Up until the time of this recording in very early 1969, Bowie's music career had been a mostly unsuccessful struggle. After a couple of years of failed singles, he'd released an album in 1967, the cleverly titled "David Bowie," but it failed to even reach the charts. Its combination of pop and music hall styles was very out of sync with the times. Then, as he wrote new songs, he began changing his style. The key song that began to turn him into a star with "Space Oddity," the first song here. It would get released as a single in July 1969, six months after this recording, and it would reach the Top Five in the British singles chart. That would lead to the release of another album later in 1969, which has variously been released under the names "Space Oddity," "David Bowie," and "Man of Words/Man of Music." Many of the songs performed here would eventually appear on that album.
At the time of this recording, Bowie wasn't entirely sure what he was doing as public performer, and was searching for a creative direction. He was part of a musical trio called Feathers with Hermione Farthingale (his girlfriend at the time) and John Hutchinson. They combined acoustic music with mime, poetry, and theatrical presentation. But when he had a chance to be an opening act on a February and March 1969 tour supporting T. Rex, he actually performed as a mime! Feathers never recorded or released any music, and only performed a few concerts in late 1968 and early 1969 before breaking up, due to Farthingale breaking up romantically with Bowie and taking part in filming a movie overseas.
At the time of this recording, Bowie didn't have a record contract. He'd met an A&R executive working for Mercury Records who told him to submit a tape of songs to his boss, Bob Reno. This is that tape. It must have been successful, because when "Space Oddity" was released as a single some months later, it came out on Mercury Records. I think the idea here was to make a recording as the Feathers trio. However, Farthingale was overseas, so it's just Bowie and Hutchinson on the recording here. Both of them sang and played guitars, but Bowie was clearly the dominant creative force, with the songs written by him, except for two covers, in the cases of "Love Song" and "Life Is a Circus." But Fathingale gets discussed in the banter between songs. And two songs, "An Occasional Dream" and "Letter to Hermione," are very clearly about her.
This recording was first released in early 2019 as the stand alone album "The Mercury Demos." Then, later in 2019, it was included as part of the "Conversation Piece" box set. Normally, I don't post albums that are officially released on my blog unless I make some significant change. In this case, I think I did that with the banter. The officially released version seems to have been released "as is," meaning there was no attempt to improve the sound quality. The songs themselves sound great, and the official version is much better than the bootleg version that existed before. But the copious banter between songs sounded pretty bad. The voices were murky, and there was a lot of background noise, like the sounds of bumping, clicking, rustling, and so forth. At one point, Bowie even noticed how a piano being played in an adjacent apartment could be faintly heard.
So I did my best to clean all that up. Using the MVSEP program, I separated the vocals from everything else for all the talking tracks. Then I got rid of almost all of that "everything else," except if it was the sound of guitar tuning or noodling or something like that. But all the bumping, clicking and rustling went into the trash. Then I ran all the vocal parts through Adobe's vocal enhancer, which does a great job bringing clarity to non-singing vocals. I think the result is a huge improvement. Frankly, the official version should have done this. But I guess 2019 was right before advances in AI led to advances in audio editing technology.
I think this is a must have for any fan of Bowie's early career. And, personally, I like his late 1960s and early 1970s music the best (although his career had many high points).
This album is 41 minutes long.
01 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
02 Space Oddity (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
03 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
04 Janine (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
05 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
06 An Occasional Dream (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
07 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
08 Conversation Piece (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
09 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
10 Ching-a-Ling (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
11 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
12 Letter to Hermione (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
13 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
14 Lover to the Dawn [Early Version of Cygnet Committee] (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
15 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
16 Love Song (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
17 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
18 When I'm Five (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
19 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
20 Life Is a Circus (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
21 talk (David Bowie with John Hutchinson)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/TAZahYJm
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/M1MfjRfFifCRQdv/file
The cover image is based on the official cover. That is based on what apparently is the cover of the original 1969 tape containing this music. I think that was written by Bowie, but I'm not entirely sure. However, that just had the song list and the text below and to the side. I wanted some vital information on the cover, so I added the text at the top, hopefully in a similar style to the rest.
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