Posts by Simon Grigg
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Ok, one more:
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Oh but there's more:
[RB: we're showing some angsty teen love for Bowie, so I trust the threadjack is ok]
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For Isabel:
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Love the gnome.
He was, famously, furious when it was rerelased and became a hit in the UK six years after he'd released it to obscurity in '67, and had his manager, the notorious Tony de Fries, try to kill it. It put a huge dent in the cool factor he'd nurtured by hanging and working with Lou, Mott and Iggy.
It still floors me that in an 12 month period he turned out Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Transformer, Raw Power and All The Young Dudes.
When he toured in the early 1990s he was going to have the UK setlist decided by public vote. NME tried to fix it so he'd have to do Gnome. Bowie killed the vote.
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Bowie's first two albums
That first one, the Deram one, has it's moments, most especially the lovely London Boys, but his Newley training wheels show a bit too much for me. Incidently, it also gave him his first hit anywhere in the world when Love You Till Tuesday was a big NZ radio hit (unsure about charts but NZ's charts are not worth the paper or airwaves they were broadcast on in reliability until the 1970s).
Do you know anything about this?
This one? Nothing more than this I'm afraid.
I always thought this was such a beautiful love song.
There used to be a video jukebox down at Blondies, a late night coffee joint in Victoria St E., and we, before John Reynolds opened John's Diner at the top of Swanson Street, used to go there many weekend nights after 11pm when A Certain Bar tossed us out, if there was nothing on elsewhere, in 1981.
I was obsessed with that video and used to pay the money to put that it on repeat until eventually someone threw their Irish coffee at the screen and I thought better of it.
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I lost it in a iPod failure and I can't find it on iTunes again.
Yeah, it seems to have been pulled, after a scrap with Apple I believe, but here are the same two doing Five years, rather well at Fashion Rocks 2005:
And as added compensation, Life on Mars, with Mike Garson, from the same gig:
I think that's Space Oddity not Life on Mars
Indeed and it's been added to the newly released 40th Anniversary issue of his Space Oddity album (which I'd mark as his weakest aside from the two mid 1980s ones tagged earlier, and is actually really called David Bowie , not SO), so if it's a guilty pleasure for anyone but missing from their collection.....
I imagine he could have asked.
yes but the man was notoriously desperate to be a star I imagine would've done almost anything he was asked to do:
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The one time I tried sitting through the damn thing on DVD
Got stuck in some god-awful motel in Paihia some years back, and it rained the the whole 5 days. The place only had one DVD...Cameron's iceberg schlick, and it played on an endless loop, and our 8 year old decided to watch over it and over again. I guess I saw it 15 times, if not always consciously. I was ready to book a one way ticket on that tub after that.
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Mike Garson's piano on Bowie's Aladdin Sane.
I was on my first date with my first serious girlfriend, Jane, in mid 1973. I'd bought my first car the day before, a 1964 red mini 850, and we picked up one of my best mates, Marc, from his place in Parnell and rolled into Queens Arcade, where, at Marbecks, I bought her a copy of the just released Aladdin Sane album. It was $4.50 as I recall.
We'd arranged to go over another friend's place and went down Shore Rd into Remuera, whereupon a woman in another car, without warning, turned into the car, smashing the front and pushed us into the playing fields, just missing a bunch of young kids kicking a ball. We were luckily only bruised and the car, although badly bashed, was vaguely drivable. The woman admitted liability, and I didn't know quite what to do, so I drove on, with the car wobbling badly, to Victoria Ave, our intended destination, and sat, stunned, listening to Aladdin Sane over and over.
The car survived, and ended up having a series of sometimes harrowing adventures over the years.
Jane and I went to a school dance later that month and she had the lightning strip painted across her face (a teen thing, I guess..everyone was getting their hair razored a la ziggy at the time too, which, for our crimes, eventually mutated into the mullet out west mid-decade), and she broke my heart a year or so later when she ran off with Marc. I took the copy of Aladdin Sane back in a huff.
Jane went to London in '76 and found herself as PA to the editor of Melody Maker just as punk broke and sent me regular parcels of flyers, 45s and more through to '78 when she returned and married, to have a couple of kids.
We remained friends, but I didn't ever return the album (original pressing 'n all), although I offered.
She died far too young, about 4 years back, and I was unable to go to the funeral as I was not in-country, which really hurt. Marc, too, had a brain haemorrhage, shortly before, in Kent, where he was a riding teacher. They were the first of my generation to go.
I still have the original album, with Jane's name and address on the back and from time to time pull it out, but I've not played the vinyl inside for some years.
So yeah, I've got a spot for Aladdin Sane, too.
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Word. And we can live with it.
I find a quick downwards flick of the mouse wheel is instinctive when the (obvious) nom-de-troll appears
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establishes a broad moral basis, which can be only achieved by intense philosophical studies.
Surely the evolutionary stance on this is that we are by nature moral because its, in the end, advantageous as a society and a species, for us to be so.
And, correct me if I'm wrong, but religion seems to have little monopoly on moral rightness. On another forum I'm have a discussion with a fairly devout Muslim in Pakistan, who's arguing fairly forcefully that the beheadings of the innocent in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the random bombings, are morally correct as a way to deter the assault on the ummah by the infidels. He sees no moral issue in this, quite the opposite..it's his duty as a Muslim to defend the ummah with every tool available.
I, in my funny atheistic way, do.