David Bowie - Under Pressure - Non-Album Tracks (1977-1982)

This album continues the Bowie stray tracks album series. But unlike in the early 1970s, when there was need for such an album every year or two, this album covers six years. Bowie put out some of the best albums of his career during that time, but there just don't seem to be as many non-album tracks as before, at least ones that have reached the public.

Furthermore, it's speculated that some of these many not fully date from this time period. What I mean is that "All Saints," "Some Are," "Abdulmajid," and "I Pray Ole" were all first released in the late 1990s as bonus tracks to late 1970s albums, and it's known that at least some overdubs were added at that time, but just how much is unclear. The very name of the song "Abdulmajid" is curious, since that the name of a woman Bowie was romantically involved with in the late 1990s (Iman, a.k.a. Zara Mohamed Abdulmajid), who he hadn't met yet in the 1970s. So it's similar to what the Rolling Stones did with some songs on their "Some Girls" and "Exile On Main St." deluxe versions, with some amount of long-after-the-fact tinkering. Anyway, they're good songs and at least the basics of them were recorded in the right time period, so I've included them.

I wasn't sure whether to include some or all of three other songs here: "The Man Who Sold the World," "Space Oddity," and "Panic in Detroit." The songs were originally done by Bowie in 1971, 1969, and 1973 respectively. For some reason, he revisited all three with new versions around 1979. I decided they're different enough, and enough time had passed from the original versions, to include them. Feel free to delete them from your versions of this album if you feel they aren't interesting enough.

For those who don't know, Bowie did two versions of the song "Cat People," one for the soundtrack to the movie of the same name, and one for his "Let's Dance" album in 1983. They're very different versions, mainly because the soundtrack version is done at a significantly slower pace, making it last over a minute longer.

I think this is going to be the last Bowie stray tracks album I'm going to make. I really like the "Let's Dance" album, but there are no stray tracks around it that I know of. Not only after that, in my opinion, the quality of his songwriting took a steep dive. For the rest of his career, I like the occasional song here and there instead of loving pretty much everything he did.

That said, I still have a lot of Bowie music to post. I have a whole series of albums based on his BBC performances, for instance (a lot more than what's been officially released). But that'll have to wait for another day.

01 Madman (David Bowie & Marc Bolan)
02 All Saints [Instrumental] (David Bowie)
03 Some Are (David Bowie)
04 Peace on Earth - Little Drummer Boy (David Bowie & Bing Crosby)
05 Abdulmajid [Instrumental] (David Bowie)
06 I Pray, Ole (David Bowie)
07 The Man Who Sold the World [Live] (David Bowie)
08 Space Oddity [1979 Version] (David Bowie)
09 Panic in Detroit [1979 Version] (David Bowie)
10 Crystal Japan [Instrumental] (David Bowie)
11 Alabama Song [Whisky Bar] (David Bowie)
12 Under Pressure (Queen & David Bowie)
13 Cat People [Putting Out Fire] [Soundtrack Version] (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15904884/DavidB_1977-1982_UndrPressure_atse.zip.html

I based the album cover on the cover of the "Under Pressure" single. That was all black, with the words of the artist and song title written in big white letters. Since the song was a collaboration between Queen and Bowie, I removed Queen from the text and recentered Bowie's name. Then I added a 1983 photo of Bowie on top, to fill up the vast black space.