‘Net innovator, cutting-edge musician, icon, entrepreneur, fashion guru, fashion victim, writer, actor, man with bad teeth, bad dancer, misguided Placebo champion, faux-cockney alien-hybrid from Mars – you name it and David Bowie is it. We might bandy the term ‘chameleon’ around like it blends into the background of just about everything this man does, but no other entertainer past or present has successfully managed to sustain by turns both genius and such inspired and outrageous daftness over such an imponderable span of generations: the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, the naughties. Choose any one of these decades, and Bowie has either defined it (70s – ‘Ziggy Stardust’) or defiled it (80s ‘Lets Dance’). Like some ubiquitous shape-shifting ‘Zelig’ Bowie can be discerned within the sepia footage of aging newsreels everywhere only to pop up un-aged and unwithered in some vastly overhyped ad campaign for your new Tommy Hilfiger gear: expressing what could only be described as a ‘this is then, that was now’ infinite kind of variety; trans-generational for want of a better word. You might not always share the same enthusiasm for his choice of direction (soul, stax, drum and bass, funk, hysterical gnomes) but you have to confess he’s anything but boring (with the exception of ‘Goodbye Mr Lawrence’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’ and ‘Labyrinth’, of course). Even the aborted Tin Machine project seems to have thrown up a number of classics in retrospect – and what’s more, the best of them are here: ‘Baby Can Dance’ and ‘I Can’t Read’ from Tin Machine and the vastly underrated ‘Goodbye Mr Ed’ from Tin Machine II. So why trawl all the rest of that 90s rock hokum when you’ve all the best bits right alongside similarly overlooked gems as ‘Loving The Alien’, ‘Jump They Say’, ‘Blue Jean’ and ‘Buddha Of Suburbia’.
A lavishly presented 4CD boxed set ‘Sounds & Vision’ may seem a trifle unnecessary for a man who already has more box-sets, compilations and ‘best ofs’ than he has official releases and regular teeth, and it may omit the most obvious of generally accepted classics (‘Life On Mars’, Starman’, ‘Jean Genie’, ‘Fame’, ‘Let’s Dance’, ‘The Laughing Gnome’- okay ‘Let’s Dance’ is just a bit of fun) but it does have its bonuses too: leaving out such large and overreaching standards somehow allows us to define the outline of the able and excited craftsman as opposed to keeping us at arms length and allowing us to sense only the detached and nebulous spirit of a ‘living legend’.
Beginning with a rough demo of ‘Space Oddity’ from 1969 (complete with hysterical laughter and impromptu door opening) and a rare take on ‘The Wild-Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ also from 1969, it soon becomes apparent that whilst not exactly a collection of train-spotting outtakes and rarities it is offering a slightly different slant on the birthing process: that contrary to accepted opinion, Bowie did not arrive on an asteroid from the solar plexus of Orion to delight us on Top Of The Pops in 1972. Quite the opposite, wee David Jones emerged naturally out of some faintly Dylan inspired folk tamperings (‘The Bewlay Brothers’) and some raw and feisty rock n roll (‘Black Country Rock’, ‘Round and Round’). From these potent but humble beginnings, it seems natural (given his theatrical interests) that Bowie then twists these simple folk chord-structures into the grotesque but beguiling musical hall avant-garde of ‘The Prettiest Star’ (here as the 1970 single version), ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and ‘Changes’ or that the old school delta blues of ‘Black Country Rock’ is perverted and sprinkled generously with glitter before morphing into ‘Ziggy Stardust’. Bowie seems to be doing nothing more than cranking up the volume, piling on the make-up and bringing rock and roll bang up to date. Sounds simple in retrospect? Well things are when you see them for what they are and not for what history returns on them. And if this ‘Sounds and Vision’ achieves one thing and one thing only, it’s that it accentuates the linearity and consistency of Bowie’s career as a ‘rock’ artist rather than his freakish temporality and his leap-frogging approach to genres.
Bizarrely, for the first time in his life, Bowie seems somehow accessible, human and aligned correctly (and without recourse to exaggeration) within the trammels of rock history, an achievement helped in part by the release of this fine, hansom and modest collection.