Condition: Used
David Bowie - Pinups
Original 1973 LP
CANADA
RCA Record
Song Title
1. Rosalyn
2. Here Comes The Night
3. I Wish You Would
4. See Emily Play
5. Everything's Alright
6. I Can't Explain
7. Friday On My Mind
8. Sorrow
9. Don't Bring Me Down
10. Shapes Of Things
11. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere?
12. Where Have All The Good Times Gone
At the time, Pinups appeared to be little more than a quick toss-off, a means of pushing out something fun before digging into the next serious `project'. I suppose that it still remains the same even now, only that it has taken on an aura all its own in the past thirty years (my God, has it been that long?). Pinups shows Bowie paying tribute to the bands that had influenced and inspired him while growing up in the sixties. From the perspective of a new millennium, it might be hard to conceive of a time when, like most other English kids, David Bowie was a fan and not a superstar, but he was. In his pre-Ziggy, pre-superstar, pre-pubescent era, he loved Pink Floyd, the Who the Kinks and the Pretty Things like any school-aged English boy would. As it turns out, he was no ordinary schoolboy, and his interpretations of these songs are hardly ordinary, either. Bowie plays with the arrangements of these classic (or semi-classic) compositions, treating them reverently but never resorting to straight cover versions.
Taking a cue from his magnificent remake of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" on Aladdin Sane, Bowie brings as much as he borrows. Because of its oddities and idiosyncasies, Syd Barrett's (of Pink Floyd) "See Emily Play" is not a song that could normally be considered for a cover version, but Bowie does a magnificent job of it, retooling it as a psycho-surreal workout for the fabulously gifted pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar. Other arrangements that transcend expectations are "Friday On My Mind" (with the `zoom zoom zoom-zoom-zoom' backing vocals a la Esquivel) and "Rosalyn", a rocker that Bowie turns into something resembling psycho-billy.
As for the rest of the album, there are high points ("Sorrow", "Everything's Alright") and moments of mediocrity ("Shapes of Things" "Where Have All the Good Times Gone", and "I Can't Explain" don't offer much that's new in their interpretation here), but it never gets bland, and it's never anywhere near bad. At this point, Bowie was cruising high and firing on all cylinders. He was slowly working his way away from the `Ziggy' persona, but Pinups catches Bowie at a time when he and his creation melded naturally, and as such, it is also one of the least pretentious works of Bowie's career.
David Bowie - Sorrow
The muse holding the giant magic wand is Amanda Lear. 1973.
Nice to see the beautiful Amanda Lear as a Goddess here, and the Lindsay Kemp troupe I think. One of my favorites, just so stylish...
Amanda Lear of course was very close to Salvador Dali she wrote the book 'Dali and Me', and then Bowie, Bryan Ferry etc.
A cabaret artist, 60's fashion model, 70's Eurodisco singer to great acclaim, and now artist/actress and TV talk show host. Dali paid for her sex change in Casablanca.
|
Shopping Cart
