Utente:Michele859/Sandbox14
| Recensione | Giudizio |
|---|---|
| Ondarock | 5 |
| Allmusic |    |
David Bowie è l'album di debutto eponimo dell'artista inglese David Bowie, pubblicato nel 1967 per la Deram Records sia in versione mono che stereo e ristampato su compact disc per la prima volta nel 1983. Nella versione uscita negli Stati Uniti nell'agosto dello stesso anno non sono presenti We Are Hungry Men e Maid of Bond Street, mentre Little Bombardier e Silly Boy Blue sono scritte erroneamente Little Bombadier e Silly Boy Blues.(illustrated-db-discography.nl/Album.htm)
Il disco
Seppure ancora lontano dallo stile che lo distinguerà negli album successivi, il disco testimonia comunque la grande energia creativa e la voglia di mettersi in gioco di Bowie ed è caratterizzato da alcune buone composizioni narrative, a metà tra il folk inglese di quegli anni e il vaudeville da rivista. Inoltre, in alcune di quelle che vengono considerate tra le migliori composizioni di Bowie del periodo Deram, si possono rilevare tematiche parallele a quelle delle sue opere della maturità. We Are Hungry Men prefigura l’interesse di Bowie per temi Orwelliani e messianici, She’s Got Medals anticipa la commistione di generi disparati mentre Come and Buy My Toys rimanda al territorio folk acustico che esplorerà nel successivo Space Oddity. Gran parte dei testi fanno inoltre riferimento alla recitazione e al grande schermo, così come all’interesse per la sorte degli emarginati e dei derelitti, temi ricorrenti nei successivi dischi di Bowie.
Molte delle tracce dell’album (tra cui Come and Buy My Toys, Join the Gang, When I Live My Dream e Silly Boy Blue) vennero in quello stesso anno proposte ad artisti come Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins e i Jefferson Airplane ma in tutti i casi le offerte vennero rifiutate, ad eccezione di Silly Boy Blue che venne incisa da Billy Fury l’anno successivo.(ref)
- perone: While the Deram album David Bowie was not the commercial breakthrough for which a singer-songwriter or record company might have hoped, it pro-vides plenty of evidence of Bowie’s quickly developing compositional, lyrical, conceptual, and vocal skills. In the case of a few songs, notably “Love You Till Tuesday” and “Sell Me a Coat,” Bowie exhibits strong commercial potential: certainly these songs are as hook-fi lled and convincingly performed as much material that was on the 1966–1967 American and British pop charts. Some of the other songs present strong thematic and theatrical constructs, but are musically or lyrically outside the scope of pop commerciality. Due to the rela-tive obscurity of David Bowie today (and certainly at the time of its release), I will discuss several representative songs that stand as particularly signifi cant examples of Bowie’s prefame work as a singer-songwriter. Let us begin with possibly the two most commercially viable songs on the album: “Sell Me a Coat” and “Love You Till Tuesday.” “Sell Me a Coat” uses the metaphor of standing coatless in the winter cold to express the feel-ings that his character has since his lover has left him. The sentiments are fairly predictable, but the lyrics are rich with imagery. Bowie’s music exhibits strong melodic contrast between verse (in which his lyrics explore the feelings of icy coldness now that his girlfriend has rejected him) and chorus (in which he requests that someone sell him a coat—bring him metaphorically into a new loving relationship—to warm him). The lower-range melody of the verses help Bowie the performer express a feeling of resignation that matches his lyrics, while the higher range and shorter phrases of the chorus highlight the urgency of his character’s need for the metaphorical “coat.” The melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material is all easily memorable and shows strong commercial potential. And, the combination of music and lyrics, and use of metaphor resemble other successful British pop material of the day. In particular, the Graham Goulding song “No Milk Today,” popularized by the group Herman’s Hermits, comes to mind, not because of any foreground resemblance, but because the two songs seem to belong within the same basic metaphorical genre. That, along with the richness of Bowie’s vocal work on the recording, makes this one of his best prefame songs. Bowie’s melodic and harmonic writing also bears some resemblance to the folkish progressive rock ballads composed by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues. The song “Love You Till Tuesday” finds Bowie singing in an exaggerated accent that emphasizes the Englishness of the song. Again, the comparison to Herman’s Hermits is inescapable: one need only think of the band’s lead singer, Peter Noone, and his delivery on “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” to get a sense of the overt Englishness of the Bowie performance. The “da-da-da-dum” chorus and the melodic and harmonic material of the verses is strong in the hook department. One could easily imagine one of the top-40 British pop bands of the day—most obviously, Herman’s Hermits—including this as an album track, or even as a viable single. Quite possibly, part of the problem for David Bowie in gaining a com-mercial following early in his career was that the album David Bowie, like Bowie’s earlier singles, is just too disparate stylistically. Bowie’s lyrics on the album range from funny, to whimsical, to dark, to sarcastic. The character types he observes and portrays in the songs include lovable losers, social outcasts, introspective near-philosophers, and brash Hitler-esque types. The music ranges from up-tempo top-40 pop, to waltz, to rock, to dark brood-ing, nearly monothematic melodies. As a collection of songs, the album tends to come off as a shotgun approach to writing: let’s try a whole bunch of approaches and see what strikes a chord with the public. In the context of a bunch of 45-rpm singles that approach might work, but in the context of an album it proves too confusing for the listener. Among those songs that contrast most sharply with material such as “The Laughing Gnome,” “Love You Till Tuesday,” and “Sell Me a Coat,” let us consider two others: “We Are Hungry Men” and “Little Bombardier.” “We Are Hungry Men” is about the closest thing to a rock (as opposed to pop) song on the album. Bowie’s lyrics, however, are anything but conventional. He portrays a character who is part of the master race, and who would legal-ize and endorse mass abortions in order to cure the overpopulation prob-lem. The basic gist of the song is that by wiping out those who are the less desirable members of society, the hungry men of the song’s title, will ensure that they have enough. Between Bowie’s portrayal of a strange, twisted char-acter in the lyrics, the cheesy sound of the Farfi sa organ, and up-tempo pace of the song, “We Are Hungry Men” anticipates the themes and sounds of the post-punk, new wave bands of the late 1970s: some of the songs on the fi rst two Talking Heads albums—Talking Heads: 77 and More Songs About Build-ings and Food—for example, are natural descendants of this Bowie song. Incidentally, the ties between David Bowie and David Byrne, principal songwriter and lead singer of Talking Heads, would reemerge in the late 1970s. The main character of “Little Bombardier” is a former war hero who even-tually is forced to leave town because of suspicions about his possible inap-propriate relationships with children. Bowie develops the character gradually over the course of the song, so that his perversions aren’t immediately made clear. Bowie leaves the specifi cs of the Little Bombardier’s unnaturally close relationship with the children of the neighborhood somewhat hazy, so that the song is not overly lurid. As a character, the Bombardier fi ts in squarely with Ziggy Stardust, several of the characters of the album Outside, the Dia-mond Dogs, and the other social/sexual outcasts of Bowie’s later, better-known songs. It is in the combination of character type, lyrics, and music, however, that “Little Bombardier” becomes more than just an off-the-wall song about a war hero who is exiled from town because of his proclivity toward pedophilia. Bowie sets his tale to waltz music that is both disarming and reminiscent of the music of the grand age of ballroom dancing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Melodically, rhythmically, and harmonically, this music would not be at all out of place in a 1920s or 1930s dance hall. And, the arrangers and producers with whom Bowie worked on his debut album orchestrate the song in a style entirely appropriate for the ballroom era. In fact, Bowie’s approach falls within a tradition of setting lyrics that deal with diffi cult or controversial topics to music that provides irony by means of its completely disarming character. One need only consider some of the work of Gustav Mahler in setting texts that deal with death to child-like melodies, or—an even closer antecedent to the entire gestalt of the “Little Bombardier”—one of the great collaborations of Kurt Weill and Ber-told Brecht in the musical The Three-Penny Opera. The song “Moritat: Mack the Knife,” with its tale of a serial murder who favored prostitutes as victims set to perky jazz-infl uenced cabaret music, immediately comes to mind. Some of the other songs on David Bowie are not so successful. While Bowie had struck a balance between singing the verses of the single ver-sion of “Rubber Band” in the lower and upper octaves, the album version of the song fi nds him singing more of the material in the upper octave. This makes his voice sound forced and renders the mood progression of the song less effective than that in the earlier recording. The lyrics of the song “When I Live My Dream” rely on images of slaying dragons and other childhood dreams, whereas the music would not be out of place in a 1960s Broadway musical starring a particularly naïve character. The song as a whole ends up sounding too much like something from the 1964–1965 British Invasion (or a not-too-great early 1960s musical) to be completely effective. The songs in which Bowie refl ects back farther in time lyrically or musically (“Little Bombardier” and “Rubber Band,” for example) are much more effective than in a song such as “When I Live My Dream” that just ends up sounding a year or two out of fashion. The use of classical orchestral instruments, especially the woodwinds (bas-soon, oboe, English horn, and piccolo) and brasses (tuba, trumpet, and French horn) that Bowie’s producers at Deram chose both for his audition recordings and for many of the songs on this album may seem like a somewhat strange choice: they decidedly were not commonly heard on pop records of the day. However, I believe that there is another way to look at the arrange-ments on David Bowie. I tend to hear the album as part of a larger corporate plan at Deram to fi nd a commercially viable way to merge classical and pop. This was the same company, after all, that would release the groundbreaking Days of Future Passed—on which the Moody Blues was joined by the London Festival Orchestra—in 1967 (the same year as the release of David Bowie) complete with album liner notes that, frankly, make a big deal out of the “fusion” of the two styles.4 The combination of folk, pop, rock, and classical on David Bowie might not have been as commercial accessible as that of Days of Future Passed, but there are some ties between the two. In fact, in a few songs, notably “Sell Me a Coat” and the album version of “Rubber Band,” the classical, pop, folk combination is more fully integrated than in parts of Days of Future Passed, particularly because of the chamber music nature that runs through the Bowie album. Despite its lack of commercial and critical success, Bowie’s debut album shows a young singer-songwriter exploring a wide variety of styles, and generally to good effect. Once David Bowie became a star, the Deram album was reissued, as was a follow-up album that consisted of post-David Bowie singles and several recordings that had been left unissued at the time of Bowie’s departure from the record label. Deram has reissued the album’s material on compact disc as part of the single-CD collection The Deram Anthology 1966–1968 (Deram 844 784–2, 1997). Despite of, or perhaps because of, the sharp contrast between these recordings (particularly in composition and orchestration) and Bowie’s post-Deram work, this collection is a must-have for any serious David Bowie fan that wants to experience the full range of Bowie’s talents.
- exploring: It is hard to believe now, but there was a time when David Bowie wasn’t quite sure how one went about becoming a pansexual glam rock superstar. In 1968, four years into an unsuccessful musical career, he recorded “In The Heat Of The Morning”, a sinister love song with an urgent melody that his then manager, Ken Pitt, considered the perfect vehicle with which to project this unknown singer to stardom. Bowie’s label, Deram, rejected the song, as they had his previous offering, “Let Me Sleep Beside You”. It was the final nail in the coffin for what had not been a fruitful relationship between label and singer. The reissue of the 1967 album David Bowie gives us a picture of one of our most creative pop stars scrabbling about in the trough of showbusiness, in search of an identity. Having released a handful of unsuccessful R&B singles as Davy Jones and the Lower Third, Bowie was trying pretty much everything on his debut album, perhaps with the notion that something must stick. There is Pink Floyd-style eccentricity (“Uncle Arthur”), matinee-idol crooning (“When I Live My Dream”) and groovy London pop (“Love You Till Tuesday”). There is even an attempt to introduce buddhist philosophy to the 60s teen scene, with “Silly Boy Blue”. None of it worked, but it all fed into the making of a unique star. Bowie was a fan of the British vaudeville actor-singer Anthony Newley and the “space mysticism” (his words) of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. He was living in a converted ambulance, virtually penniless, touring the country and performing in small clubs. Pitt came across him on 17 April 1966, when he was playing London’s Marquee Club. “David oozed charisma and was in total command of himself,” says Pitt. “I was particularly struck by the artistry with which he used his body, as if it were an accompanying instrument.” Pitt was also impressed by Bowie’s choice of material. Alongside the usual R&B covers was a rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. “It was daring and delightful. From then on my ambitions were his ambitions and I hoped that one day I would be able to concentrate on him as my only client.” Pitt noted Bowie’s interests in pop, mime, music hall and storytelling, and saw in him the possibility of an all-new, all-singing, all-dancing, multi-operational pop artist. He took him to the theatre for the first time — to see Joe Orton’s Loot, among other productions — and encouraged an interest in literature, citing Bowie’s enthusiasm for André Gide’s If It Die and Albert Camus’ The Outsider. He played him the first record by the Velvet Underground, brought back from a trip to New York. “I placed the VU on the turntable,” Pitt says. “As he so often did when aroused or excited he threw one leg up, tucked it under the chair and sat on it. Particularly delighted with one track, he smiled at me and said, ‘I’m going to pinch that’.” Pitt’s first attempt to make Bowie a star involved taking a demo to Hugh Mendl of Deram, a progressive pop subsidiary set up by the Decca label in order to revive its dowdy image. Decca’s in-house producer, Mike Vernon, was given the job of taking Bowie’s strange songs and turning them into something the young, record-buying public might be interested in. “I had never heard of him,” Vernon says. “My first reaction was: he’s a young Anthony Newley. There was a dramatic, show-tune influence in the songs and a storytelling approach that was unique at the time. He was hip, even if he wasn’t famous, and I realised that producing this record would broaden my horizons. The whole album, from going into the studio to mastering, took a week.” Its creator has done his best to distance himself from it, but David Bowie has an eerie charm, filled as it is with slightly seamy tales of parochial life that could have been lifted from one of the Joe Orton plays Bowie had seen with Pitt. On “There Is A Happy Land” he sings of how “sissy Stephen plays with girls”; on “Uncle Arthur” he recites the tale of a 31-year-old man who runs home to his mollycoddling mother after his girlfriend proves to be a terrible cook. And on “Love You Till Tuesday” he appears to be taking on the guise of a frivolous stalker, creepily referring to himself as “little me” and hiding in apple trees until getting bored of the girl he is shadowing. Vernon says: “I remember thinking, ‘This is a really quirky record – who on earth will buy it? But when we did ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ I could see that Bowie was special. I thought, ‘If we can come up with a song which has that certain something, this guy might just go somewhere.'” The song that Deram decided had that certain something was “The Laughing Gnome”. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate this much-mocked novelty single. Backed by a rhythm pinched from the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For The Man”, this tale of meeting a little man who looks like a “rolling gnome” and packing him off on a train to Eastbourne, only to come back home and find him living in the chimney, has the kind of perverse wit that has run through Bowie’s career. “‘The Laughing Gnome’ took almost as long as the entire debut album to record because we had to do all the speeded-up vocals, which was quite difficult in those days,” Vernon says, referring to the gnome’s chipmunk-like parts, that were provided by Bowie himself. “It became a top-10 hit a few years later, by which time Bowie was famous. It was a terrible embarrassment to him, but to all concerned it was only ever intended as a funny children’s record.” Bowie has never talked about his debut in public. Now, David Bowie is being reissued on the same day as the release of a live album from his Reality world tour of 2004. The collision suggests a wish to bury this portrait of his former self. But as Vernon says, “David can’t really disown it because that’s the way he was at the time”. In April 1968, Pitt told Bowie that he needed to write a new song if he was ever going to make it. Bowie had recently seen 2001: A Space Odyssey and, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s success in capturing a sense of existential intergalactic loneliness, he came up with “Space Oddity”. Pitt gave a demo of the song to Deram, but the label had gone cold on its would-be star. Bowie retreated to suburban Beckenham to run a Sunday night folk club in The Three Tuns pub and study mime under Lindsay Kemp. Pitt concentrated on making a promotional film, LoveYou Till Tuesday, which included “Space Oddity”. Pitt says: “When one morning a cameraman said to David, ‘Well, if it isn’t Major Tom,’ I suspected that we had finally found that long-hoped- for hit.”
- exploring: Da Disc and Music Echo, 10 giugno 1967: A remarkable, creative debut album by a 19-year-old Londoner who wrote all 14 tracks and sings them with a sufficiently fresh interpretation to make quite a noise on the scene if he gets the breaks and the right singles. Here is a new talent that deserves attention, for though David Bowie has no great voice, he can project words with a cheeky “side” that is endearing yet not precocious. “Love You Till Tuesday” is a bright song with a fascinating lyric; “Uncle Arthur” is excellent; “Please Mr. Gravedigger” is eerie, original; and a lot of his other work is full of abstract fascination.
- amg: David Bowie's first ever LP -- the 1967 set that introduced the world to the likes of "Rubber Band" and "There Is a Happy Land" -- is an intriguing collection, as much in its own right as for the light it sheds on Bowie's future career. Nobody hearing "She's Got Medals," for instance, can fail to marvel at the sheer prescience displayed by a song about gender-bending. Even within Bowie's subsequent world of alligators, starmen, and astronettes, however, there are no parallels for the likes of "Please Mr. Gravedigger," with its storm-swept lament for a murdered little girl, or "Uncle Arthur," the archetypal mommy's boy, whose one stab at snapping the apron strings shatters when he realizes his new love cannot cook. There's also a frightening glimpse into future Bowie universes, served up by "We Are Hungry Men," a tale of a world in which food is so scarce that the people have resorted to cannibalism. Not all of the songs are such sharp observations of human frailties and failings, while the distinctly family-entertainment style arrangements make it clear that, whatever audience Bowie was aiming for, rock fans were not included among them. But songs like "Love You Till Tuesday" and "Maid of Bond Street" have a catchy irresistibility to them all the same, and though this material has been repackaged with such mind-numbing frequency as to seem all but irrelevant today, David Bowie still remains a remarkable piece of work. And it sounds less like anything else he's ever done than any subsequent record in his catalog.
Registrazione
Le sessioni di registrazione dell'album iniziarono il 14 novembre 1966 con Uncle Arthur e She’s Got Medals nello studio 2 della Decca a West Hampstead, sotto l'attenta direzione del manager Kenneth Pitt. Questa sarebbe stata la sede per tutte le sessioni, che si susseguivano velocemente mentre i Buzz esaurivano le esibizioni in calendario. Dieci giorni dopo vennero registrate There is a Happy Land, We Are Hungry Men e Join the Gang. I Buzz tennero l’ultimo concerto in programma il 2 dicembre ma continuarono a partecipare alle registrazioni che continuarono nei 15 giorni successivi. Little Bombardier, Sell Me a Coat, Silly Boy Blue e Maid of Bond Street furono realizzate tra l’8 e il 9 dicembre con a seguire, rispettivamente il 12 e 13 dicembre, Come and Buy My Toys e Please, Mr. Gravedigger.
Il produttore Mike Vernon definì Bowie «la persona più semplice con cui lavorare», aggiungendo che «alcune melodie erano ottime e il materiale, i testi, erano di una qualità straordinaria». Vernon era assistito dal tecnico del suono Gus Dudgeon (futuro produttore del brano Space Oddity), che pure apprezzò il lavoro dicendo al biografo David Buckley che «la musica era molto cinematografica, tutto molto suggestivo, molto onesto e spontaneo, e perciò unico». Dek Fearnley, che aiutò David negli arrangiamenti, ricordava un metodo di collaborazione più o meno simile a quello che Bowie avrebbe usato trent’anni dopo. «Aveva una canzone nella sua forma base e la sviluppavamo insieme. Diceva, "mi piacerebbe avere un violino" e io dicevo, "sì, manteniamo un tocco sentimentale, mettiamoci un trombone" e lui diceva che era una grande idea. Era così maledettamente ispirato... mi ha stimolato su cose che altrimenti non avrei mai potuto fare». Essendo in possesso di una preparazione musicale piuttosto rudimentale, i due acquistarono un manuale, l’Observer’s Book of Music, per cercare di comprendere i termini usati dai musicisti di Vernon, molti dei quali provenivano dalla London Philharmonic Orchestra.(xoomer.alice.it/life_on_mars/cronologia67-69.html)
Poco più di due mesi dopo, il 25 febbraio 1967, le versioni di Rubber Band, Love You Till Tuesday e When I Live My Dreams che sarebbero apparse sull'album completarono le registrazioni.
Influenze
David Bowie è visto spesso come una "trovata da varietà" derivata da un flirt stilistico con Anthony Newley, anche se lo stesso Bowie, durante le registrazioni dell’album, confessò a Mike Vernon di essere un ammiratore del cantante e attore inglese. Come ha dichiarato Gus Dudgeon a David Buckley, «se la prendeva con Mike Vernon e me perché avevamo detto "Bowie è veramente bravo e le sue canzoni sono grandi, ma sembra Anthony Newley"». L’album è considerato, secondo la definizione del biografo David Buckley, «un'opera giovanile tendente al servilismo affrontabile soltanto da chi possiede una soglia di imbarazzo sufficientemente alta». Il periodo Deram è stato sin da allora svalutato da Bowie stesso: «quella roba tipo Tony Newley, che piaggeria», disse nel 1990. «No, non ho molto da dire a suo favore. Quanto ai testi, immagino che stessi cercando una mia dimensione, da narratore di storie brevi. Musicalmente è piuttosto stravagante. Non so dire dove stessi rovistando. Sembrava avere le sue radici dappertutto, nel rock, nel vaudeville, nella rivista o non so che altro. Non so se ero Max Miller o Elvis Presley».
In realtà le somiglianze vocali con Anthony Newley affiorano solo in brani come Love You Till Tuesday, Little Bombardier e She’s Got Medals. L'album presenta infatti una miscela di folk e brevi storie che trae molti spunti dal versante più commerciale della nascente psichedelia britannica. Il tema della nostalgia del tempo di guerra, le evocazioni di innocenza infantile e il campionario di disadattati sociali, sono tutti coerenti con i lavori contemporanei dei Pink Floyd di Syd Barrett, della Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band e persino dei Beatles (Revolver, apparso l’anno prima, proponeva le sue storie di persone solitarie e sottomarini gialli mentre Sgt. Pepper venne pubblicato lo stesso giorno di David Bowie).
Tracce
Tutte le tracce sono scritte da David Bowie.
- Uncle Arthur - 2:07
- Sell Me a Coat - 2:58
- Rubber Band - 2:17
- Love You Till Tuesday - 3:09
- There Is a Happy Land - 3:11
- We Are Hungry Men - 2:58
- When I Live My Dream - 3:22
- Little Bombardier - 3:24
- Silly Boy Blue - 3:48
- Come and Buy My Toys - 2:07
- Join the Gang - 2:17
- She's Got Medals - 2:23
- Maid of Bond Street - 1:43
- Please Mr. Gravedigger - 2:35
Formazione
Uscita e accoglienza
Le recensioni ottenute da David Bowie non furono molte ma l’album ricevette critiche sostanzialmente positive. Allen Evans di New Musical Express definì il disco «molto innovativo» e Bowie «un talento molto promettente», sottolineando «una notevole freschezza di suono negli arrangiamenti leggeri di David e Dek Fearnley». La rivista Disc & Music Echo presentava il disco come «un album di debutto notevole e creativo di un diciannovenne londinese» e dichiarava: «Ecco un nuovo talento che merita attenzione perché, sebbene David Bowie non abbia una gran voce, sa porgere le parole con una certa impertinenza che risulta accattivante, anche se non precoce... piena di astratto fascino».(bowiewonderworld.com/press/press60.htm#100667, algonet.se/~bassman/articles/index.html) Kenneth Pitt aveva spedito copie di David Bowie a numerose persone con cui aveva contatti nel modo dello spettacolo per sollevare interesse nei confronti del cantante, ricevendo anche lettere di congratulazioni. Tuttavia, l'album non fu un successo commerciale, anche per lo scarso interesse della Deram nel promuoverlo. Tony Hall, capo della promozione Decca e personaggio chiave nell’assicurare il contratto a Bowie, era passato ad un’altra società ancora prima dell’uscita del disco, così David aveva perduto il suo referente all’interno della compagnia.
Copertina
Le foto della copertina sono state scattate dal fratello di Dek Fearnley, Gerald.(amg) Il servizio fotografico si era svolto nello studio-cantina di quest’ultimo, sotto una chiesa in Bryanston Street vicino a Marble Arch, dove David e Dek avevano anche fatto le prove durante la registrazione dell’album. «Quella giacca militare, ne andavo molto fiero... era di sartoria», ricordava il cantante molti anni dopo circa l’abbigliamento che aveva scelto come complemento del suo taglio di capelli da paggetto. La fotografia sul retro di copertina dell'album uscito nel Regno Unito è un primo piano frontale di Bowie mentre quella presente nell'edizione americana è uno scatto di profilo.(algonet.se/~bassman/album/index.html)
Descrizione dei brani
Uncle Arthur
Il brano di apertura è una tragicommedia incentrata sulla figura dello "zio Arthur", un trentenne disadattato che legge ancora i fumetti e vive in simbiosi con la mamma. Un giorno, nel tranquillo quadretto familiare irrompe Sally e Arthur lascia la madre per seguire la donna che ama. Si pentirà presto di essersi sposato e tornerà a rifugiarsi in seno alla madre. La descrizione delle tribolazioni domestiche del protagonista si può ritrovare in Repetition del 1979, anche se in quest'ultima le tematiche saranno completamente diverse.
little Sally may be lovely, but cooking leaves her in a maze.»
«Gira la testa di Arthur, non ha mangiato bene per giorni,
la giovane Sally può essere deliziosa, ma la cucina la disorienta.»
Uncle Arthur è inclusa nella raccolta The Deram Anthology 1966-1968 del 1997.
- songs: David Bowie’s first LP, released on the same June morning as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is an anthology of comic strips: cross-dressing soldiers, zombies from a soon-to-come dystopia, lost children, ready-made hipsters, maiden uncles, shabby bombardiers. It didn’t sell, and Bowie, seemingly embarrassed by it, has tried to write the record out of his history (selections from it never turn up on career anthologies, though that may be in part due to rights issues). It’s comparable to the first LP by Bowie’s Deram labelmate Cat Stevens, which was recorded around the same time, shared some of the same musicians and had a similar taste for eclecticism. That said, Stevens led off his album with his #2 hit “Matthew and Son” while Bowie chose his clapalong hornpipe “Uncle Arthur.” “Uncle Arthur,” also one of the first tracks recorded for the LP, is a character sketch much in the Ray Davies line (down to the mother resenting her child’s ill-advised relationship, a Davies staple), though it’s more surreal and detached from humanity. The Batman-loving title character is both a sad portrait of a middle-aged eccentric unable to accept happiness when he stumbles into it, and also a boy’s imagining of an adult, one who flees from any extended contact with girls. It’s telling that the character is known only as Uncle Arthur, furthering the sense the lyric’s from a child’s perspective, with the muddles of adult life resolved by a child’s logic (Uncle Arthur left Sally because he didn’t like her cooking, or so mum says). “Uncle Arthur”‘s one of Bowie’s better tunes to date—the chorus seems crafted for a pub sing-a-long. Some nice touches in the arrangement, too: after the second verse, when Arthur finds love, the opening wind melody returns, now as a duet. And at song’s end the chorus, which has only been three lines until now, is finally resolved with a fourth line: “follows mother,” which is Arthur’s final fate. Storytime’s over. Recorded 14 November 1966, released in June 1967 on DML 1007 David Bowie. The LP was produced by Mike Vernon and engineered by Gus Dudgeon.
Sell Me a Coat
Malinconica ballata in cui si ricorre al simbolismo che vede l'estate come immagine di amore e felicità e l’inverno come perdita dell'amore e di frigidità. In questo periodo Bowie eseguì il brano nello spettacolo teatrale Pierrot in Turquoise di Lindsay Kemp e due anni più tardi venne inserito nel video Love You Till Tuesday. In questa occasione, alla registrazione originale vennero aggiunti una strumentazione supplementare e le voci di accompagnamento di Hermione Farthingale (all'epoca fidanzata di Bowie) e del chitarrista John Hutchinson.(illustrated-db-discography.nl/SongS.htm#S) La sequenza del video contiene riprese effettuate presso la boutique londinese Mr. Fish, che avrebbe fornito a David i costumi usati nel periodo di The Man Who Sold the World.
- songs: Well before Bowie’s first album was released, his manager Ken Pitt sent acetates to American musicians, hoping that Bowie, like Bob Dylan or Laura Nyro, could first get a name as a songwriter. Pitt sent “She’s Got Medals” and “Silly Boy Blue” to the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Co. (both rejected both) and, in a sign he considered Bowie to fit into the “folk” niche, Pitt singled out Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, to whom he sent everything from “When I Live My Dream” to “There is a Happy Land” (sadly, not “We Are Hungry Men”—a Peter, Paul and Mary version of that track would’ve been one for the ages). No one wanted anything to do with Bowie’s admittedly odd songs. It’s surprising that they all rejected “Sell Me a Coat,” though, as it’s one of Bowie’s catchiest early compositions, with its nursery-rhyme chorus. Someone could’ve made a hit, a minor one at least, with these materials. “Sell Me a Coat” is Bowie coloring within the lines—it was almost certainly written and produced to be a possible single. The verses’ melody is in a lower range, with Bowie singing phrases slowly and somberly; the chorus has a brisker tempo, is in a higher key and is made of short, punchy phrases (like the consonant “little patch pockets”). Overlaid onto all this are Bowie’s alternating images of winter and despair (the verses—his girlfriend has dumped him) and warmth and renewal (the chorus—he’s looking for a new one). It’s almost too perfect, and so winds up feeling a little fake and cloying. Still, those qualities didn’t hurt a great many Top 10 hits. “Sell Me a Coat” is a girl dressed up for the ball who wound up with no dance partners. Recorded 8 December 1966. A revised version (heard in the promo clip above) was made for Bowie’s promotional film “Love You Till Tuesday” in 1969, with new backing vocals from Bowie’s then-partners Hermione Farthingale (you don’t get names like that anymore) and John “Hutch” Hutchinson—the new version’s a mess, mainly because, due to odd mixing, the backing vox often drown out Bowie’s lead); on David Bowie.
Rubber Band
Rubber Band segna l'uscita di David Bowie dalla scena mod londinese e dal rhythm and blues che aveva caratterizzato i singoli precedenti e preannuncia il suo nuovo interesse per il teatro vaudeville, il che può essere spiegato anche dalla sentita necessità di una svolta da parte del cantante inglese. I passati fallimenti commerciali, che avevano portando tra l'altro alla risoluzione del contratto con la Pye Records,(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/) avevano spinto Bowie alla ricerca di un cambio estetico nelle composizioni e di un livello più sofisticato di scrittura e arrangiamento rispetto al materiale di inizio 1966.(Pegg)
Il 18 ottobre 1966, Bowie e i Buzz (più il trombettista Chick Norton) registrarono tre canzoni agli R.G. Jones Studios, Rubber Band, The Gravedigger (che poi sarebbe diventata Please Mr. Gravedigger) e The London Boys, con le quali il manager Kenneth Pitt tentò di ottenere un contratto con la Deram Records, una controllata di nuova costituzione della Decca.(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/) Così come era avvenuto con la registrazione del singolo precedente I Dig Everything, fu abbastanza evidente che la band era piuttosto inesperta in termini di arrangiamenti ma questa volta funzionò.(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/) L'etichetta rimase positivamente colpita e il 27 ottobre decise che Rubber Band e The London Boys sarebbero state pubblicate su 45 giri.(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/) Il bassista Derek Fearnley ha ricordato nel 1991: «Avevamo lavorato sul tipo di suono che volevamo e avevamo faticosamente scritto la notazione, ma sbagliavamo tutti i tempi. Per fortuna i musicisti interpretarono quello che avevamo scritto e siamo riusciti ad arrivare in fondo».(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/)
Improvvisamente erano passate le influenze blues dei singoli precedenti, l'impostazione si era spostata dai club al teatro di provincia e invece di giovinezza e desiderio emergevano i ricordi della "grande guerra".(bowiesongs.wordpress.com/?s=rubber+band) Anche se le radici di Rubber Band affondano nel vaudeville e nel teatro musicale leggero di inizio novecento, si tratta infatti di un brano malinconico che narra di un veterano della prima guerra mondiale che si vede portar via la donna dal direttore di una banda musicale.
Rubber Band è anche la prima incisione in cui si manifesta la passione di David Bowie per il cantante e attore britannico Anthony Newley, che nel 1960 aveva raggiunto la vetta delle classifiche inglesi (e italiane) con Why. Lo stile vocale di Newley, caratterizzato da un vibrato esagerato e da una pronuncia affettata, avrebbe contrassegnato la produzione di Bowie per tutto il "periodo Deram" fino al 1968.(Perone)
Il 45 giri fu pubblicato il 2 dicembre 1966 e fece registrare l’ennesimo insuccesso commerciale nonostante alcune recensioni positive.(bowiewonderworld.com/press/press60.htm#rubb) ma Rubber Band semplicemente non incontrò il favore di chi comperava i dischi, deludendo nello stesso tempo chi aveva seguito Bowie nel periodo mod, e inoltre le stazioni radio non erano troppo entusiaste di passare la canzone perché non commerciale e troppo "in".(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/)
Kenneth Pitt lavorò anche sulla pubblicazione del singolo negli Stati Uniti e il 10 novembre a New York incontrò Walt Maguire che lavorava per la London Records, filiale della Decca che distribuiva per il mercato americano.(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/) Anche a Maguire piacque Rubber Band e decise di pubblicarla a dicembre, ma anche oltreoceano il 45 giri passò inosservato e un mese dopo la sua uscita Maguire scrisse a Pitt esprimendo la sua delusione per i risultati.(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/)
Nonostante l'insuccesso, il 25 febbraio 1967 Bowie decise di registrare nuovamente il brano per includerlo nel suo album di debutto, in una versione un po' più lenta e con alcune differenze nel testo: il cambio della data citata all'inizio da 1912 a 1910 e l'aggiunta dell'ironica invettiva finale «Spero ti si rompa la bacchetta...» («I hope you break your baton...»).(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/)
Rubber Band segnò la fine del contratto con la Deram e, inoltre, lo stesso giorno della sua pubblicazione Bowie e i Buzz si separarono.(exploringdavidbowie.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/rubber-band-2/) Il brano apparve in seguito nel video Love You Till Tuesday (1969), accompagnata da una sequenza che mostrava un baffuto Bowie, in giacca sportiva e paglietta mentre assiste ad un immaginario concerto bandistico.
Love You Till Tuesday
Love You Till Tuesday è stata pubblicata il 14 luglio 1967 con Did You Ever Have a Dream come lato B e, nel 1975, come lato B di The London Boys.
There Is a Happy Land
In questo brano sentimentale ispirato a William Blake, l'innocenza infantile è vista come un paradiso metaforicamente separato dall'incombente oscurità dell'età adulta. Il brano fu scelto dalla Deram come lato B della versione americana di Rubber Band, sostituendo The London Boys che aveva suscitato polemiche per il testo.
- songs: Once when I was around 24, I was sitting in a Manhattan subway car across from a kid who seemed irritated by his nattering mother. I gave him a raised eyebrow and a smile of sympathy and he stared at me coldly for a moment, as if I was absurd and possibly evil. I realized I was just a grown-up making a weird face at him. We were no longer allies. I had crossed the border and there was no going back; I wearily consigned myself to adulthood. “There Is a Happy Land,” for me the best song on David Bowie, is Bowie’s attempt to convey the common mind of childhood. He wasn’t alone: psychedelia was in part a means of burrowing back into childhood, whose mindset was seen as being akin to LSD-inspired visions. Think of Syd Barrett’s early songs like “See Emily Play,” recorded a few months after this track. Bowie’s “When I’m Five” and “There Is a Happy Land” are two of the better depictions in pop music of how a child regards the world, and as such they can be unnerving. In “Happy Land” there’s the sense of childhood being a separate order, with its ranks and guilds, its legends and factions all unknown to adults. The song is set in a field near dusk, the hour just before dinner, when the empire of children is at its height. “There Is a Happy Land” is ironically named—childhood is rarely purely happy, but is rather tumultuous, epic, hilarious, terrifying and so surreal that the best attempts of artists only come halfway close to capturing it (maybe Jean Vigo or Lewis Carroll came the closest). The lyric has classic fictional children like Tiny Tim playing alongside Bowie’s own creations (perhaps even his memories of Bromley neighborhood kids), much like how kids often blend their lives with stories, as well as how they constantly appraise their world, assigning values and colors to their playmates: Jenny whose sister died, Billy with the limp. A child’s reasoning can be both straight and capricious: I recall being convinced that my dog Jip could talk, but chose not to, for mysterious reasons of his own. The track has one of the LP’s more ambitious arrangements, opening with a 16-bar instrumental section, with an initial solo by what sounds like a celesta but could be a treated piano, a second by a distant-sounding French horn (again, my guess—could be a trumpet) that ends a bit discordantly. Pieces of the solos recur as motifs, along with several other themes (e.g., a tiny waterfall of piano notes on the penultimate bar of each bridge), which cycle through the rest of the song. Bowie sings much of the lyric in long, slow phrases, though the asides to adults are sung curtly, often in four-note phrases seemingly tacked on to the ends of verses. The two bridge sections are in constant harmonic churn, sometimes with a new chord for nearly every beat (the line “Tiny Tim sings prayers and hymns/he’s so small we don’t notice him,” for example, dips and rises like a seesaw, going (acc. to this chord chart) F/Em/Am/C/Am/C/F/Em over four bars). The title is possibly derived from “There Is a Happy Land (Far, Far Away),” the 19th Century Scottish hymn, which begins “There is a happy land, far, far away/where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.” Which fits well, for childhood is something of a storm-cloudy heaven. Recorded on 24 November 1966; on David Bowie.
We Are Hungry Men
Intitolato in origine We Are Not Your Friends, il brano racconta la nascita di una dittatura che si propone di adottare misure drastiche come il cannibalismo per combattere la sovrappopolazione. Pur lasciando intravedere alcune tematiche che diventeranno familiari nelle opere di Bowie, come l'adorazione del Messia e la paura del totalitarismo, l'atmosfera è ancora più ironica che inquietante e le interiezioni di un nazista da fumetti risultano più grossolane che pungenti. Il brano fu escluso dall’edizione americana di David Bowie.
Gli annunci parlati della canzone sono di Gus Dudgeon.(booklet)
- songs: On the oddly-sequenced LP David Bowie, sandwiched between the hushed, eerie “There is a Happy Land” and the saccharine “When I Live My Dream” is Bowie’s abrasive science-fiction radio play “We Are Hungry Men,” which opens with a frantic “BBC announcer” bewildered by cities apparently overpopulating by the hour, offers a comic-book Nazi rant interlude and reaches its insane peak with Bowie chanting like a Dalek, over shrieking horns: "I’ve prepared a document legalizing mass abortion! We will turn a blind eye to infanticide!". “We Are Hungry Men” may be one of the more embarrassing things Bowie has ever recorded but it’s also a spectacular car wreck of a track, whose chorus is, perversely, one of the album’s catchiest. As with “She’s Got Medals,” it’s Bowie’s first crack at a theme that will preoccupy him for much of the following decade—here, messianic fascist political figures and the dystopias in which they come to power (“Cygnet Committee,” “The Supermen,” much of Diamond Dogs). The lyric’s specific enough (people arrested for breathing too much air, etc.) that Bowie must have been reading some contemporary science fiction. So here’s a brief generalization on postwar SF, which you can feel free to skip. Where much of US postwar science fiction is visionary, po-faced, curious about drugs, ultra-masculine and often rife with can-do positivism (Alas, Babylon offers nuclear war as a means of restoring America’s pioneer spirit), UK SF is far more pessimistic, full of ruin and doomed societies. The UK of the ’50s and early ’60s produced John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (grains disappear, civilization ends) and John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (plague, then plants kill almost everyone) and The Midwich Cuckoos (your children are evil—they will kill you). Most of all, there were the great postwar British dystopians JG Ballard (Jonathan Lethem: “Ballard in a grain of sand — the visual poetry of ruin…the convergence of the technological and the natural worlds into a stage where human life flits as a violent, temporary shadow“) and Brian Aldiss. Aldiss, by 1965, had written novels about humanity being reduced to a bestial state and hunted by insects (Hothouse), human civilization as a generations-long sham (Starship) and the grim spectacle of a world with no children, only the aged (Greybeard). So in “We Are Hungry Men” Bowie is working in an already well-tilled field. He’s also flashing on a hip topic of concern in the mid-’60s: global overpopulation. This would come to mainstream attention with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968, but the concept was already in wide circulation before then. Images of humans packed like sardines in cities, living ten to a room in teeming high rises, are all over the late ’60s: the Star Trek episode “The Mark of Gideon” and John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar, both from 1968, being just two examples. But the key inspiration for Bowie’s lyric may have been Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!, serialized in the August to October 1966 issues of the British SF magazine Impulse. Make Room! (set in 1999, in a New York City overrun by 35 million people) is better known as its movie adaptation, Soylent Green. “Soylent Green is people!” is a better catch phrase than “we are hungry men!,” though. Recorded 24 November 1966; released on David Bowie.
When I Live My Dream
Questo brano divenne uno dei punti fermi del primo repertorio di Bowie e le molte versioni esistenti indicano che la canzone era tenuta in considerazione sia da Bowie che dal suo manager Kenneth Pitt. Quello che può sembrare una semplice canzone d’amore rivela un certo senso di sofferenza mentre la tendenza di Bowie a drammatizzare le sue emozioni in forma cinematografica prefigura le fantasie da grande schermo di numerosi testi successivi. Il 18 dicembre 1967 Bowie incluse una nuova incisione del brano nella sua prima sessione radiofonica alla BBC e, più o meno nello stesso periodo, la eseguì nello spettacolo Pierrot in Turquoise. Una seconda versione, riarrangiata dal musicista britannico Ivor Raymonde, fu proposta come singolo alla Deram in ottobre ma il progetto venne bocciato. Questa seconda versione fu usata in seguito nel video Love You Till Tuesday. Bowie registrò anche una parte vocale in tedesco, tradotta da Lisa Busch, per la prevista edizione tedesca del video ma di fatto Mit Mir in Deinen Traum non fu mai trasmessa. Nel 1969 When I Live My Dream venne eseguita al Festival della Canzone di Malta e ricevette il riconoscimento per la miglior produzione discografica al Premio Internazionale del Disco di Monsummano Terme. Altre due versioni inedite (la prima con una parte vocale differente, la seconda un demo accompagnato dall’organo) sono apparse su bootleg.
- songs: Bowie’s first LP was essentially finished in mid-December 1966 but Deram sat on it for more than six months. In February 1967, Bowie cut two new tracks that became last-minute additions, leavening the album’s weirdness with more standard pop. Much like “Sell Me a Coat,” “When I Live My Dream” has a lovely melody burdened with awkward lyrics (“the trees will play the rhythm of my dream” ?) and smothered (in later versions) by an overdone arrangement. Whenever Bowie deliberately tried to write for a mainstream audience in this period, as he appeared to be doing here, he fell into weak artifice. He could easily connect with the sad, the lost and the eccentric, but found it difficult to, basically, write for squares. That said, Bowie and his manager Ken Pitt apparently thought “Dream” could be their break-through song and so kept flogging it despite the lack of label enthusiasm. A fairly spare initial version was soon followed by a remake with a sodden Ivor Raymonde arrangement, the latter version proposed as a single (Deram nixed it). Bowie pushed “Dream” for the rest of the decade—including it in the mime show Pierrot in Turquoise, recording a German version and making it the closing number of his “Love You Till Tuesday” promotional film. He finally gave up in July 1969, when Bowie performed “Dream” in a big-band arrangement at the International Song Festival competition in Valetta, Malta, and lost to a Spanish child prodigy named Cristina. The song suffered from bad timing, in part—it reeked of stale sentiment and sounded corny when it was released in the summer of ’67. And the lyric, with its tired knights-and-castles imagery, its weak rhymes (“horse” paired with “voice”) and the occasional groan-inducing line like “tell them I’m a dreaming kind of guy,” is a real muddle. The singer’s been dumped and contents himself with imagining his lost lover in his dreams, but he also keeps putting off his illusions, as though he needs her legal consent to get things started. It builds up to the final histrionic verse where he assures her that he’ll only stalk her in his dreamworld. Best suited as a cue for nostalgia, despite it having had no resonance in its own time. Leos Carax used it in 1984’s Boy Meets Girl, and Seu Jorge‘s version, recorded in 2004 for the Life Aquatic soundtrack, is likely the song’s finest interpretation. Singing most of it in Portuguese helped. The first version was recorded on 25 February 1967, the remake on 3 June 1967 (both are on Deram Anthology).
Little Bombardier
Questo nostalgico valzer da luna park, uno dei pochissimi brani di Bowie scritti in 3/4, è un altro esempio dell'abilità di Bowie di tratteggiare le varie tipologie umane e le loro storie. Trombone, archi e pianoforte forniscono il sottofondo ad un testo che racconta di Frankie Mear, un anziano veterano di guerra che allontana in un cinema la solitudine e l'alcolismo fino al giorno in cui due bambini gli offrono di nuovo la gioia di vivere. Anche in questo caso però la storia non ha un lieto fine e Frankie, sospettato di pedofilia, viene bandito dalla città.
to the little bombardier.
Packed his bags, his heart in pain,
wiped a tear and caught a train,
not to be seen in town again.»
«La mano dell’autorità disse "basta"
al piccolo pilota di bombardiere.
Fece le valigie con l’angoscia nel cuore,
si asciugò una lacrima e prese il treno,
per non farsi rivedere mai più in città.»
Anche Little Bombardier venne inclusa nella prima sessione BBC di Bowie ed è comparsa in numerosi bootleg come Archive Volume One del 1993, God Knows I'm Good del 1997 e The Rise and Rise of Ziggy Stardust del 2000.
Silly Boy Blue
Il testo surreale di questo brano è dedicato ad un "Bambino del Tibet" ed evoca le montagne di Lhasa e la reincarnazione. Si tratta di uno dei primi segnali della fase buddhista di David Bowie, che nel febbraio del 1966 aveva dichiarato a Melody Maker: «Voglio andare in Tibet. È un posto affascinante, sapete... I monaci tibetani, i Lama si seppelliscono per settimane tra le montagne e mangiano solo ogni tre giorni. Sono assurdi, e si dice che vivano centinaia di anni». In questo brano si trovano accenni densi delle aspettative e delle illusioni che si alimentavano fra i giovani degli anni sessanta, ma per Bowie non si trattava dell'euforia di un momento. Il bisogno di riposte è sempre stato un tema centrale per il cantante e in futuro lo stesso argomento sarà sviluppato con maggior partecipazione emotiva fino all'album Reality del 2003.
Nelle prime due sessioni radiofoniche per la BBC (18 dicembre 1967 e 13 maggio 1968) furono presentate due nuove registrazioni del brano, e fino all'anno successivo la canzone avrebbe costituito l'accompagnamento per la sequenza mimica tibetana Yet-San and the Eagle, che Bowie eseguiva in questo periodo. Silly Boy Blue venne in seguito incisa da Billy Fury, la cui cover fu pubblicata senza successo dalla Parlophone nel marzo 1968 (ed è presente anche nell'album tributo di artisti vari Oh! You Pretty Things del 2006). Un demo apparso su bootleg fu registrato con i Lower Third agli R.G. Jones Studios addirittura nell’ottobre 1965, anche se il testo di questa versione, completamente differente, ha molto più a che vedere con la Londra suburbana che con il Tibet. Nel 2000, il brano è stato nuovamente registrato per l'inserimento nell'album Toy, previsto inizialmente per il 2001 ma ad oggi mai pubblicato.(illustrated-db-discography.nl/Toy.htm) Il 26 febbraio 2001, accompagnato da Sterling Campbell alla batteria, Tony Visconti al basso, Philip Glass al piano e Moby alla chitarra (e con una sezione di archi), Bowie ha cantato Silly Boy Blue alla Carnegie Hall di New York all'interno del Tibet House Benefit Concert.(xoomer.alice.it/life_on_mars/tibethouse.html)
- songs: Il tentativo di un adolescente britannico di rappresentare la cultura tibetana in una canzone pop sembra non possa che essere ridicolo, ma Bowie, mortificato dalla grandezza di una cultura che sta eccitando la sua immaginazione, scrive un dolce inno pop con un assaggio di maestà. L'interesse di Bowie nel buddismo tibetano non era un atteggiamento superficiale dettato da una moda che si stava diffondendo, in quanto aveva cominciato ad esplorare la religione da alcuni anni, prima ispirato dal libro di Heinrich Harrer Sette anni in Tibet del 1952, poi dall'incontro con il lama tibetano Chimi Youngdong Rimpoche, esiliato a Londra. Il Buddismo era entrato anche nel coro di Baby Loves That Way. La prima registrazione era della fine del 1965 con i Lower Third, con un testo completamente differente. Si trova in bootleg quali The Forgotten Songs of David Robert Jones. Il test, sebbene pieno di immagini del buddismo tibetano, simpatizza con il giovane monaco ancora in contrasto con la sua cultura. Anche nel bel mezzo del culto, Bowie ha un occhio per gli eretici. La versione della sessione BBC del 1968 (rintracciabile su Bowie at the Beeb) aveva un elaborato arrangiamento di Tony Visconti completo di gong e campane. Billy Fury ne ha eseguito una cover nello stesso anno. Il brano del 1997 Seven Years in Tibet è un sequel tematico. Previsto anche per Toy del 2001. Eseguito per il Tibet House Benefit alla Carnegie Hall nel febbraio 2001, dove sembrava come se aveva scoperto una canzone popolare cantata perduta e di nuovo a vita.
Come and Buy My Toys
Accompagnato solo da una chitarra folk a dodici corde, Bowie riprende le atmosfere di There Is a Happy Land, anche se manca il senso di mistero e minaccia di quest'ultima, descrivendo un idillio di fanciulle sorridenti e rosei ragazzi i cui anni felici avranno presto fine. L'invito è quello a godere della gioia e della spensieratezza dell'infanzia prima che le responsabilità dell'età adulta prendano il sopravvento:
but now you shall play in the market square till you be a man.»
«Lavorerete la terra di vostro padre,
ma ora giocate sulla piazza del mercato finché sarete uomini.»
Join the Gang
Cinico ritratto di una combriccola londinese che contiene espliciti riferimenti all’uso di droghe e presenta una serie di personaggi disgraziati, archetipi della Swinging London: la modella da manifesti pubblicitari Molly, il cantante rock perennemente ubriaco Arthur e Johnny l’esistenzialista. Bowie canta in modo vivace e malizioso ma c'è un leggero sapore di invidia. Dopo tutto, per anni Bowie aveva osservato da vicino la gioventù metropolitana andare avanti senza di lui.(songs) «It's all a big illusion, but at least you're in» canta a un certo punto. Introdotto da un assortimento di cliché pop di metà anni sessanta, dal sitar che rende omaggio alle influenze orientali rese popolari in quegli anni da George Harrison alla batteria funky ed una linea di pianoforte honky-tonk, il brano fu eseguito dal vivo dai The Buzz in quel periodo.(songs)
She's Got Medals
In questo brano si trovano i primi accenni dell'interesse di Bowie per l'ambiguità sessuale e il travestimento. Racconta di una ragazza che si arruola nell'esercito sotto sembianze maschili per sfidare la morte in un bombardamento aereo e farsi congedare come donna. Per inciso, a metà degli anni sessanta "medals" era un'espressione gergale usata come sinonimo di "balls", che in origine derivava dalla diceria secondo la quale le "medaglie del Bengala" erano tanto comuni da essere usate dai soldati come bottoni per i pantaloni.
Maid of Bond Street
La penultima traccia, la seconda esclusa dall'edizione americana dell'album, è caratterizzata da un pianoforte da vaudeville, una linea vocale sincopata e un testo tipico del periodo Deram sulle vite frustrate del sottobosco di Londra, dove la celebrità e l'ostentazione dell’apparenza sono le uniche garanzie di successo. Come nel caso di Little Bombardier, il testo contiene riferimenti alla fantasia che vede la finzione cinematografica come antidoto contro una grigia esistenza:
her cares are scraps on the cutting-room floor.»
«Questa ragazza, il suo mondo è fatto di flash dei fotografi e film,
vive dei frammenti caduti sul pavimento della sala di montaggio.»
Please Mr. Gravedigger
La prima registrazione di questo pezzo faceva parte del pacchetto di tre canzoni col quale il manager Kenneth Pitt ottenne il contratto per Bowie con la Deram. Si tratta più che altro di un poema in musica, anche se nella versione dell'album non ci sono strumenti musicali ma effetti sonori atmosferici che fanno da sottofondo alla storia di un assassino di bambini che, tra singhiozzi e starnuti, si rivolge al becchino del cimitero di Lambeth con l'intenzione di seppellire lui stesso, forse perché ha scoperto il suo assassinio di una bambina di 10 anni. Come ricordava Gus Dudgeon, in quel periodo Bowie adottava metodi poco ortodossi per entrare nella parte: «Me lo ricordo ancora, piazzato in mezzo alla stanza con un paio di calosce e il bavero rialzato come se si trovasse sotto la pioggia, ingobbito, che rimescola in una scatola piena di ghiaia».(songs) Dudgeon rivela inoltre la strana sensazione che ha provato quando Bowie, in alcuni punti del brano, abbreviò "Mr. Gravedigger" in "Mr. G.D.": «Sono le mie iniziali, e la cosa mi dava un po’ fastidio!». Bowie eseguì la canzone il 27 febbraio 1968 nella trasmissione della TV tedesca 4-3-2-1 Musik Für Junge Leute. Una cover di Please Mr. Gravedigger è stata eseguita da Des de Moor e e Russell Churney in Darkness and Disgrace del 2003.(songs)
buddismo per bio
«Per quanto mi riguarda l'idea di vita occidentale, la vita che viviamo ora, è sbagliata. Tuttavia sono convinzioni difficili da mettere nelle canzoni».(David Bowie, intervista a Melody Maker 24 febbraio 1966, da songs)
«Mi sono imbattuto nella Buddhist Society di Londra quando avevo circa diciassette anni. Seduto di fronte a me c'era un lama tibetano, alzò gli occhi e disse: "Stai cercando me?" Non aveva padronanza della lingua inglese e in realtà voleva dire "Chi stai cercando?", ma avevo bisogno che dicesse "Stai cercando mee»." "(David Bowie, 2001). (canzoni)
"I stumbled into the Buddhist Society in London when I was about seventeen. Sitting in front of me at the desk was a Tibetan lama, and he looked up and he said “Are you looking for me”? He had a bad grasp of English and in fact was saying “Who are you looking for?” But I needed him to say “You’re looking for me.”" (David Bowie, 2001).(songs)
Note
Bibliografia
- Nicholas Pegg, David Bowie. L'enciclopedia, Arcana, Roma, 2002, ISBN 88-7966-270-8.
Voci correlate
Collegamenti esterni
- Testi e traduzioni delle tracce su Velvet Goldmine
- (EN) Recensione di David Bowie su AllMusic
- Cerca David Bowie su Last.fm
[[Categoria:Album di debutto del 1967