I personally am looking forward to this set, have the others(which are great if you only started with 'hours...' which i did when i was little) my first Bowie i bought with my pocket money was 'Heathen' which i love and 'Never Let Me Down' and 'Tonight' purely becausr i enjoy the music, recently watched 'Labyrinth' which is also cool so this box is one i am most excited about. If that makes me strange then i guess i must be......
I notice Mario McNulty produces new version of NLMD, I heard someone say he was the original producer, yet when I look at the old sleeve notes it says produced by Bowie and David Richards??? Have I got something mixed up?
hmmm....most of TM2 ws recorded before and during the Sound & Vision tour. A little recording was done after the tour, in March 1991. It would be fairer to say that TM2 project ran before and during and after the SV tour, rather than Bowie "taking his break". However, I do commend your insistence on trying to defend TM. It was a complete failure, critically, musically and artistically and it pushed Bowie's reputation to the lowest it ever got. The records are largely horrible. They've gone down in Laughing Gnome territory as toe-curling embarassments. Oy Vey Baby didn't even chart in the UK at a time when a thousand sales in a week got you into the chart. He was completely mis-firing. Yes, he could have done all the right things to make a rock album, got in the right musicians, the right studio and producer but it seemed at the time that it was just not possible to make the correct decisions; decisions that were easy in the 70s deserted him. I don't buy the myth that TM was some sort of catharsis, it was just another mis-step, arguably a bigger mis-step than both Tonight and NLMD.
Even if that could be objectively concluded and agreed upon, WTF cares, really? It's a bad album. Not the end of the world.
IK,R? The era that produced "Outside", "Baby Universal", "You Belong in Rock and Roll", "I Can't Read", "Baby Can Dance"??? I'm so in.
Exactly. The only Tin Machine I like at all is "Goodbye, Mr. Ed", and even that is blighted by the choice of TV's "talking horse" as subject matter. Some thoughts on later-period Bowie: Heathen is a good album but impossible to sequence because it's all over the place, tempo-wise. Reality is up and down, some really good songs mixed with some so-so ones, plus one meh cover (to be fair, nobody could ever rescue the lugubrious "Try Some, Buy Some") and closing with utter brilliance ("Disco King" is stunning).
The Tin Machine albums are hardly horrible. I think their commercial non-success was more to do with commercial music at the time than the strength of the albums; also, they were not well promoted and there was a lot of record company chaos around them. They certainly aren't widely accepted by fans as his nadir.
That was a live album, so it can hardly be compared to actual new music releases. It wouldn’t get played on the radio either, so it wouldn’t be something the public would hear of. This was pre-internet - I didn’t even hear of its release until years later.
Some TM songs lasted as much as 7 years in his setlists. Whereas the NLMD stuff was only ever done in 1987. Don't think he did Gnome live beyond a couple lines as a joke. Bowie had passion in music again with TM, even if the album are a tough listen. He tried doing a 1988 rock session with Fairbairn and Bryan Adams band in LA that didn't surface, beyond a lead vocal getting recycled on a Ronson(?)or Reeves(?) solo album.
I smirked at the Bowie Is Exhibit I attended that had the "FU TM shirt" on a mannequin under a blazer.
If you're David Bowie and you decide it's time to front a RAWK band again, it's really not a simple affair. Picking the right guitarist is particularly fraught. Some of the musicians he picked in those years were blasts from not only the past, but the way past: the Hunt brothers; Peter Frampton. For all kinds of reasons, you can't just pick a Ronson clone and expect anything meaningful to happen. He attested in a 1975 interview to coming to despise the hard rock sound of acts like Zeppelin (and, one presumes, the kind of glorious (to us) glam rock noise made by the Spiders). But even there, the Spiders rarely went out as singer+power trio after he hit: supplemental musicians came and went all over the place.
I believe it was "Like a Rolling Stone", and it appeared on the posthumous 1994 Mick Ronson LP Heaven and Hull. It is... competent but inessential. You can stick around for "Oh rock ’em, Ronno, rock!" at 2:35, if you want...
From the sessions with Bryan Adams' band came three songs later, although they were reworked before release. The aforementioned Like A Rolling Stone, Pretty Pink Rose, which was subsequently given to Adrain Belew, and Lucy Can't Dance, which was a bonus track on BTWN.
Listening to Oy Vey Baby at the moment, it isn't bad as such, I think my main problem with it is that it isn't a full concert, I would have preferred the CD to replicate the VHS and have the full show, rather than a compilation live album with fades.
