h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, low points really, cos he's had a few. Generally speaking the bloke has been something of a genius in his field, and without a doubt one of those people you just can't categorise cos he's a one-off.

But for someone who has been so innovative and original, he's had a few failures. Tin Machine for instance, and the Diamond Dogs period. Now, I'm not not enough of a Bowie fan to know why those were low points in his career, or even if genuine fans see them as failures, so I open up the discussion for anyone who wants to comment

He does always seem to have pulled through though doesn't he. A few years after Diamond Dogs he was back on top with Station to Station and then Low. But then he went sour again with Ashes to Ashes - a song (and especially a video) I've never liked, but that's just a personal thing.

But...it's so GREAT! Especially when his mother turns up!

And you can also play 'Spot the Steve Strange' - which is a great game for all the family.

What's this? 'Spot the Steve Strange' ?

But I have to say, I quite like Ashes to Ashes, and Diamond Dogs. At one of his concerts that I had the fortune to attend he was commenting about each song that was written about, as he put it, "Self doubt, denial, and loneliness". When he got to Ashes to Ashes he add heroin to that list. It is really kind of a sad song...

Ashes to Ashes is my all-time favourite music video! (Anyone know what any of it means?) I didn't know that was his mother, though...

And I like diamond dogs too. There's a lot of 1984 influence, which is interesting...

Well the lyrics are pretty obviously about drugs, and at that concert I mentioned he did confirm that it was about heroin. There is the chorus, probably about heroin:

"Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out in heaven's high
Hitting an all-time low"

and then there are also lines like:

"Time and again I tell myself
I'll stay clean tonight
But the little green wheels are following me
Oh no, not again"

which are probably about addiction.

Then there are the opening song lines which bring Major Tom from Space Oddity into it:

"Do you remember a guy that's been
In such an early song
I've heard a rumor from Ground Control
Oh no, don't say it's true"

So I think it can be pretty conclusively deduced that the song is about Major Tom and heroin.

I can't help feeling that the Ashes to Ashes video was what inspired Not The Nine o'Clock News to write 'Nice Video, Shame About the Song'

AmI the only person who feels that tin machine was severely underated?

It was only ever intended to be a side-project with him as a band member.

Oh yay! I have been looking for someone who enjoyed Tin Machine. I haven't had much experience with it, but it didn't seem fair, all the abuse it was getting. Not necessarily here, but just in general.

Oh, and what is the Spot the Steve Strange game thingy? I still don't get it, and I am still curious...

Sorry Athena, I didn't noticed you'd asked that!

One of the people that 'sings' to the camera (I think there are four of them) is Steve Strange, who used to front an early '80s 'New Romantic' band called Visage. (Their biggest hit was called 'Fade to Grey.') He was a friend of Boy George's, and I remember a television interview with Boy George where he said they all seethed with jealousy when Steve got a spot in the video!

I my opinion Bowie never had any low points, well not until Tin Machine that is, it's just some points were higher than others.

Althought I'd probably say Aladdin Same is my favourite album, Diamond Dogs is so similar that I could count it as a double album. And, of course, the outfits were "Spectacular" in this phase.

The white soul phase is probably my least favourite musically, coz I miss Mick Ronson, but Bowie's voice on these albums really astounds. "Wild is the Wind" - unbelievable.

Just a bugbear, and I know Bowie had had heaps of praise, but I do think the quality of his voice is overlooked. In the Ziggy Stardust film, his singing on My Death, BRILLIANT. By the way, is this out on DVD, does anyone know?

I could rabbit on about all the following albums but it more of the same really.

The films? Yes, I suppose some are a bit cringey, but that all adds to his glamour don't you think, that he's prepared to go with stuff he knows people will mock. "Absolute Beginners" - never mind the film, what a fantastic track!!

I suppose, if I'm really pushed, I could admit that Pinups is a bit crap, but justify it by saying it was probably a record company thing.

Am I a reasonable and rational person? Where Bowie's concerned? HELL NO!

'Wild is the Wind' - AMAZING!!

Oh yeah...forgot about Pinups...I can no longer see what I once saw in his version of 'Where Have All the Good Times Gone?'

But still, what about that sleeve?! Twiggy!

Tin machine anybody?

The drum 'n' bass album?

Labarynth?

He's done some dodgy things in his time has our david

And we haven't even mentioned 'The Laughing Gnome' yet

Well... we have now

Aw, poor David. OK, there's been a few minor indiscretions, but they were all done in name of ART!!!

And no, I never did get Tin Machine myself either, and I really, really tried.

Twiggy, yes, how humiliating for her to be upstaged by a fella on the Pinups album cover.

Young Americans is my personal favourite and I think that is all one can say! Trying to compare Hunky Dory with Scary Monsters is just not really possible in my opinion! The most I think one can say is that MOST of his albums are of a VERY high quality whether you like the style of music or not.

Films ... well I don't really think that he should give up his day job as it were! The film role that I think suited him best is Man Who Fell to Earth because it really used his 'otherness' without it seeming forced.

I don't think he is so much an originator as a spotter of the latest musical trends which he then brings to public attention. He moves on to the next thing while the rest of us are enjoying whatever it was he had spotted.

Let me deal with the low points first. By his own admission, Bowie lost the plot during the 1980s. After 'Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps' in 1980, he didn't make another great album for the rest of the decade. 'Let's Dance' was a good pop album and the title track was a killer single, but it was all a bit superficial by Bowie's standards.

His next two albums are the ones that Bowie himself has cited as his worst work: 1984's 'Tonight' and 1987's 'Never Let Me Down'. On 'Tonight', his creative inspiration had run so dry that there are only four new songs on it, and two of those ('Tumble And Twirl' and 'Dancing With The Big Boys') were co-written with Iggy Pop. The rest of the album consists of covers - two old Iggy numbers ('Don't Look Down' and 'Neighbourhood Threat'), the Fifties standard 'I Keep Forgettin'' and a truly horrible massacre of The Beach Boys' 'God Only Knows'. ‘Never Let Me Down’ did contain some more new Bowie songs, but none that many fans would judge to be among his best, and the brassy 1980s production has dated badly.

Tin Machine was, I think, a desperate attempt to break out of creative paralysis by doing something – anything - as drastically different to what had gone before as possible. That strategy of dislocation had worked for him before in the mid-1970s when he swapped Los Angeles, cocaine and the Thin White Duke for Berlin, cold turkey and minimalist electronica. Unfortunately, forming a graceless grunge band with two unreconstructed monsters of old-school rock like the Sales brothers was a far less successful strategy. Perhaps the best thing that came out of Tin Machine was that it cemented Bowie's partnership with the band's guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who has contributed to most things that Bowie has done since the TM era and has proved to be one of his most creative and enduring collaborators. There is, in my opinion, just one great Tin Machine song: ‘I Can’t Read’, which is moving precisely because it sounds like an admission of creative paralysis. Bowie has named 'I Can't Read' as '...one of the best I have ever written', and he liked it enough to re-record it during the sessions for the 'Earthling' album and release it as a single in 1998.

Ah, but the best... where to begin? I love ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, a fantastically dark, dense album that should be played to anyone who thinks that all acoustic music is wimpish. ‘All The Madmen’ is an amazing song – would anyone else have thought of writing about someone who chooses to be shut up in an asylum because the ‘lunatics’ are saner than the ‘normal’ people outside? ‘Hunky Dory’ is in a similar musical vein, but with a little light creeping into Bowie’s worldview, and some classic songs: ‘Life On Mars?’, ‘Changes’, ‘Queen Bitch’ and, in ‘Kooks’, one of the very few parent-to-child songs that doesn't seem nauseating to most non-parents.

‘Diamond Dogs’ is my personal favourite from Bowie’s glam-superstar era. It’s aged better than ‘Ziggy Stardust’ or ‘Aladdin Sane’, it has a stunning anthemic single in ‘Rebel Rebel’, but most of all it has the heartbreakingly gorgeous ‘Sweet Thing’/’Candidate’ medley, an irresistible mixture of drug-addled decadence and romance.

The title track of ‘Young Americans’ is brilliant, but I can take or leave most of the products of Bowie’s white soul/Thin White Duke phase. You can hear him straining to try to reach some kind of authentic emotion through narcotic numbness on ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Station To Station’. Maybe he just about succeeds in getting there on ‘Stay' and ‘Word On A Wing’ on the latter album. But for me, Bowie really became compelling again when he got to Berlin and hooked up with Brian Eno.

‘Low’ is a masterpiece: icy electronic mood music for a shockingly bleak mood. It’s a timeless record because it was utterly unlike anything else that was around in pop and rock at the time (1977) and not much has been like it since, certainly not anything made by stars as big as Bowie was at the time. Much of it is instrumental, and those parts that aren't - like the superb single 'Sound And Vision' - have only fragmentary lyrics, usually images of withdrawal and desolation. Yet somehow it achieves a kind of barren, bitter beauty.

‘”Heroes”’ (double quotes are part of the title) is like the first light of dawn after the pitch blackness of ‘Low’, and of course it has its stunning title track. I love ‘Sons Of The Silent Age’, for its stirring melody and bitterly funny lyric, and there are some gorgeous instrumentals: the delicate ‘Moss Garden’ and the deeply ominous ‘Sense Of Doubt’.

‘Lodger’ contains some great moments: ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ (which was accompanied by a truly brilliant and audacious video, involving our David portraying three different women), the gibbering, thrilling ‘African Night Flight’, and the exhilarating ‘Red Sails’. It features what is probably Bowie’s best song on a ‘political’ theme: ‘Repetition’, a disturbing and convincing look at domestic violence.

And then came the virtually flawless ‘Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)’ – urgent and gripping from start to finish. It was as if Bowie had been galvanised by the British punk rock boom of the late 1970s into making his own most intense, fiery record. ('Teenage Wildlife' makes explicit reference to 'the New Wave boys'.) It has a unique sound, with Robert Fripp’s distinctive guitar tone one of the most important ingredients. It’s a record that seems driven by desperation: every song is a protest or a dry, sceptical commentary on something, be it fascism and merciless capitalism (‘It’s No Game’) the gullibility and fickleness of the general public (‘Fashion’), the problems inherent in young love (‘Because You’re Young’) or Bowie’s own career (‘Ashes To Ashes’). In many ways ‘Scary Monsters’ is a bleak album, but it’s also consistently intelligent, inventive and exciting. No wonder Bowie found it so hard to follow - and after that, as already discussed, things went sharply downhill for a decade or so.

But for me, the most underrated period of Bowie’s career is the past 12 years. Lots of people know that he lost it big time in the 1980s. Not enough people know that he got it back in the 1990s, and even fewer appreciate that he’s returned to peak form in the 21st century. For me, 1993’s ‘Black Tie White Noise’ contains some of Bowie’s best excursions into soul styles, and its lead single ‘Jump They Say’ is one of his most moving songs (it concerns the suicide of Bowie’s half-brother Terry). I also have a sizeable soft spot for the ingenious and sometimes very funny black comedy of ‘1.Outside’ from 1995 – Bowie and Eno’s sci-fi detective story in a song cycle, featuring some scorching industrial rock numbers like ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ and 'Hallo Spaceboy'. Hear Bowie transformed by a vocoder into a 78-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl! Great fun - though considering the subject matter is ritual murder in the name of art, not exactly innocent fun.

It’s a bit misleading to call ‘Earthling’ ‘the drum’n’bass album’. It does have a strong influence from that direction, and the rhythm tracks often sound a lot like The Prodigy, who were very prominent at the time (1997), but Bowie was still writing songs with fairly conventional melodies and structures to put over those rhythms. Sometimes it works very well, as on ‘Little Wonder’ and ‘Dead Man Walking’, and some of the best musical moments come from the way Bowie and his band blend in incongruous elements over the racing rhythms. It’s great hearing Mike Garson drape elegant piano lines over the galloping jungle beats, and once again Bowie has the service of a superb and distinctive guitar sound, this time a cutting, corrosive fuzz-tone courtesy of Reeves Gabrels. There are two outstanding tracks placed together near the end of the album: the ominous ‘The Last Thing You Should Do’ and the drily witty ‘I’m Afraid Of Americans’. Not all the material on ‘Earthling’ is that strong, but still it was a brave move for Bowie and a largely successful experiment.

‘...hours’, from 1999, seemed like a bit of a retreat after that, returning to a more conventional soft-rock style, but it contains two absolutely gorgeous semi-acoustic songs - ‘Survive’ and ‘Seven’ – that return to the style of ‘Hunky Dory’ and throw in ravishing melodies and thoughtful lyrics, respectively about getting over a bad relationship and about the need to make good use of the limited time life allows. There’s also Bowie’s best glam-rock song in a quarter-century, ‘The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell’.

For me, though, Bowie’s real modern masterpiece arrived in 2002. ‘Heathen’ is an absolutely devastating album, one that draws from the best parts of Bowie’s past without ever seeming like a mere remake. There are no dispensable tracks, there’s tremendous stylistic variety, there’s emotional and spiritual depth, and there are some songs that rank among Bowie’s very best.

Bowie’s mother Peggy Jones and one of his oldest friends, Freddi Burretti, both died during 2001, and ‘Heathen’ is an album haunted by mortality and fear of an uncertain future. It opens and closes with two stark synthesiser-based tracks: ‘Sunday’ and ‘Heathen (The Rays)’ - that seem like the sound of ‘Low’ with a huge injection of the emotional expression that the numb, withdrawn 'Low' largely lacked. In between there’s urgent rock on ‘Slow Burn’ (featuring some great Pete Townshend guitar), a fantastic epic ballad in ‘Slip Away’, another marvellous slice of stark electronica in the poignant ‘5:15 The Angels Have Gone’ , Bowie’s best pop song in ages in ‘Everyone Says “Hi”’, and even some fun – an enthusiastic cover of cult singer The Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s ‘I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spacecraft’. There are two more very fine covers too, of The Pixies’ ‘Cactus’ and Neil Young’s ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You’.

‘Heathen’ is an album that gives more and more to a listener with repeated attention. ‘Everyone Says “Hi”’, for instance, turns out to be addressed to someone recently deceased, and to concern the way people often simply cannot bring themselves to accept that the dead are gone. The yearning, soulful ‘I Would Be Your Slave’ initially seems like a submissive love song, but closer inspection suggests that it’s a desperate plea for a sign from God. The catchy, upbeat ‘A Better Future’ is, explicitly, a rather aggressive prayer, demanding what the title suggests, while ‘Heathen (The Rays)’ is a fear-laden song addressed to life itself. ‘Heathen’, overall, is an amazing album that anyone who has ever been moved by David Bowie should hear.

I reviewed 2003’s ‘Reality’ for collective, and I’ve already gone on far longer than I intended here, so I’ll refer you to A1284284 for a detailed critique. Suffice to say that it has much in common with ‘Heathen’ in that it’s stylistically diverse and the lyrics often seem to address matters spiritual and existential. ‘Reality’ is perhaps not as consistently great as ‘Heathen’, and the tone is a little lighter: but ‘Reality’ certainly contains some wonderful songs. Since writing the collective review, I’ve grown fond of the urgent opening bulletin ‘New Killer Star’, the yearning George Harrison cover ‘Try Some, Buy Some’ and the brooding, jazz-tinged closer ‘Bring Me The Disco King’ – which features another dazzling display on the ivories from Mike Garson.

In conclusion, I’d just like to say that no-one has had a more varied or fascinating career in contemporary music than David Bowie, and he remains a huge talent as he enters the fifth decade of that career. I was reluctant to get drawn into discussing this topic because I Bowie’s best work so much that I suspected that if I started talking about him, I’d end up writing more than enough for a whole Guide entry.

And guess what? I just have.

I got half way through your opus Ormy and decided that when I replied I'd offer the opinion that you've just written 99% of this TotW, but you've already admitted it yourself

Simply put, Heathen is the best thing he's done for 25 years... IMO

2,000+ words - more than some of my University essays - and I still feel like I only skimmed the surface. I could write a on Bowie, but someone has already written one that would be hard to top: 'The Complete David Bowie' by Nicholas Pegg, which is amazingly thorough and informative. I used it to check that I'd got the dates and spellings right in the epic posting above.

One Bowie album I'd love to get hold of is his 1993 'soundtrack' for the BBC TV series 'The Buddha Of Suburbia', which - according to Mr Pegg - contains so much original, high-quality Bowie material that it really should be regarded as a full-blown Bowie album rather than a simple soundtrack project. (Most of the songs weren't actually used in the TV show.) But I've never seen it in shops, and Amazon don't have it, so I guess it's deleted.

Ormondroyd, this is superb but really - anyone would think you were a Bowie fan or something!

I think we've got the bulk of an Entry here! Nice work!