David Bowie Bowie at the Beeb – The Best Of The BBC Radio Session 68-72 (2000)
is a compilation album by David Bowie, first released in 2000. Originally, it came in a three-CD set, the third, bonus CD being a live recording made on 27 June 2000 (2000-06-27) at the Portland BBC Radio Theatre. Later editions contain only the first two CDs.
This compilation also features a previously unreleased song, “Looking for a Friend” (disc 1, track 15), which John Peel says would be released as a single by Arnold Corns as a follow-up to the Arnold Corns versions of “Moonage Daydream” and “Hang Onto Yourself”, but it was never released, thus making this the only performance of “Looking for a Friend”.
Track listing – All tracks written by David Bowie except as noted.
Disc one 1.
Recorded for John Peel in Top Gear as “David Bowie and the Tony Visconti Orchestra,” 13 May 1968 (1968-05-13), tracks 1–3 broadcast 26 May 1968 (1968-05-26).
01.”In the Heat of the Morning” – 3:02
02.”London Bye Ta Ta” – 2:36
03.”Karma Man” – 3:00
04.”Silly Boy Blue” – 6:08
Recorded for D.L.T. (Dave Lee Travis Show) as “David Bowie and Junior’s Eyes,” 20 October 1969 (1969-10-20); neither track was broadcast.
05.”Let Me Sleep Beside You” – 3:17
06.”Janine” – 3:24
Recorded for The Sunday Show introduced by John Peel as “David Bowie and the Tony Visconti Trio (aka The Hype),” 5 February 1970 (1970-02-05), broadcast date 8 February 1970 (1970-02-08).
07.”Amsterdam” (Jacques Brel) – 3:18
08.”God Knows I’m Good” – 3:36
09.”The Width of a Circle” – 5:21
10.”Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” – 5:07
11.”Cygnet Committee” – 9:07
12.”Memory of a Free Festival” – 3:18
Recorded for Sounds of the 70s: Andy Ferris as “David Bowie and the Tony Visconti Trio,” 25 March 1970 (1970-03-25), broadcast date 6 April 1970 (1970-04-06).
13.”Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud” – 5:55
Recorded for in Concert: John Peel as “David Bowie and friends,” 3 June 1971 (1971-06-03), broadcast date 20 June 1971 (1971-06-20).
14.”Bombers” – 3:19
15.”Looking for a Friend” – 3:34
16.”Almost Grown” (Chuck Berry) – 2:44
17.”Kooks” – 3:32
18.”It Ain’t Easy” (Ron Davies) – 2:51
Disc two
Recorded for Sounds of the 70s: Bob Harris by David Bowie with Mick Ronson, 21 September 1971 (1971-09-21), broadcast date 4 October 1971 (1971-10-04).
01.”The Supermen” – 2:51
02.”Oh! You Pretty Things” [Japan-only] – 3:15
03.”Eight Line Poem” – 2:56
Recorded for Sounds of the 70s: Bob Harris as “David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars”, 18 January 1972 (1972-01-18), broadcast date 7 February 1972 (1972-02-07).
04.”Hang on to Yourself” – 2:50
05.”Ziggy Stardust” – 3:26
06.”Queen Bitch” – 2:59
07.”I’m Waiting for the Man” (Lou Reed) – 5:24
08.”Five Years” – 4:24
Recorded for Sounds of the 70s: John Peel as “David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars,” 16 May 1972 (1972-05-16), broadcast date 23 May 1972 (1972-05-23).
09.”White Light/White Heat” (Reed) – 3:48
10.”Moonage Daydream” – 4:58
11.”Hang on to Yourself” – 2:50
12.”Suffragette City” – 3:28
13.”Ziggy Stardust” – 3:24
Recorded for Johnnie Walker Lunchtime Show as “David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars,” 22 May 1972 (1972-05-22), broadcast date 5 June 1972 (1972-06-05)–9 June 1972 (1972-06-09).
14.”Starman” – 4:05
15.”Space Oddity” – 4:16
16.”Changes” – 3:29
17.”Oh! You Pretty Things” – 2:57
Recorded for Sounds of the 70s: Bob Harris as “David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars,” 23 May 1972 (1972-05-23), broadcast date 19 June 1972 (1972-06-19).
18.”Andy Warhol” – 3:14
19.”Lady Stardust” – 3:21
20.”Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” – 3:08
Disc three
Supplied as a bonus disc with 2000-release limited editions.
Tracks recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre, 27 June 2000 (2000-06-27).
1.”Wild Is the Wind” (Ned Washington, Dimitri Tiomkin) – 6:23
2.”Ashes to Ashes” – 5:04
3.”Seven” (Bowie, Reeves Gabrels) – 4:13
4.”This Is Not America” (Bowie, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays) – 3:44
5.”Absolute Beginners” – 6:32
6.”Always Crashing in the Same Car” – 4:07
7.”Survive” (Bowie, Gabrels) – 4:55
8.”Little Wonder” (Bowie, Gabrels, Mark Plati) – 3:49
9.”The Man Who Sold the World” – 3:58
10.”Fame” (Bowie, Carlos Alomar, John Lennon) – 4:12
11.”Stay” – 5:45
12.”Hallo Spaceboy” (Bowie, Brian Eno) – 5:22
13.”Cracked Actor” – 4:10
14.”I’m Afraid of Americans” (Bowie, Brian Eno) – 5:30
15.”Let’s Dance” – 6:20
BOWIE AT THE BEEB
Four years after the NMC’s DAVID BOWIE BBC SESSIONS 1969-1972 sampler was issued and then hurriedly withdrawn from sale, another BBC set from EMI called BOWIE AT THE BEEB: The Best of the BBC Radio Sessions 68-72 was released on 25 September 2000.
This EMI 3CD release was made up of the best BBC tracks recorded between 1968 and 1972, and the tracks were personally chosen by David Bowie. Unlike NMC’s planned but never realised DAVID BOWIE BBC SESSIONS 1969-1972 3CD set, BOWIE AT THE BEEB: The Best of the BBC Radio Sessions 68-72 was officially sanctioned by David Bowie.
It included the first-ever live performance with guitarist Mick Ronson and Bowie’s 1968 session with the Tony Visconti Trio. Although the recordings are mainly in mono, they have been mastered to the highest possible sound quality and resolution. The third CD (a bonus CD) initially included with the compilation captures Bowie’s performance at the BBC Radio Theatre, Portland on 27 June 2000 before a studio audience, just two days after his Glastonbury Festival appearance. This show, filmed by the BBC, was edited down to a 1 hour programme and broadcast on BBC 1 to coincide with the release.
The 3CD packaging features track by track/session details along with sleeve notes from BBC radio producers Bernie Andrews and Jeff Griffin who, between them, were responsible for producing seven of the sessions. Griffin and Andrews also supplied personal artifacts/memorabilia for inclusion in the 20-page full colour booklet with research by Kevin Cann and liner notes by Mark Adams.
The cover art is by artist Guy Peellaert, who painted the Diamond Dogs (1974) album cover and was created by reworking a Mick Rock photograph of Bowie recording PINUPs in 1973, and a Sarah McCormack photograph of BBC Maida Vale Studio 3. Sarah McCormack is the wife of Bowie’s friend Geoffrey (Alexander) McCormack who sang at a number of Ziggy Stardust concerts.
The bonus CD artwork is by Rex Ray who also produced the HOURS album artwork, along with singles, posters and the forthcoming Ziggy 2002 art prints. In the future BOWIE AT THE BEEB (2000) will comprise only the 2CDs worth of the 1968-72 BBC material.
EMI also distributed to radio stations (in late August 2000) an 8-track promotional CD which was stylishly packaged as a reel-to-reel tape (see below). A limited edition deluxe four LP set was released in October 2000 and included two tracks not found on the 3CD version.
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David Bowie – Bowie At The Beeb
The 1972 Ziggy Stardust BBC sessions
For Ziggy Stardust fans it is CD2 which is of most interest as it contains seventeen tracks that David Bowie recorded at various BBC studios in 1972 as Ziggy Stardust. To date these have only been available to fans as part of the fore-mentioned NMC DAVID BOWIE BBC SESSIONS 1969-1972 (sampler) and illegally in various bootlegs.
All but one song of the Ziggy Stardust BBC sessions appears in this new EMI release. The missing song is Bowie’s cover of Lou Reed’s “White Light – White Heat” from from Sounds of the Seventies (Broadcast: 19 June 1972). To see where these songs were recorded and their history see Ziggy Stardust on Radio, TV, Film & Video.
Following the release it was quickly discovered by fans that the two supposedly different versions of “Ziggy Stardust” on CD2 (Tracks 4 and 12) were in fact the very same track. Presumably someone at EMI made a mistake and duplicated the track of “Ziggy Stardust” from May 1972 leaving the earlier version from January 1972 missing.
EMI then stated that anybody who purchased a copy of BOWIE AT THE BEEB (2000) with this mistake was able to claim a free single-track CD replacement containing the missing version of “Ziggy Stardust”. Current pressings of the BBC set now contain the correct versions.
REVIEWS
Grand Dame’s Route to Stardust by Andy Gill (MOJO Magazine)
TEMPORARILY BULKED out with a third disc of the recent BBC Radio Theatre show that effectively reprised his headlining Glastonbury set, this 2-CD compilation collects Bowie’s earliest sessions from various Top Gear, In Concert, Johnnie Walker and Sounds Of The Seventies shows recorded between May 1968 and May 1972, tracking his progress from Anthony Newley wannabe to the brink of Aladdin Sane, offering a handy aural frieze of his surprisingly arduous climb to superstardom, culminating aptly in the Ziggy-killing Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.
It’s interesting to recall Bowie’s callow beginnings. The poppy organ and ambitious arrangements of In The Heat Of The Morning and London Bye Ta-Ta are redolent of the Swinging ’60s, as are lyrical references to “the ragged soldier catching butterflies”. The prissy strings of Karma Man further expose the earnest nature of the hippy years, while solo acoustic versions of God Knows I’m Good and Jacques Brel’s Port Of Amsterdam capture the future progenitor of glam in a rather ill-fitting Euro-Dylanesque mode.
Other Space Oddity material finds him in transition: the urgent vocal style and rough, spindly guitar work makes Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed sound like Dylan with a Diddley beat, which wins the praise of laid-back John Peel. He is rewarded with a balls-aching eight minutes of wordy Cygnet Committee, complete with flamenco flourishes and “I want to live” drama queen finale.
A 1970 Sunday Show performance of The Width Of A Circle captures a pivotal moment in Bowie’s early career: the first public appearance of Mick Ronson. It’s not an exceptional performance. But he gets into his stride on the disc two which, apart from pulsating covers of I’m Waiting For The Man and White Light/White Heat, focuses almost entirely on Bowie’s last few rungs up the stardom ladder with Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, including two virtually indistinguishable takes each of Hang On To Yourself and Ziggy itself. The quality of both performances and recordings is exceptional for the time, with elegant versions of Starman and Oh! You Pretty Things affirming the confident new direction of Bowie’s pop sensibility, and muscular renditions of Suffragette City, Queen Bitch and Changes. It wouldn’t all be downhill from here on, but Bowie had clearly reached a rarefied plateau from which further ascent would prove difficult.
Bowie At The Beeb by David Quantick (Q Magazine)
The BBC’s decision to let its many sessions go free has been the curse of the bootlegger and the delight of the rock fan who wants to hear great old music from his/her record collection in a raw, tinny fashion. Bowie’s BBC sessions have long been available illegally, but now these reasonably cleaned-up recording – from 1968 to 2000 – are available to all.
The early tunes are a strange mix of Scott Walker-influenced pop (In The Heat Of The Morning, Let Me Sleep Besides You), hippy-pop (Memory Of A Free Festival, Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed) and the partially formed rock of Width Of A Circle, recorded within a few days of guitarist Mick Ronson joining Bowie’s band, and Bombers a song that sounds like a template for the imminent Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars album.
CD1 is thus the sound of Bowie working out who he’s going to be (and also the sound of John Peel talking like Price Lord Hippy Arse). By CD2, Bowie is both sucking up to DJ Brian Matthews like a good ‘un and sandpapering the face off rock ‘n’ roll. Here we have the best of both the Ziggy Stardust album (two crunching versions of the title track) and Hunky Dory, plus a brilliant, Lou Reed name-checking White Light / White Heat. The songs here are rougher, louder and often more exciting than their “official” versions, not least Moonage Daydream where Ronson’s guitar sounds like it’s ripping transatlantic cable out of the seabed. Disc Three, a limited edition item, features a Bowie show from the BBC Radio Theatre earlier this year, meaning that guitarist Earl Slick may well have played to some old ladies who thought they had tickets for News Quiz. Songs as old as Fame and new as the superb Seven are featured and Bowie’s current punter-wowing tour is thus captured for ever – albeit without all the bits between songs faded out for some reason, like on Stage. ****
Rolling Stone Review by Greg Kot
David Bowie didn’t start out as a “phallus in pigtails,” as he sings with self-deprecating amusement on “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed.” That would come later. On the first half of the double CD Bowie at the Beeb, which collects BBC performances from 1968 to 1972, he is an earnest folk-pop singer still grappling with his boyhood influences — music hall, cabaret, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan — while dabbling in blues rock and psychedelia. (There’s also a superfluous limited-edition bonus disc, containing an entire concert recorded last June.) Bowie wanted little to do with the dominant counterculture of the day, as he makes clear in tunes such as “Cygnet Committee” and “Changes” (“Look out, you rock & rollers”), and these discs offer a fascinating glimpse into the years when he transformed his words into a persona: Ziggy Stardust, the first anti-rock star. With the addition of guitarist Mick Ronson, Bowie’s music flirts with rock grandeur on the second disc, but the fey theatricality of “Starman” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” allows him to subvert it. It’s only the first of many roles Bowie would later play, but here’s where the fun started.
Review of Bowie at the Beeb by Andy Barding
THE Seventies and early Eighties were great for the Bowie collector. Life was simpler then – cheaper, certainly – and many of the great artefacts that we take so much for granted today could still be filed under “hot poop”.
Newbies might find it hard to believe that Santa Monica 72 was ever UNofficial. Or that we used to salivate over the recurring rumours that maybe – just maybe – the Hammersmith 73 or Love You Till Tuesday films might just see the light of day. Back then – when “box set” could only have meant a clique of inhabitants of a village near Bath and “compact disc” would have required six months of lying motionless on a plank – we were grateful for whatever tidbits could be squeezed, stolen, co-erced or even faked from the seemingly bottomless (and certainly always double-locked) vaults. Pride of place in my collection of such naughty things, sandwiched between my official RCA LPs and Dollars In Drag, were Ziggy 2 and My Radio Sweetheart.
Inauspicious and inappropriate in design, bloody expensive and tough to track down, these illicit LPs were scratchy, tinny and hissy as hell – but lovely for it. Pressed into their grey-black grooves, somewhere under the copious surface noise, were exciting off-air recordings of some of Bowie’s early radio sessions – glamorously stripped versions of the tracks we already knew off-pat from Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory, with the occasional guest vocalist and frequent flashes of brilliance from the Spiders. As time rolled on, more and more of these bizarre rush-recorded sessions would come to light, usually with conflicting theories about recording dates and sources. A 1969 session with Junior’s Eyes was a hell of an eye-opener when it cropped up on a Radio One nostalgia programme, and the emergence of a 1970 session with the heaviest, hardest and sexiest version of Waiting For The Man to ever grace a bootleg LP surprised everyone – even David Bowie, who admitted at the time that he had forgotten even recording it!
Every now and then Tommy Vance or John Peel would repeat a track or two from a 1972 sesh, giving us hope against hope that maybe we would get something we hadn’t already heard and catalogued on tape. Occasionally, Tommy would strike a rich seam – but more often than not it’d be the same old version of Ziggy Stardust and the same old version of White Light White Heat. Undaunted, we forged on into the 80s. Collectors gagging for more and more BBC stuff swopped tapes with like-minds until, ooh, a whole C90 could be filled up with scruffily edited, variable quality tracks. Somewhere in there, a boot called “No More Sleeping With Ken Pitt” threw the collecting community into understandable panic, giving us as it did almost a whole live set from 1970 and an absurdly early (almost straight off the Hull train) appearance by Ronson – albeit in barely listenable quality and cruelly clipped between each and every damn song.
The CD generation moved the session obsession up a (top) gear. For the first time, this stuff was available in knocking-on pristine quality, and a Bowie at the Beeb broadcast gave us a handful of dates to be going on with and a dribbly taste of the previously unheard bookend sessions from December 67 and June 72. And so we plodded, happy as pigs in proverbial, until a few years back when the whisperers started to mutter stuff about an official set. The thing was shelved, of course – but not before a very tasty taster could leak onto the market with a couple of unheard June 72 tracks “to be going on with”.
That was that, then. Right up to today, September 25, 2000. Now we have Bowie at the Beeb. Two CDs worth of stunning archive material from three decades ago. Where does it leave us? Apart from feeling old, that is? In a word, sated. From an anorak’s point of view, this great new collection – as well as upgrading that iffy-sounding 1970 stuff by about a million per cent – succeeds in filling each and every hole in the “collector’s collection”. We had been missing the 68 session, with the exception of When I’m Five. Bowie at the Beeb gives us every last missing peep and squawk. The 1970 concert special had been missing Memory Of A Free Festival. Here ya go, fella. Indeed, the public domain now has every session song recorded by DB at the BBC – even (if you look hard on your Radio Hype bootleg CD) the Oh! You Pretty Things live version chopped out of the June 71 buddy-bash.
Aesthetically, the set is more than delightful. Luckily for us, Bowie and Visconti are better at looking after their stuff than Auntie – whose regular spring cleans through the years have meant the wholesale wiping and slinging of important video and audio archive material. Indeed, it’s the stuff that the BBC hasn’t deemed important enough to keep that holds the most interest for yer actual Bowiephile. The experimental nature of the 68 material, from a super-swinging London Bye Ta Ta to an ethereal Silly Boy Blue and a cosmic-karmic Karma Man, makes for essential listening. And while the proficiency and confidence of the 1970 live set is astonishing considering the speed of turnaround, a simply sensational standout recording of Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud shows how the young Bowie had – by the tender age of 23 – already honed the performance magic that would soon propel him beyond the beyond. It’s CD2 that will get the most attention, understandably. Kicking off with two songs from a wonderful but shortlived Bowie-Ronson acoustic duo period, it quickly slips into Ziggy overdrive with a heap of searing, fun-filled blasters from the first half of 72 that defy their in-and-out-again enforced immediacy.
There’s nothing the collector hasn’t heard before on this disc, but boy does it sound great in this ultimate quality. Moonage Daydream, always a favourite track anyway, is a sensational foil for Mick Ronson’s finger-slashing axework. If anything on this album conjures a picture of the Spiders in full-throttle, it’s this. Especially when played, as the saying goes, at maximum volume. By June of 1972, of course, Bowie was earning a decent crust as a full-time alien and the Beeb were unable or unwilling to drag his god-given ass and carrot frightwig back into the studio. Which is a shame in a way. Can you imagine what sort of miracles could have emerged from a 73, 74, 76 or 77 session? Exactly.
As a stand-alone artefact, then, Bowie at the Beeb is a cracking piece of work and wickedly good fun. Take it in the context of the RCA recorded work from the same time, and you’ve got yourself a cogent and clear picture of the artist in action and in development. Whatever purpose these recordings originally served (shifting units – or records, as we used to call them – presumably), their position in the 21st century is no less important. These are confusing, fractured times – and up close and personal at the birth of Ziggy is as good a place as any to lose oneself.
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