David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 15: In Concert, John Labatt Centre, London, Canada, 5-14-2004

Finally! I posted David Bowie's "BBC Sessions, Volume 1" back in 2019. Now, it's the start of 2025, and I'm posting "Volume 15," the last one. This is another BBC concert.

Bowie lived for another dozen years before dying of cancer in 2016. But he retired from touring in 2004 and basically went into seclusion until coming out with new studio albums in 2013 and 2016. At the time of this concert, he was touring to support his album "Reality," released in late 2003. I previously commented that I'm not a big fan of Bowie's songwriting from the late 1980s onward. I still think he went into a prolonged slump. But "Reality" was a pretty good album, and it got a lot of critical praise. I think he was finding his musical groove again around this time. He would finish strongly with his last two albums in 2013 and 2016, so it's a shame we don't have any concerts from that time period.

Only "New Killer Star" and "The Loneliest Guy" come from "Reality." There are some unusual choices with some of the other songs. For instance, "Sister Midnight" is a song Bowie wrote, but he gave it to Iggy Pop for a 1977 album. Similarly, he wrote "All the Young Dudes," but gave it to Mott the Hoople, who had a big hit with it in 1972. "Cactus" is a Pixies song that he recorded for his 2002 album "Heathen."

Everything here is officially unreleased, as far as I know. The sound quality is excellent.

This album is 59 minutes long.

01 New Killer Star (David Bowie)
02 Cactus (David Bowie)
03 Sister Midnight (David Bowie)
04 talk (David Bowie)
05 All the Young Dudes (David Bowie)
06 The Loneliest Guy (David Bowie)
07 Under Pressure (David Bowie)
08 Station to Station (David Bowie)
09 Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)
10 talk (David Bowie)
11 Quicksand (David Bowie)
12 Modern Love (David Bowie)
13 I'm Afraid of Americans (David Bowie)
14 'Heroes' (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/P9QohvUM

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/1BWE3bvGL7DPRGT/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 14: In Concert, Maida Vale Studios, London, Britain, 9-18-2002

Here's yet another David Bowie BBC album. And even now, I'm still not done, with one more to go.

This album is about an hour long, and there are many cases when the BBC takes a longer concert and edits it down to fit an hour-long time slot. But this isn't such a case. I found a review of this concert that confirms this is the entire show. From that article, I also found out that the concert was done mainly for the BBC radio broadcast, with only about 100 people in the audience.

The concert took place three months after the release of Bowie's album "Heathen," so naturally he played some songs from it. But he also played a couple of rarities, along with the usual classic hits. Most interestingly, he performed "The Bewley Brothers." This song first appeared on his 1971 album "Hunky Dory." But apparently, he'd never performed it in concert before, due to lots of hard to remember lyrics. He did it here with a lyric sheet in hand. According to setlist.fm, this was the first time he'd played it in concert, and he only played it four more times after this. 

I believe everything here is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent.

This album is 59 minutes long.

01 talk by Jonathan Ross (David Bowie)
02 Sunday (David Bowie)
03 talk (David Bowie)
04 Look Back in Anger (David Bowie)
05 talk (David Bowie)
06 Cactus (David Bowie)
07 talk (David Bowie)
08 Survive (David Bowie)
09 talk (David Bowie)
10 5.15 The Angels Have Gone (David Bowie)
11 talk (David Bowie)
12 Alabama Song [Whisky Bar] (David Bowie)
13 talk (David Bowie)
14 Everyone Says 'Hi' (David Bowie)
15 talk (David Bowie)
16 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
17 talk (David Bowie)
18 The Bewlay Brothers (David Bowie)
19 talk (David Bowie)
20 Heathen [The Rays] (David Bowie)
21 talk (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/vQnSgxWH

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/hQaQuJSQTmUuEwW/file

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 13: 2002-2003

Here's yet another album of David Bowie performing for the BBC. Unlike most others from around this time period, this one is a collection of BBC studio sessions. It so happens all of them were broadcast on TV instead of on the radio.

Everything here is officially unreleased, at least as far as I can tell. The first three songs are from the popular "Top of the Pops" TV show. Most appearances on that show are lip-synced, but these versions are included because they were actually done live. The next four songs are from another BBC TV show, "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross."

The eighth song is from the BBC TV show "Parkinson." The next three, tracks 9 to 11, are from yet another BBC TV show, "Later... with Jools Holland."

Everything I've mentioned so far is from 2002. But the last two tracks are from 2003, a second appearance on the TV show "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross."

Generally speaking, the songs sound really good. But there was a lot of cheering on most of them. So I ran all the songs through the MVSEP audio editing program and removed the crowd noise.

This album is 54 minutes long.

01 Slow Burn (David Bowie)
02 Fame (David Bowie)
03 I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship (David Bowie)
04 Everyone Says Hi (David Bowie)
05 Fashion (David Bowie)
06 Slip Away (David Bowie)
07 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
08 Life on Mars (David Bowie)
09 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
10 5.15 The Angels Have Gone (David Bowie)
11 Heathen [The Rays] (David Bowie)
12 Modern Love (David Bowie)
13 New Killer Star (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/8fTrzEZY

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/d68cHTrIuHTKqkw/file

The cover photo was taken backstage at a concert for the BBC in September 2002.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 12: In Concert, BBC Radio Theatre, London, Britain, 6-27-2000

The next album in my series of David Bowie BBC albums in a particularly special concert. This concert took place two days after Bowie performed in front of a massive audience at the annual Glastonbury Festival. This contrast, by contrast, was extremely small, with only 250 people fitting into the venue.

The people lucky enough to get in consisted of fan club members who won a lottery. But also, a number of elites were allowed in, including stars like Russell Crowe, Meg Ryan, Boy George, Lulu, Bob Geldof, members of Duran Duran, and more.

This concert was officially released twice. The first version came out as a bonus disc on some versions of the album "Bowie at the Beeb." But it was missing five songs. Later, it was included as part of the box set "Brilliant Adventure." This included the missing songs.

However, both of these versions were missing all the banter between songs, and there was a lot of banter. So I used a bootleg version that contained everything. The sound quality of that was just as good as the released versions. However, I did cut out two false starts to songs.

This concert is a must-have for any Bowie fan. Knowing that he was recording this for the radio as well as probable later official release, he really rose to the occasion.

This album is two hours and nine minutes long.

01 Wild Is the Wind (David Bowie)
02 talk (David Bowie)
03 Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)
04 talk (David Bowie)
05 Seven (David Bowie)
06 talk (David Bowie)
07 This Is Not America (David Bowie)
08 talk (David Bowie)
09 Absolute Beginners (David Bowie)
10 talk (David Bowie)
11 Always Crashing in the Same Car (David Bowie)
12 talk (David Bowie)
13 Survive (David Bowie)
14 talk (David Bowie)
15 The London Boys (David Bowie)
16 talk (David Bowie)
17 I Dig Everything (David Bowie)
18 talk (David Bowie)
19 Little Wonder (David Bowie)
20 talk (David Bowie)
21 The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)
22 talk (David Bowie)
23 Fame (David Bowie)
24 talk (David Bowie)
25 Stay (David Bowie)
26 talk (David Bowie)
27 Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie)
28 Cracked Actor (David Bowie)
29 talk (David Bowie)
30 I'm Afraid of Americans (David Bowie)
31 talk by Gail Ann Dorsey (David Bowie)
32 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
33 talk (David Bowie)
34 The Jean Genie [Instrumental Version] (David Bowie)
35 talk (David Bowie)
36 All the Young Dudes (David Bowie)
37 talk (David Bowie)
38 Starman (David Bowie)
39 'Heroes' (David Bowie)
40 talk (David Bowie)
41 Let's Dance (David Bowie)
42 talk (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/rh9Yisua

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/8T5iLjZHEZ4BtFh/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 11: 1999-2000

I love David Bowie's music from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. I think his songwriting wasn't as strong after that. However, he still was an excellent performer. I have a bunch of his BBC albums still to post from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Generally speaking, most of the songs he did in these sessions are from earlier in his career anyway, so you should like these albums even if you're not such a big fan of his new material from those years.

This album is a case in point. It's a collection of BBC studio sessions for the most part, with just three songs that were relatively new at the time ("Survive," "Something in the Air," and "Repetition"). The first seven tracks are from an October 1999 session before a very small audience. Tracks 8 and 9 are from an appearance on the BBC TV show "Later... with Jools Holland." 

Finally, the last four tracks are from the 2000 Glastonbury Festival, which was broadcast on the BBC. Normally, I would have posted the entire Glastonbury performance, but that has been officially released as the live album "Glastonbury 2000." Also, I have other very similar performances of most of the songs from that, since the next album in this series is a full BBC concert that took place just two days after Glastonbury. So I only included four songs that he didn't play in that concert.

I used the MVSEP audio editing program to remove the crowd noise from the first seven tracks plus the last four, so everything here would sound like it was recorded in a studio. There wasn't much clapping with the first seven anyway, since it sounds like the audience was quite small. Everything here is unreleased except for the four Glastonbury tracks.

This album is 50 minutes long.

01 Survive (David Bowie)
02 Drive-In Saturday (David Bowie)
03 Something in the Air (David Bowie)
04 Can't Help Thinking about Me (David Bowie)
05 talk (David Bowie)
06 Repetition (David Bowie)
07 China Girl (David Bowie)
08 Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)
09 Cracked Actor (David Bowie)
10 Changes (David Bowie)
11 Station to Station (David Bowie)
12 talk (David Bowie)
13 Golden Years (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/1cf31ogH

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/zj9YKUraxwObErm/file

I'm not a fan of smoking cigarettes, so normally I wouldn't have chosen the cover photo I did for this album. However, this is the one and only photo I found of Bowie that actually comes from one of the BBC sessions included here, so I thought this was the most fitting photo. Specifically, this photo was taken during the October 25, 1999 BBC session in Maida Vale Studios in London. The first seven tracks here come from that session.

David Bowie - VH-1 Storytellers, Manhattan Center, New York City, 8-23-1999

Here we are with the very last "VH-1 Storytellers" album I plan on posting.

My goal was to post only episodes that haven't been released as albums. I'm breaking that rule here because this one has been posted as an album (and as a DVD). But the reason I'm posting this is because the album had some problems which I believe I've fixed. 

The album only had eight songs, with banter between them, plus four bonus tracks at the end without banter. Also, one song that was played, "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell," wasn't included at all. So I'm including the missing song. I also made some changes to make the bonus tracks fit better into the full concert. I didn't have the extra banter that presumably went with them. But I moved one song ("Always Crashing in the Same Car") to a spot earlier in the concert where it fit well with some banter to precede it there. And I made a couple other minor adjustments to make things flow better in a way that made logical sense to me. In the end, this isn't drastically different or enlarged, but I think it's a better listen.

I have a few more final notes about this Storytellers series. One is that there were a few other Storytellers episodes I didn't include because they have been officially released, and I didn't see any way to noticeably improve them. In particular, these ones are interesting:

Ringo Starr
Billy Idol
Counting Crows
Culture Club
Meat Loaf

Futhermore, as I previously mentioned, there are a few more episodes I would like to post, but I can't find the full audio for them. If any of them do show up, I will post them. If you have one or more, please pass them on to me. Those are:

Lyle Lovett
Shawn Colvin
Cee-Lo Green
Death Cab for Cutie
Ray LaMontagne
Jason Mraz
Grace Potter

On top of that, I have to admit there are still more episodes I didn't post because I didn't like these artists enough. Besides, most of them aren't available anyway. Those are: Hanson, Tony Bennett and the Backstreet Boys (together, strangely enough), Wyclef Jean and Friends, Train and Fuel (a shared episode), Jay Z, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, Kid Rock, Kanye West, Christina Aguilera, Infant Sorrow, T.I., Maxwell, Jill Scott, and Alicia Keys.

I believe I posted 63 episodes at the blog. If you add up the others mentioned above that aren't posted here for one reason or another, it comes to about 90 episodes, give or take one or two.

This album is an hour and eight minutes long.

01 talk (David Bowie)
02 Life on Mars (David Bowie)
03 talk (David Bowie)
04 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
05 talk (David Bowie)
06 Thursday's Child (David Bowie)
07 talk (David Bowie)
08 Can't Help Thinking about Me (David Bowie)
09 talk (David Bowie)
10 Always Crashing in the Same Car (David Bowie)
11 talk (David Bowie)
12 China Girl (David Bowie)
13 talk (David Bowie)
14 Seven (David Bowie)
15 talk (David Bowie)
16 Drive-In Saturday (David Bowie)
17 talk (David Bowie)
18 Word on a Wing (David Bowie)
19 Survive (David Bowie)
20 I Can't Read (David Bowie)
21 talk (David Bowie)
22 If I'm Dreaming My Life (David Bowie)
23 The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17195338/DAVDBWE1999StrytllrsMnhttnCntrNwYrkC__8-23-1999_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/RmhNNGzw

The cover image is from this exact concert. 

US Festival '83, Glen Helen Regional Park, San Bernardino, CA, 5-30-1983 - Day 3, Part 9: David Bowie

The ninth and final act on Day Three (Rock Day) of the 1983 US Festival is David Bowie.

In 1983, David Bowie was probably at the commercial peak of his long music career. His album "Let's Dance," released in April 1983, sold ten million copies worldwide, his biggest selling album by far, and turned him into a superstar.

It so happened that Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak was a big Bowie fan, and the US Festivals were basically vanity projects bankrolled by Wozniak.  

Berry Fey was the promoter organizing the festival with Wozniak. He later recalled, "The festival was completely booked, and Van Halen had a favored-nation clause in their contract that said no one could get more than them – and they were getting $1 million. Then Steve [Wozniak] came to me and said, 'God, Barry, I really love David Bowie.' I say, 'Steve, there's no room. Let's put this to bed.' And he says, 'Well, I really do love David … Could you try? It is my money and my festival.'"

Fey called Bowie, but Bowie was touring Europe to support the "Let's Dance" album. He wasn't due to perform in California until August, months away. He could only spare a single day flying to the U.S. and back to make the festival.

Fey said, "David tells me: 'We'll have to interrupt our tour and charter a 747 to bring our equipment and get it right back again.' So I went to Steve: 'David's gonna cost you a million and a half, but it's gonna cost you an extra half a million for Van Halen.' He just shrugged his shoulders: 'So?' The addition of Bowie ultimately cost $2 million."

Bowie and his band arrived on the morning of the day they were due to play, flying by helicopter from the airport. When they got backstage, they found a party started by Van Halen the night before was still going strong. Carmine Rojas, bassist for Bowie, later recalled to Spin Magazine that the drug use was heavy. "Everybody was packing – and I don't mean guns. Everybody was holding, as they said back in the day."

Carlos Alomar, guitarist in Bowie's band, also remembered the time. "We were shitting bricks, alright. David used to freak out over California and New York [concerts, because of their high profile], and he would always tell us, 'Don't go partyin'!' – just like all the other bands that got totally ripped up and fucked up before the [US Festival] gig. We had done that before, and David sometimes was a little cautious and would say, 'Listen guys, don't party too hard because I need you to be [on your game].' Well, that doesn't work! He did not ask us that for the US Festival. We remained what we will call primed – we were totally fuckin' hyper and primed the minute we hit the stage. We were bouncing off the walls. So no, we did not do that 'get plenty of rest before the show bullshit.'"

Alomar added, "It was a huge, huge deal. We had to understand how special the occasion was. Van Halen, David Bowie – this is top of the line. This was a job that had to be fabulous. It had to be our best."

Rojas further commented that the concert went over well with the crowd. "It was majestic. The sound coming off the big speakers, and the audience singing along with you, it's powerful. It's very tribal. It touches on your emotions strongly when you have people [singing] back and forth with you like that, and you're one huge team. That's a very powerful, positive energy. And David was such a leader and frontman, controlling all of that – and he was loving it."

Alomar was similarly pleased. "I look back at that performance and can still see David turning around and smiling at me. We had this thing where he'd give me the cues and then I'd cue the band. So we always had this connection going. And sometimes when he looked back at me that night, I was like 'Dude, you're lookin' like a Cheshire cat right now' [Laughs.]. There was a different smile, a look of, 'We nailed it. We did it. They went for that one. Oh, they loved that one.' It was that kind of joy. It wasn't that regular 'this is a cue' look. No, it was 'listen to that.'"

Of all the acts for the 1983 US Festival, I had the most trouble with the music of this one. For the vast majority of the others, I was able to find soundboard bootlegs, or at least videos of similar high quality that I converted to audio. But not with the Bowie set. He wasn't even included in the Westwood Radio One network show of highlights from the festival. All I could find was an audience bootleg that has the problems typical of audience bootlegs.

So at first I considered not including this, for fear that the sound quality wasn't up to snuff with the rest. But then I decided that Bowie was one of the headliners, one of the biggest acts, so I had to include his music. I resolved to do my best trying to improve the sound. For instance, I used the MVSEP audio editing program to get rid of most of the audience noise, other than at the ends of songs and during key moments of massive cheering during songs. That helped a lot. I also used the UVR5 program to improve the mix, mostly by boosting the lead vocals relative to the instruments. 

I think this set sound a lot better now, way better than the bootleg I started with. It's still not as good as most of the rest from this festival, but I think it's definitely listenable. 

The end of Bowie's set marked the end of the main portion of the US Festival, after New Wave, Heavy Metal, and Rock days one after another. Most people went home. But it wasn't actually the end of the festival, as there was a Country day a few days later. I only have a small portion of that to post, but I'll be posting that too.

This album is an hour and 36 minutes long.

118 Star (David Bowie)
119 Heroes (David Bowie)
120 What in the World (David Bowie)
121 Golden Years (David Bowie)
122 Fashion (David Bowie)
123 Let's Dance (David Bowie)
124 Breaking Glass (David Bowie)
125 Life on Mars (David Bowie)
126 Sorrow (David Bowie)
127 Cat People [Putting Out Fire] (David Bowie)
128 China Girl (David Bowie)
129 Scary Monsters [And Super Creeps] (David Bowie)
130 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
131 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie)
132 Station to Station (David Bowie)
133 Cracked Actor (David Bowie)
134 Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)
135 Space Oddity (David Bowie)
136 talk (David Bowie)
137 Young Americans (David Bowie)
138 Fame (David Bowie)
139 The Jean Genie (David Bowie)
140 Modern Love (David Bowie)

https://www.imagenetz.de/gP67q

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/b4FEajuJ

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/91peiO8lO9nC0tq/file

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

Various Artists - Prince's Trust Rock Gala, Wembley Arena, London, Britain, 6-20-1986

Hmmm. I could have sworn I'd posted this months ago. I'd posted the 1982 Prince's Trust concert a while back. I was getting to post the next one in the series, from 1987, when I did a search and noticed this one wasn't here. So now you'll get two in a row, as I'll be posting the 1987 one today as well. 

Prince Charles, the crown prince of Britain at the time, ran a charity to help troubled youths. It's still going as I write this in 2024, and Charles has finally become king. 

These concerts didn't happen every year. In fact, I don't think there was any after the 1982 one I mentioned until this one, although there was a Dire Straits concert in 1985 that benefited the charity. This one, though, was truly a star-studded event. Perhaps inspired by Live Aid in 1985, the big names showed up in droves.

In fact, I find this concert frustrating, because so much big name talent was underused. The concerts started with sets by Big Country, Suzanne Vega, and Level 42. I definitely like Big Country and Suzanne Vega (whereas Level 42, not so much), and I've posted albums by them here. But it seems very odd to me that they got to play four or five songs each, while much bigger names like Sting, Mark Knopfler, George Michael, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger got less than one full song, since they only appeared as part of duets. Very strange.

That said, what there is here is quite good. It's just that I wish there had been a lot more of it. But as far as I can tell, this was the complete concert. I guess the organizers had to keep things relatively short because the concert was broadcast live on TV and radio in Britain. I gather the reason Big Country, Suzanne Vega, and Level 42 had such surprisingly long sets was because one purpose of the show was to showcase new talent. This is a trend with the other Prince's Trust concerts I'm aware of. At least in this year the new acts would end up being pretty good. (Some other years weren't so lucky.)

One special aspect of this concert is how much the big stars in the second half of the show performed together. You don't really see it in the artist credits on each song. For instance, typically, Phil Collins played drums, Elton John played piano, Midge Ure of Ultravox played rhythm guitar, and Eric Clapton or Mark Knoplfer played lead guitar. At one point, you can hear Rod Stewart joke about how happy he is to finally get Elton John in his backing band. But that's not all. You really the watch the video this (the whole thing can be found on YouTube as I type this) to see all the stars backing each other.

The highlights are many, too many for me to describe. But I'll point out that the biggest start of the evening had to be Paul McCartney, who closed the show. Keep in mind that, from the perspective of 1986, McCartney hadn't barely played in any concerts since the 1970s. Starting in 1989 he would go on a world tour, and he would tour often after that. But he'd only made three other concert appearances in the 1980s prior to this, and each one was just for a couple of songs at most. (For instance, he played one song for Live Aid in 1985.)

By the way, note that there's a flaw with the duet of "Dancing in the Street" by David Bowie and Mick Jagger. For some reason, Bowie's vocals are way down in the mix. I currently don't have the means to fix that, since it's tricky with them singing together most of the time. But with audio editing technology advancing recently, it probably will be fixable eventually.

Note that various versions of this concert have been officially released, both on audio and video. But as far as I can tell, none of them are complete. The audio version, for instance, is only the length of a single album. So there's a lot more music here.

This album is two hours and 17 minutes long.

01 Introduction (Emcee)
02 talk (Big Country)
03 Wonderland (Big Country)
04 Fields of Fire (Big Country)
05 talk (Big Country)
06 Look Away (Big Country)
07 Chance (Big Country)
08 talk (Big Country)
09 In a Big Country (Big Country)
10 talk (Big Country)
11 talk (Suzanne Vega)
12 Tom’s Diner (Suzanne Vega)
13 talk (Suzanne Vega)
14 Cracking (Suzanne Vega)
15 Small Blue Thing (Suzanne Vega)
16 talk (Suzanne Vega)
17 Marlene on the Wall (Suzanne Vega)
18 talk (Emcee)
19 Lesson in Love (Level 42)
20 Leaving Me Now (Level 42)
21 Something about You (Level 42)
22 talk (Level 42)
23 Your Song (Elton John)
24 talk (Phil Collins)
25 In the Air Tonight (Phil Collins)
26 talk (Emcee)
27 Better Be Good to Me (Tina Turner)
28 talk (Tina Turner)
29 Tearing Us Apart (Eric Clapton & Tina Turner)
30 talk (Eric Clapton)
31 Call of the Wild (Midge Ure)
32 talk (Midge Ure)
33 Money for Nothing (Mark Knopfler & Sting)
34 talk (Mark Knopfler)
35 Every Time You Go Away (Paul Young)
36 talk (Paul Young)
37 Reach Out (Joan Armatrading)
38 No One Is to Blame (Howard Jones)
39 talk (Rod Stewart)
40 Sailing (Rod Stewart)
41 I’m Still Standing (Elton John)
42 talk (Elton John)
43 Every Time You Go Away (Paul Young & George Michael)
44 talk (George Michael)
45 I Saw Her Standing There (Paul McCartney)
46 Long Tall Sally (Paul McCartney)
47 talk (Paul McCartney)
48 Dancing in the Street (David Bowie & Mick Jagger)
49 Get Back (Paul McCartney & Everyone)
50 talk (Paul McCartney)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/kFX6wzSe

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/FFh3i4FUiXCUiKw/file

Each time one of these concerts happened, there typically was a group photo. If anyone wants to identify all the people in the photo, that would be great.

Iggy Pop with David Bowie - Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, OH, 3-21-1977

It's high time I post something from Iggy Pop, so he's a concert from probably the most pivotal year of his music career. Plus, this could be of interest for David Bowie fans. Bowie was involved in every song here, but... only in a backing role. He played keyboards and sang backing vocals, but no lead vocals at all. You can see him sitting at the keyboards in the background of the cover photo.

It's fitting that Bowie was involved, because he played a pivotal role at this point in Pop's career. Pop had a few wasted years in the middle of the 1970s after Pop's band the Stooges broke up, mostly due to drug abuse. Bowie helped Pop get a solo career started. He co-wrote nearly all the songs on Pop's albums "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life," and produced and played some instruments on them for good measure. Still, the albums were more Pop than Bowie, and they were very critically acclaimed. They probably still are the most praised albums of Pop's career. However, sales weren't that good, although the albums at least reached the Top Forty in the U.S. and Britain.

In early 1977, Bowie had just released an acclaimed album of his own, "Low." But rather than tour to support it, he joined Pop's tour band for about six weeks. Pop went on to tour a lot more that year without Bowie, but this concert happens to be one with Bowie. Bowie deliberately kept a low profile during these concerts, never singing lead vocals or addressing the audience. However, if you listen carefully, you can often make out his voice with the backing vocals.

This concert happened after the release of "The Idiot," but before the release of "Lust for Life." So it mostly consists of songs from "The Idiot," plus songs from when Pop was in the Stooges.

After releasing "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life," Pop had one more album on his record company contract. So he decided to release a live album from his 1977 shows that ended up getting called "TV Eye Live 1977." Unfortunately, it was a pretty bad album. Pop put most of the production costs in his own pocket and had it produced and mastered very cheaply, which resulted in poor sound quality. So, for instance, although allmusic.com reviews gave both "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life" five stars out of five stars, "TV Eye Live 1977" only got one and a half stars. So there has been a big need for a good live album from his 1977 concerts.

Happily, in 2020, a box set called "The Bowie Years" was released. Not only did it include all three albums mentioned above, it included three full soundboard-based concerts. Two of those have disappointing sound quality though, and this one was the best, by far. So I'm posting this here to give this concert the prominence it deserves. 

I didn't have any problems with the recording, except for two near the end. First, the last song, "China Girl," faded out before the song ended. So I took the last bit from one of the other concerts in "The Bowie Years" and used that to give that song a decent finish. 

And second, this concert was lacking the song "Lust for Life," and that's my favorite Pop song from 1977. So I added that at the very end as a quasi-bonus track. That version comes from a concert in Manchester, Britain, in September 1977.

This album is an hour and two minutes long. Just the Cleveland part (without "Lust for Life") is 57 minutes long.

01 Raw Power (Iggy Pop)
02 T.V. Eye (Iggy Pop)
03 Dirt (Iggy Pop)
04 1969 (Iggy Pop)
05 Turn Blue (Iggy Pop)
06 Funtime (Iggy Pop)
07 Gimme Danger (Iggy Pop)
08 No Fun (Iggy Pop)
09 Sister Midnight (Iggy Pop)
10 I Need Somebody (Iggy Pop)
11 Search and Destroy (Iggy Pop)
12 I Wanna Be Your Dog (Iggy Pop)
13 China Girl [Edit] (Iggy Pop)
14 Lust for Life (Iggy Pop)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16050169/IggPp_1977_AgraBllroomClevelndOH__3-21-1977_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is actually two photos put together. I wanted a photo that showed Pop and Bowie together on stage, but I could only find photos of either Pop or Bowie. So I used Photoshop to put Pop in front of a photo of Bowie (and a couple of strangers standing at the side of the stage). Both photos were from the same concert, at the Rainbow Theatre in London, on March 7, 1977. So that was about two weeks before this concert.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 10: 50th Birthday Concert, Madison Square Garden, New York City, 1-9-1997

I'm going to tempt fate by posting another David Bowie BBC album. (Weirdly, as I write this, Volume 8 is banned here but not on YouTube, and Volume 9 is banned on YouTube but not here.) Again, get it while you can, because who knows if this post will last.

David Bowie turned 50 years old in January 1997, and he decided to celebrate it with a bang, via a concert at Madison Square Garden that was broadcast on the BBC. What makes this especially interesting are all the guest stars who dueted with Bowie, usually for more than one song: Frank Black of the Pixies, the Foo Fighters, Robert Smith of the Cure, Sonic Youth, Lou Reed, and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. 

I'm sure Bowie was especially excited to perform with Reed, since Bowie had been a big fan ever since the late 1960s, at a time when very few people had ever heard of Reed or his band the Velvet Underground, especially because Bowie was British and the Velvet Underground were even more obscure in Britain at the time. All the songs were originally done by Bowie, with the exception of three songs by Reed: "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Dirty Blvd.," and "White Light-White Heat." Bowie had performed "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "White Light-White Heat" pretty much since they were released. (For instance, it's known he performed "I'm Waiting for the Man" back in the summer of 1967!) However, this was the one and only time Bowie was involved with "Dirty Blvd." a more recent Reed song. The one Bowie original done with Reed, "Queen Bitch," comes from the "Hunky Dory" album in 1971. It is obviously an homage to Reed and the Velvet Underground, both musically and lyrically (and he mentioned the inspiration in the album's liner notes), so it's interesting to hear Reed help sing it.

The sound quality is excellent... now. Originally, all the lead vocals were surprisingly low in the mix. So I used the audio editing program UVR5 to remix every single song here. I think it sounds much better as a result.

This album is an hour and 58 minutes long.

01 Introduction [Instrumental] (David Bowie)
02 Little Wonder (David Bowie)
03 The Hearts Filthy Lesson (David Bowie)
04 Scary Monsters [And Super Creeps] (David Bowie & Frank Black)
05 Fashion (David Bowie & Frank Black)
06 Telling Lies (David Bowie)
07 Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie & the Foo Fighters)
08 Seven Years in Tibet (David Bowie & the Foo Fighters)
09 The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)
10 The Last Thing You Should Do (David Bowie & Robert Smith)
11 Quicksand (David Bowie & Robert Smith)
12 Battle for Britain [The Letter] (David Bowie)
13 Voyeur of Utter Destruction [As Beauty] (David Bowie)
14 I'm Afraid of Americans (David Bowie & Sonic Youth)
15 Looking for Satellites (David Bowie)
16 Under Pressure (David Bowie)
17 'Heroes' (David Bowie)
18 Queen Bitch (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
19 I'm Waiting for the Man (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
20 Dirty Blvd. (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
21 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
22 Moonage Daydream (David Bowie)
23 talk - Happy Birthday (David Bowie)
24 All the Young Dudes (David Bowie & Billy Corgan)
25 The Jean Genie (David Bowie & Billy Corgan)
26 Space Oddity (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BihDJUwS

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/FENHxg97tAFqkXl/file

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

Robyn Hitchcock - Covers Hunky Dory by David Bowie, Three Kings, Clerkenwell, London, Britain, 10-31-2010

From 2003 to 2011, Robyn Hitchcock performed annual benefit concerts where he covered one of his favorite albums by others in their entirety. I've already posted two such concerts, one a collection of "naff" 1970s hits, and the other the "Revolver" album by the Beatles. This time, it's "Hunky Dory," the 1971 David Bowie album.

Hitchcock has been a huge fan of Bowie's music for his entire career, so it's no surprise that he decided to cover a Bowie album. In fact, I'm surprised he only did one out of all his yearly benefit concerts. He started the concert performing the songs from the "Hunky Dory" album in order. But that would have made for a rather short concert if he stopped there. So he played another seven Bowie songs to finish off the show. Those were all hits from the 1970s, including "All the Young Dudes," which was a 1972 hit for Mott the Hoople, but was actually written by Bowie.

The source is an audience bootleg. Those usually don't sound as good as soundboard bootlegs, but luckily this one sounded better than most audience boots. However, to make sure this was up to snuff with other albums posted on this blog, musical friend Mike Solof volunteered to improve the sound with some remixing. He boosted the lead vocals relative to the instruments for all the songs. In my opinion, that was a significant improvement.

Like the other annual benefit concerts he did, he played with a full band that attempted to duplicate the original recordings as much as possible. They did a good job of that, even nailing little details, yet it was still very much a Hitchcock performance with his distinctive singing style and banter. 

This album is an hour and 28 minutes long.

01 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
02 Changes (Robyn Hitchcock)
03 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
04 Oh, You Pretty Things (Robyn Hitchcock)
05 Eight Line Poem (Robyn Hitchcock)
06 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
07 Life on Mars (Robyn Hitchcock)
08 Kooks (Robyn Hitchcock)
09 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
10 Quicksand (Robyn Hitchcock)
11 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
12 Fill Your Heart (Robyn Hitchcock)
13 Andy Warhol (Robyn Hitchcock)
14 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
15 Song for Bob Dylan (Robyn Hitchcock)
16 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
17 Queen Bitch (Robyn Hitchcock)
18 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
19 The Bewlay Brothers (Robyn Hitchcock)
20 Soul Love (Robyn Hitchcock)
21 The Jean Genie (Robyn Hitchcock)
22 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
23 Rebel Rebel (Robyn Hitchcock)
24 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
25 Golden Years (Robyn Hitchcock)
26 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
27 TVC-15 (Robyn Hitchcock)
28 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
29 All the Young Dudes (Robyn Hitchcock)
30 Sound and Vision (Robyn Hitchcock)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15932462/RobynH_2010_HunkyDryThreeKingsClerkenwell__10-31-2010_atse.zip.html

 At first, I didn't know what to do for the cover art. So I did an Internet search for images related to David Bowie and Hunky Dory. I found a photo of Bowie in 1972, during his Ziggy Stardust persona phase, with the Hunky Dory album in his hands. That gave me an idea. I found a photo of Hitchcock in 1986 with his face at a similar angle and similar lighting. Then I pasted his face over Bowie's. The result is pretty weird, but hopefully in a good, amusing way.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 9: ChangesNowBowie, BBC, Rentals Studios, New York City, 1-7-1997

I could be taking a risk posting this album, we'll see. Just a few days ago (as I write this in November 2023), I posted a David Bowie BBC album compiling various 1990s sessions. A few days after that, it got taken down due to some unknown copyright violation. So this one may well be taken down soon, we'll see. (Get it while you can!) To reduce my risk of having things taken down here, I posted this album on YouTube earlier today. It got past the copyright violation check over there, so that's a good sign, at least.

Bowie probably had the roughest stretch of his music career in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when his albums were not well received by critics and his sales went way down. But he'd bounced back somewhat by the time of this concert, with the better received albums of "Outside" in 1995 and "Earthling" in 1997. 

This music comes from a big Bowie special on the BBC called "ChangesNowBowie." It was recorded just two days before a special fiftieth birthday concert in New York City with many guest stars, also broadcast by the BBC. (I'll be posting that next.) But this is quite different from that concert. It was performed by a small band, but in semi-acoustic mode. There were no guest stars. Also, the song list is rather unusual for him in the 1990s. All but two of the songs date from 1972 or earlier. Another song, "Repetition," is from the late 1970s. Only "Shopping for Girls" came from the 1990s, and even that was from 1991 (the album "Tin Machine II") instead of something promoting his latest album. Furthermore, many of the songs chosen were only occasionally played by him even back in the 1970s, instead of the usual big hits. 

The BBC special included interview sections between the songs, with lots of talking. However, in my opinion, interviews don't have a lot of replay value, so I've cut all that out and stuck to just the music. If you search the Internet, it's not that hard to find the rest.

This album is 32 minutes long. That's pretty short for an album. I could have tried to add some extra songs, but I decided not to, as this holds together as a single performance, with an overall acoustic sound.

01 The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)
02 The Supermen (David Bowie)
03 Andy Warhol (David Bowie)
04 Repetition (David Bowie)
05 Lady Stardust (David Bowie)
06 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie)
07 Shopping for Girls (David Bowie)
08 Quicksand (David Bowie)
09 Aladdin Sane (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15928016/DavidB_1997_BBSessonsVol9ChangsNwBwieRentlsStdiosNwYrkCty__1-7-1997_atse.zip.html

The cover photo was taken in New York City on January 10, 1997, three days after this.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 8: 1990-1999

I really love David Bowie's music from the first half of his career (1960s to about 1986), but I'm not such a big fan of the second half of his career (1987 and after). So I've posted seven albums of Bowie at the BBC, but that stopped with a concert in the year 1990. However, recently, musical friend Mike Solof turned me on to the fact that he actually has a bunch of BBC sessions from the 1990s and 2000s. I gave them a listen and was pleasantly surprised. So I've decided to continue the series of BBC albums until I run out of material in 2003. (He stopped performing live around that time.)

Here's the first album from this new batch. This is a collection of short sessions from radio and TV appearances. Note that everything here remains officially unreleased, as far as I know.

The first song, "Space Oddity," is a solo acoustic version from a 1990 press conference where he promoted an upcoming tour. He played four songs, which were broadcast on a BBC radio show. Unfortunately, the other three ("Panic in Detroit," "John, I'm Only Dancing," and "Queen Bitch") were mere snippets less than a minute long each, so I haven't included them here. Note that I made some edits that fixed a lyric mistake in the middle of the song (he sang the wrong line, then corrected himself, so I only kept the corrected part), and removed some talking over the music. So that's why this song has "[Edit]" in the title.

The next five songs come from a BBC studio session in 1991 when Bowie was part of the band Tin Machine. He did two albums with this band, in 1989 and 1991. It's not an acclaimed portion of his career. For instance, at the crowd-sourced rateyourmusic.com, those two albums are among the five lowest rated albums of his entire career (with 1987's "Never Let Me Down" being the lowest). However, the five songs here sound fine to me. Perhaps they came off better in their BBC versions, without studio tinkering?

The next two songs, tracks 8 and 9, are from 1995. Both songs were originally from his 1995 album "Outside." They were performed for the BBC TV show "Later... with Jools Holland."

The last two songs date from 1999. They were done for the BBC TV show "Top of the Pops." Normally, the musicians performing on that show merely lip-synced to their records. Sometimes, that was the case for Bowie, so there are some Top of the Pops performances I didn't include here because of that reason. But in this case, Bowie pre-recorded versions of these songs and then lip-synced to those. So I've included them here because they are unique versions.

This album is 49 minutes long. 

Note that the next two albums in this series date from 1997. They're both full shows, so they deserve their own albums, even though they fall within the time frame of this album.

01 Space Oddity [Edit] (David Bowie)
02 A Big Hurt (Tin Machine [David Bowie])
03 Baby Universal (Tin Machine [David Bowie])
04 Stateside (Tin Machine [David Bowie])
05 talk (Tin Machine [David Bowie])
06 If There Is Something (Tin Machine [David Bowie])
07 Heaven's in Here (Tin Machine [David Bowie])
08 Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie)
09 Strangers When We Meet (David Bowie)
10 Thursday's Child (David Bowie)
11 The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/VeMnGHXb

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/UhEjyNaNvqMgng1/file

The cover photo is a screenshot I took of a YouTube video of Bowie's 1995 performance here.

Live Aid - Wembley Stadium, London, Britain, 7-13-1985, Part 4: Dire Straits, Queen, and David Bowie

This is the fourth of five albums of the London portion of the 1985 Live Aid concert.

Generally, I had at least four musical acts for each part. But this time, it's only three. That's because they are three very big acts at the time, so they were given longer time spots.

First up was Dire Straits. They only played two songs, but together those totaled nearly twenty minutes. For "Money for Nothing," the band was joined by Sting on backing vocals, just as it was on the original studio recording.

Queen was up next. Many say that this was the best set of all the Live Aid acts. Amazingly, in 2004, a poll of music industry insiders called the "World's Greatest Gigs" voted this as the best concert of all time! I think that's a bit much. It was only 21 minutes long, so it's hard to compare with great full-length concerts. Much of what was great about it was the visual performance of lead singer Freddie Mercury, which obviously can't be captured in an audio recording. But it was so impressive that Queen's albums jumped back up the charts after Live Aid, just like U2's did. And the 2018 movie about Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody," made their Live Aid performance the emotional peak of the film, and recreated it with great attention to detail.

It must have been tough to follow an act like that, but David Bowie did a commendable job. He would have a rough late 1980s, but in 1985, he was still riding high from his smash 1983 album "Let's Dance." Rolling Stone Magazine later noted that his performance was "arguably Bowie's last triumph of the 1980s," and that "as approximately two billion people sang along to 'Heroes' ... he still seemed like one of the biggest and most vital rock stars in the world."

This album is an hour long.

070 talk (Tommy Vance)
071 Money for Nothing (Dire Straits with Sting)
072 talk (Dire Straits)
073 Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits)
074 talk (Griff Rhys Jones & Mel Smith)
075 Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)
076 Radio Gaga (Queen)
077 Audience Participation (Queen)
078 Hammer to Fall (Queen)
079 talk (Queen)
080 Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
081 We Will Rock You (Queen)
082 We Are the Champions (Queen)
083 talk (Andy Peebles)
084 TVC-15 (David Bowie)
085 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
086 Modern Love (David Bowie)
087 Heroes (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15749024/LveAidJFKStdiumLondnPA__7-13-1985_Part4.zip.html

As usual for this series, I split the cover into four parts so I could include photos from more of the acts. This is pretty much the only album in the series where there were only three acts: Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits in the top left, Freddie Mercury and Brian May of Queen in the top right, and David Bowie in the bottom left. That left me one more spot to fill. So I chose a crowd scene, since I had one of those for the Philadelphia concert but none for the London one.

David Bowie - Bridge School Benefit, Mountain View, CA, 10-19-1996

I plan on posting some more albums of David Bowie at the BBC, because he returned to the BBC a bit towards the end of his career. But first, this makes a good stop in the mid-1990s between BBC shows. What makes this concert stand out is that it was done in the acoustic format, with Bowie only accompanied by a second guitarist and bassist.

I originally had an audience bootleg of this concert. Later, I found a soundboard bootleg. The soundboard had much better and clearer sound quality. But the downside was that it reduced the audience noise to almost nothing. It's strange to have a song end and basically just hear crickets when there's supposed to be cheering. So I took the cheering after each song from the audience bootleg and patched that into the soundboard version. Now, I think it sounds better than ever before.

The yearly Bridge School Benefit typically puts on two shows each year, on back to back nights. That was the case in 1996. Bowie played similar sets each night, but there were a few differences. I had that same two sources for both shows. So most of the songs here are from the October 19th show, but I've added in three songs from the October 20th show at the end. 

Most of the songs are written by Bowie, but he did two snippets of cover songs, "I'm a Hog for You" and "You and I and George." Plus, "White Light/White Heat" is a Velvet Underground cover.

As an aside, in his banter between songs, he occasionally made reference to some of the other performers in that year's Bridge School concerts. Pete Townshend played on October 19th, and he talked some about how much Townshend influenced him. Billy Idol and Bonnie Raitt played on October 20th only, and he made jokes referencing them. Additionally, he was introduced at the start of this recording by Neil Young.

This album is 44 minutes long.

01 talk by Neil Young (David Bowie)
02 Aladdin Sane (David Bowie)
03 talk (David Bowie)
04 The Jean Genie (David Bowie)
05 I'm a Hog for You (David Bowie)
06 talk (David Bowie)
07 I Can't Read (David Bowie)
08 talk (David Bowie)
09 The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)
10 talk (David Bowie)
11 'Heroes' (David Bowie)
12 talk (David Bowie)
13 Let's Dance (David Bowie)
14 talk (David Bowie)
15 You and I and George (David Bowie)
16 talk (David Bowie)
17 China Girl (David Bowie)
18 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17362470/DAVDBWE1996BrdgeScholBnfitMuntnViwCA__10-19-1996_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/JjBnsCeq

The cover photo comes from one of the 1996 Bridge School Benefit concerts, though I don't know which one.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 7: In Concert, Milton Keynes National Bowl, Milton Keynes, Britain, 8-5-1990

I had previously posted six albums of David Bowie performing for the BBC, from the years 1967 to 1980. I had thought I was done with his BBC material, since I'm not a big fan of his music after the mid-1980s. But then I came across this concert broadcast on BBC radio in 1990, and couldn't resist posting it.

In 1987, put out the album "Never Let Me Down," which wasn't well received. He supported it with a worldwide"Glass Spider" concert tour, which was criticized as overblown and pretentious. He regrouped in 1988 with a new band, Tin Machine, that had a very different sound. However, while this band's first album had a better critical reception, its sales were disappointing. In 1990, his record company put out a career spanning box set called "Sound + Vision." Bowie decided to take a break from his Tin Machine band and put on a world tour to promote the box set. 

He famously and repeatedly claimed that he would use this tour to exclusively play his older hits, and then would retire them. However, the claim wasn't entirely true. He did retire some of his songs, such as "Space Oddity" and "Young Americans." And from this point on, he tended to play lesser known songs from his back catalog more often. But he did play many of his older hits on subsequent tours. In any case, those claims helped fill the seats, causing most of the concerts to sell out. 

To make a long story short, this concert (and the tour as a whole) is a great selection of his favorite songs from his entire music career up until that point. He didn't play any songs from his 1987 album "Never Let Me Down," nor did he play any Tin Machine songs. But guitarist Adrian Belew was in the tour band (which consisted of just five musicians, in contrast to a much bigger sound for the Glass Spider tour). Bowie wrote and sang lead on a song off Belew's 1990 album "Young Lions," and Bowie sang that sole new song in this concert.

Normally, BBC broadcast recordings are pretty close to flawless. But this one had a serious flaw: Bowie's vocals were relatively low in the mix. Happily, that was something I could fix, thanks to audio editing programs like X-Minus. I used that program to boost his vocals on every song here. I didn't feel the need to add "[Edit]" to the titles of all the songs, since the treatment was the same for all the songs. But you will find that one on song, "Station to Station," because that song had an additional problem. There was a section above five seconds long in the middle of the song that was missing. Luckily, it was in a place that was repeated elsewhere, so I fixed it by patching in a section from elsewhere in the song.

Other than "Pretty Pink Rose" there aren't really any surprises here, since it's a greatest hits type show. But he did perform the Them hit "Gloria" as part of a medley with "The Jean Genie." He never officially released his version of that song.

I understand that this show took place in front of an audience of 60,000 people during a summer heat wave. Many suffered from dehydration, sunburn, and heat exhaustion. However, you can't tell that at all just listening to this recording.

This concert is an hour and 47 minutes long.

01 Space Oddity (David Bowie)
02 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
03 Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)
04 Fashion (David Bowie)
05 talk (David Bowie)
06 Life on Mars (David Bowie)
07 talk (David Bowie)
08 Pretty Pink Rose (David Bowie)
09 Sound and Vision (David Bowie)
10 Blue Jean (David Bowie)
11 Let's Dance (David Bowie)
12 Stay (David Bowie)
13 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
14 China Girl (David Bowie)
15 Station to Station [Edit] (David Bowie)
16 Young Americans (David Bowie)
17 Suffragette City (David Bowie)
18 Fame (David Bowie)
19 'Heroes' (David Bowie)
20 Changes (David Bowie)
21 The Jean Genie - Gloria (David Bowie)
22 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie)
23 Modern Love (David Bowie)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dznSB

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/RTK62eWj

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Nru5XAhk5NPbsCt/file 

The photo chosen for the cover is the only high-resolution one I could find where I was 100% sure it came from this exact concert. So I used it, even though it's a bit odd with his hands on his face.

David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust - Acoustic Mixes (1972)

Here's a type of album I've never posted before. (And note this is NOT the officially released version of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" album as you know it.) It used to be one could never find multitrack mixes of songs. I'd never even heard of those being available. But that started to change with the "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" series of computer games, in which mixes were made of famous songs that separated out each of the major instruments, like bass, guitar, drums, vocals, and so on. Also, some music formats became increasingly popular, such as 5.1 surround sound, which effectively has four music channels instead of the usual two for stereo.

Thanks to these sorts of developments, sometimes it's possible to make mixes of songs where you can strip out one or more of the instruments. It's very hit or miss, and it becomes harder to find this sort of thing the further you go back in time, because the multi-track masters often were not saved. For instance, when a special Beatles version of "Rock Band" was made in 2007, there were no multitrack versions of Beatles songs. They had to be created using special new audio forensics technology that had only recently been developed, and that took many months and lots of money. In the end, such versions were made for only about 70 Beatles of the 200 or so original Beatles songs.

When it comes to David Bowie, there aren't many of these multitrack mixes available now, but one great exception is the entire "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album. Perhaps because that's such a famous and classic album, it got special attention. In any case, since these exist, and since I'm a big fan of stripping music back to reveal the acoustic core of songs, I edited these multitracks to create versions of each song that primarily just feature Bowie's voice and guitar. The result is essentially an alternate acoustic version of the album, allowing you to hear it in a new way, and hopefully notice little things you'd missed before.

Note that I was limited by what was on the multitrack channels. In some cases, there was some bleed of some other instruments into the channels I selected. For instance, you might get a little bit of bass on one song, or some drums on another song. But every song is stripped way down, and sounds quite different from the well-known official versions.

By chance, my source material also included one bonus track, "Sweet Head." So I tacked that onto the end. From what I understand, the multitrack mixes of another bonus track, "Velvet Goldmine," should also exist. But I haven't been able to find that one. If anyone has it, please let me know and I'll add it in.

I'm very curious what people think about this, and if you like it. If you do, and let me know, I could post more stripped versions based on multitrack mixes in the future.

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Five Years (David Bowie)
02 Soul Love (David Bowie)
03 Moonage Daydream (David Bowie)
04 Starman (David Bowie)
05 It Ain't Easy (David Bowie)
06 Lady Stardust (David Bowie)
07 Star (David Bowie)
08 Hang on to Yourself (David Bowie)
09 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
10 Suffragette City (David Bowie)
11 Rock 'N' Roll Suicide (David Bowie)
12 Sweet Head (David Bowie)

NOTE: The Pixeldrain link was removed due to a copyright violation.

https://bestfile.io/en/XEQYw9UZKi2ZNvV/file

Just as the music here is similar to the released "Ziggy Stardust" album, but different, the cover used here is similar to that album's cover, but different.  There was a photo session that resulted in the official cover, and somehow a bunch of outtakes from that session have been made public. I picked one of the outtakes, then added the usual text in the upper left corner, and further added the words "Acoustic Mixes" there.

David Bowie - Acoustic Demos (1968-1971)

I'm a big fan of David Bowie's music, but I like some eras of his music career more than others. My favorite era stretches from about 1968 to 1973. One thing I like about his music from that time was that it was often acoustic based, helped by the fact that I favor acoustic versions of songs in general. So I've created this collection of acoustic performances. All of these versions are versions that I haven't included on any other Bowie albums I've posted at this blog.

All but four of the versions here have been officially released. The four unreleased ones are bunched together near the end, tracks 11 to 14. Most of the rest have only been released in recent years. Perhaps some of those versions weren't released earlier because their sound quality is fairly rough. The songs "In the Heat of the Morning," London Bye Ta-Ta," and "When I'm Five" sounded worse than the others. So I asked my musical friend MZ for help. He made some tweaks to help, but there's only so much one can do, so those still sound worse than the others.

A couple of the songs I had sounded even worse than the ones mentioned above. So I've demoted those two, "Amsterdam" and "Bombers," to bonus track status.

This album is 52 minutes long.

01 In the Heat of the Morning (David Bowie)
02 London Bye Ta-Ta (David Bowie)
03 Angel Angel Grubby Face [Version 2] (David Bowie)
04 Space Oddity [Duet Version] (David Bowie with John 'Hutch' Hutchinson)
05 When I'm Five (David Bowie)
06 Conversation Piece (David Bowie)
07 Lover to the Dawn [Early Version of Cygnet Committee] (David Bowie with John 'Hutch' Hutchinson)
08 Let Me Sleep Beside You (David Bowie with John 'Hutch' Hutchinson)
09 Ching-A-Ling (David Bowie with John 'Hutch' Hutchinson)
10 An Occasional Dream (David Bowie with John 'Hutch' Hutchinson)
11 Quicksand (David Bowie)
12 Changes (David Bowie)
13 Kooks (David Bowie)
14 Right On Mother (David Bowie)
15 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
16 Lady Stardust (David Bowie)

Amsterdam (David Bowie)
Bombers (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17362494/DAVDBWE1968-1971AcusticDmos_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/FaS52TTu

I don't know when or where the cover art photo comes from. But based on his appearance, I'm fairly confident it's from 1971 or 1972. I used the Krea AI program to fix it up some. It used to be even more blurry and low res.

David Bowie - Toy (2001)

One well known "lost album" is "Toy" by David Bowie. Around 2000, Bowie had what I consider to be the excellent idea of revisiting some of his little-known songs from the very start of his career. He performed all new versions of these songs with drastically different arrangements, as well as three brand new songs. He was ready to release this as his next album in 2001, but there were problems with his record company, which wouldn't let him release the album. So instead a number of the songs dribbled out as B-sides and on compilations. Then, in 2011, the entire album as it was originally conceived was released onto the Internet. It is widely speculated that Bowie himself did this.

There are two different versions, but with the same song order. The versions differ slightly with the productions of the songs. I've chosen the less well known version, if only to help spread it around a little more. Both are equally good, in my opinion.

I could say a lot more, but for once I don't have to, since there's a Wikipedia entry that explains it all quite well. That can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_(David_Bowie_album)

That lists where the original versions can be found, and where some of the revised versions can be found. Two of the songs, "Uncle Floyd" (also known as "Slip Away") and "Afraid" appeared on his next studio album, "Heathen."

The album is fairly long, being exactly an hour in length. Perhaps some of the songs would have been cut had it actually been released in 2001.

UPDATE: On November 29, 2021, I drastically updated the mp3 download file. Earlier that month, an official version of the album was finally released, as part of the "Brilliant Adventure" box set. However, only 12 of the 16 songs were included. So I've posted those twelve, plus the extra four at the end. 

01 I Dig Everything (David Bowie)
02 You've Got a Habit of Leaving (David Bowie)
03 The London Boys (David Bowie)
04 Karma Man (David Bowie)
05 Conversation Piece (David Bowie)
06 Shadow Man (David Bowie)
07 Let Me Sleep Beside You (David Bowie)
08 Hole in the Ground (David Bowie)
09 Baby Loves That Way (David Bowie)
10 Can't Help Thinking about Me (David Bowie)
11 Silly Boy Blue (David Bowie)
12 Toy [Your Turn to Drive] (David Bowie)
13 Uncle Floyd [Slip Away] (David Bowie)
14 Afraid (David Bowie)
15 Liza Jane (David Bowie)
16 In the Heat of the Morning (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15129408/DavidB_2001_Ty_atse.zip.html

When I searched the Internet for a good cover art photo, I was surprised to find many fan-made versions already existed. I don't know of any cover that was approved to be the real one back in 2001. So instead I just picked the one out of those that I liked the best. I like this one because it's based on the cover of his 1967 album, simply called "David Bowie," except it has different text and uses a photo of him from around 2001.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 6: 1974-1980

I'm probably guilty of false advertising by calling this the sixth collection of David Bowie's BBC performances. In fact, while all the other albums in this series had all or many of their songs from actual BBC performances, this one has a grand total of one ("Heroes"). The rest are from other radio and TV appearances. But I'm calling it a BBC album because it finishes off the 1970s for the series. For whatever reason, Bowie almost never appeared on the BBC much after 1973 for a long time.

When it comes to Bowie appearing on TV - and most or all of these performances are from TV shows - the trick is finding versions that aren't lip-synced. The prevalence of that unfortunate technique has risen and fallen over the years, but it's never entirely gone away. For a few of these, I believe he was singing to a backing track for at least some of the instruments. But in all cases, at least his lead vocals were done live.

Absolutely none of the performances here have been officially released. But the sound is very good, because they all come from quality recordings of TV shows.

Most of the songs are the hits you'd expect, although he performed live on TV so rarely for much of the 1970s that a lot of the hits don't appear here. However, there are a couple of unexpected choices. One, a cover medley of "Foot Stompin' - I Wish I Could Shimmy like My Sister Kate," wasn't released by him at time. It's clear why, since it obviously soon evolved into his original hit song "Fame."

It's also unexpected that he sang a duet with Cher on a lesser known song of his. They also did a duet of a long medley. I haven't included it because it's so painful and cheesy, in a 1970s variety show way. It started out with "Young Americans," but did snippets of many more songs, including "Do Do Run Run," "Day Tripper," "Blue Moon," "Young Blood," and more. Trust me, it's better to read about it than to actually hear it. But if you really want to, you can find it on YouTube.

This series comes to an end in 1980, because his radio and TV appearances seem to have dwindled down after that year. Even for 1983, which was his biggest year in terms of commercial success with the "Let's Dance" album and subsequent world tour, I couldn't find any good TV or radio appearances that weren't taken from his concert tour. However, he did resume performing for the BBC in the 1990s, so the series will pick up again then.

This album is 54 minutes long.

01 1984 (David Bowie)
02 Young Americans (David Bowie)
03 Foot Stompin' - I Wish I Could Shimmy like My Sister Kate (David Bowie)
04 Can You Hear Me (David Bowie & Cher)
05 Fame (David Bowie)
06 Heroes (David Bowie)
07 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
08 Stay (David Bowie)
09 Beauty and the Beast (David Bowie)
10 Alabama Song [Whisky Bar] (David Bowie)
11 TVC-15 (David Bowie)
12 The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)
13 Boys Keep Swinging (David Bowie)
14 Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17362462/DAVDBWE1974-1980BBSssonsVlum6_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/puSmeEzk

In 1979, Bowie appeared on "Saturday Night Live" wearing some exceedingly strange outfits. (He changed outfits after each song to maximize the strangeness.) The cover art photo here comes from that performance. Unfortunately, I can't really capture the event with a single photo. It's worth tracking down on YouTube and watching.