon, where they recorded a cover of The Beatles ‘ACROSS THE UNIVERSE’ and a new collaborative composition, ‘FAME’ at Electric Lady Studios. The New York sessions were co-produced by David and Record Plant engineer Harry Maslin.

Bowie opted not to tour following YOUNG AMERICANS’ release, and within nine months, had moved on again, releasing his next album, STATION TO STATION, and reinventing himself once again in the persona of The Thin White Duke.

This new pressing of YOUNG AMERICANS was cut on a customised late Neumann VMS80 lathe with fully recapped electronics from 192kHz restored masters of the original Record Plant master tapes, with no additional processing on transfer. The half-speed was cut by John Webber at AIR Studios.

DAVID BOWIE - YOUNG AMERICANS - TRACKLISTING

SIDE ONE

Young Americans

Win

Fascination

Right

SIDE TWO

Somebody Up There Likes Me

Across The Universe

Can You Hear Me

Fame

YOUNG AMERICANS

50th ANNIVERSARY HALF SPEED MASTERED LP

50th ANNIVERSARY PICTURE DISC LP WITH POSTER

AVAILABLE 7th MARCH, 2025 ON PARLOPHONE

David Bowie: January 8th 1947 - January 10th 2016

(Original photo by Helmut Newton, 1983)

#BowieForever

LOOKING BACK FIFTY YEARS TO BOWIE’S 28TH BIRTHDAY

“Slim tie, Showdown, Can't stop…” *

It’s 8th January in David Bowie’s UK birthplace and it’s wonderful to see all the appreciation already shown for him around the globe on what would have been his 78th birthday today.

The love for DB via social posts, live tributes and fan meetings is quite incredible. You know how moved he would have been.

The image we’ve used was taken on David’s 28th birthday on this day in 1975. He was snapped by Robin Platzer at the star-studded opening of the Lajeski Gallery in New York, where sixty artists exhibited their interpretation of ‘The Condition of the Tie today'.

Here’s an edited excerpt from a report in The New York Times headed: The Theme Was Ties, the Opening Slightly Mad...

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The show’s theme was “The Condition of the Tie Today,” and its purpose was, as Yoko Ono, artist and former Beatle wife, put it, “fun in this time of depression.”

So for fun's sake, if not always for art's sake, about 1,000 guests and gate‐crashers from the worlds of art, fashion, music and theater and from the fringes of these worlds, jammed into 22‐yearold Gary Lajeski's new chrome and glass winter digs in the old Valentino building. It's an extension of his Tower Gallery in Southampton.

They came with and without tie and in a variety of dress and undress.

Pop singers, ranging from glitter (David Bowie) to bubble gum (David Cassidy), mingled with actors and socialites who were trundled back and forth from the Plaza Hotel by carriage.

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* Actually, Bowie’s tie was far from slim, having been a fan of neckwear as a statement for some time already.

#BowieForever #WorldDavidBowieDay #DavidBowieBirthday

A HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM DBHQ

“Dazzled by the new year”

Welcome to 2025 via Renaud Monfourny’s camera lens from thirty years ago.

This shot was taken in Paris in 1995 to accompany a Bowie interview in Les inRockuptibles with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, published the following year.

Thanks for all your support throughout 2024, it’s more appreciated than you know.

Have a wonderful 2025 and here’s to some exciting Bowie anniversaries ahead and more this year.

#BowieNewYear2025 #BowieRenaudMonfourny #BowieLesinRockuptibles

DAVID’S 10-YEAR-OLD SEASONAL MESSAGE TO YOU

“Black struck the kiss,…”

Ten years ago today, David Bowie kindly sent us his annual seasonal message to post on the official Bowie socials and here on DavidBowie.com

Despite the enthusiasm and exciting promise of more music on the horizon in the brief note, sadly this would prove to be his last year-end holiday message.

We’ve used the same image (called Bowie Ghosts), that accompanied that original post.

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25th December 2014

SEASONAL MESSAGE FROM DAVID BOWIE TO YOU

Wishing you guys a very happy year-end holiday and we are looking forward to a full, plump but snappy, rather sexy, music-crazy New Year, are we not?

Oh, yes we are !!

David Bowie 2014

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#Bowie2014 #BowieForever

DAVID BOWIE’S SECOND LP IS 55 TODAY

“Can you hear me Major Tom?”

The second album by David Bowie (titled David Bowie and latterly known as Space Oddity) was released fifty-five years ago today in the UK through Mercury affiliate Philips Records.

Financed by Mercury on the strength of the Space Oddity single, the album was recorded in 1969 at Trident Studios in London with Tony Visconti producing, aside from Space Oddity itself which was produced by Gus Dudgeon.

Mercury added the legend Man of Words/Man of Music for the US version of the album and used different artwork. Neither the Philips or Mercury versions had any commercial success, despite a positive reaction from critics.

The album finally reached the audience it deserved with the reissue in 1972 by RCA Records under the title of Space Oddity, following Bowie’s commercial breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust. Using a contemporary Mick Rock photo of Bowie as the artwork, the reissue charted in both the UK and the US.

Tony Visconti revisited the album five years ago for the superb Space Oddity (2019 Mix) release which included Conversation Piece, not included on the original.

The cover images here were taken by Vernon Dewhurst.

#SpaceOddity55

DAVID BOWIE CENTRE AT V&A EAST STOREHOUSE OPENS SEPTEMBER 2025

“Waiting for the gift of sound and vision…”

This has been a long time coming since we first announced back in February of last year.

It gives us much pleasure to share the press release following this morning’s London press event where details about V&A East Storehouse including an Order an Object service, new acquisitions, a reveal of opening displays and more about the David Bowie Centre were presented.

With introductions from the V&A’s Deputy Director Tim Reeve and V&A East's Director Gus Casely-Hayford there was also a panel discussion led by Naz Hamdi, along with a sneak peek inside V&A East Storehouse’s Collections Hall.

Keep reading for more information...

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Opening on 13 September 2025, V&A East Storehouse’s free to access David Bowie Centre will be the new home of David Bowie’s archive, recently acquired by the V&A through the generosity of the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group. For the first time, the archive of 90,000+ items, which traces Bowie’s creative processes as a musical innovator, cultural icon, and advocate for self-expression and reinvention, will be accessible to everyone. Highlights include stage costumes such as Bowie’s breakthrough Ziggy Stardust ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti (1972), lyrics for songs including Fame (1975), Heroes (1977) and Ashes to Ashes (1980), as well as examples of the ‘cut up’ method of writing introduced to Bowie by the writer William Burroughs.

Split into three separate zones, the David Bowie Centre will have a mix of small, curated displays and audio-visual installations. There will also be quieter study areas, where visitors can delve into all aspects of Bowie’s archive on their own. From Bowie’s iconic costume to musical instruments, make-up charts, stage models, Oblique Strategies card decks, personal notes, writings, lyrics and music, sketches, designs and more, at V&A East Storehouse, visitors can get closer to David Bowie than ever before.

To develop the inaugural David Bowie Centre displays, the curatorial team consulted with 18–25-year-olds from the four Olympic Boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest through London Legacy Development Corporation and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’s Elevate Youth Voice. The small displays spotlight the wide range of objects within the archive and Bowie’s multi-dimensional creative approach, including his unrealised projects, collaborations, and influences. They also reveal the stories behind the creation of some of Bowie’s iconic albums and personas from Aladdin Sane to The Thin White Duke, and his significant influence on creatives from Lana del Rey to Lil Nas X and Issey Miyake. A series of rotating guest curators – including Bowie’s collaborators, experts, contemporary creatives, and young people from V&A East’s Youth Collective – will also be invited to share their insights and perspectives on the archive.

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More details regarding schedules, events and access to follow.

📸 Bowie live onstage in 1973 image by Mick Rock and a guitar from the David Bowie Archive being prepared ahead of the David Bowie Centre opening at V&A East Storehouse © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

See the David Bowie Facebook version of this post for more images.

#BowieArchiveVAM #VnAEastStorehouse #DavidBowieCentre

'hours...' 25th ANNIVERSARY ON YOUTUBE

“Everything’s falling into place...”

A quick reminder that as part of our 25th anniversary celebration of 'hours...' we have been posting videos from Bowie’s various 1999 promotional TV appearances, live performances, and guest interviews on the official Bowie YouTube channel.

Check them all out here.

#Bowie1999 #Hours25 #BowieHours

TONIGHT ALBUM IS FORTY TODAY

“And you’ll believe you’re loving the alien...”

David Bowie’s Tonight album was released on 24th September 1984, 40 years ago today.

Though there were only three tracks on the album that David Bowie had no hand in the writing of at all, there were just two solo Bowie compositions and two new co-writes out of the nine tracks.

Some would argue the two solo Bowie compositions are the two best tracks on the album. Would you agree?

1. Loving The Alien (Bowie)

2. Don't Look Down (Pop/Williamson) (Originally recorded by Iggy Pop for New Values, 1979)

3. God Only Knows (Wilson/Asher) (Originally recorded by The Beach Boys for Pet Sounds, 1966)

4. Tonight (featuring Tina Turner) (Bowie/Pop) (Originally recorded by Iggy Pop for Lust for Life, 1977)

5. Neighborhood Threat (Bowie/Pop/Gardiner) (Originally recorded by Iggy Pop for Lust for Life, 1977)

6. Blue Jean (Bowie)

7. Tumble And Twirl (Bowie/Pop)

8. I Keep Forgettin' (Leiber/Stoller/Garfield) (Originally recorded by Chuck Jackson for Any Day Now, 1962)

9. Dancing With The Big Boys (featuring Iggy Pop) (Bowie/Pop/Alomar)

As ever, those Dig! chaps have dug a bit deeper, and you can read this in-depth piece by Alan York now...

Tonight: A New Dawn For David Bowie’s Overlooked 80s Album:

We’ll leave you with the intro to Alan’s piece...

“At least in the commercial sense, the success of David Bowie’s 16th studio album, Tonight, was pretty much a fait accompli. Arriving in the autumn of 1984, just nine months after the completion of his enormous Serious Moonlight world tour, the record shot to No.1 and basked in Bowie’s reputation as a global superstar – and yet history often finds it sitting in the shadow of its illustrious predecessor, 1983’s Let’s Dance.”

#BowieTonight40 #BowieDIG