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)

The download link has been removed due to copyright issues. However, look to the comments below.

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