Stephen Holland - Multimedia Journalist

  The Bowie Project #6 – Aladdin Sane (1973) Click here to listen to an audio version of this review on Spotify  Aladdin Sane is the first album David Bowie released from a position of success and stardom. After the success of Ziggy Stardust the year before, Bowie and the character he was portraying were on top of the world. Retrospectively his previous releases, such as Hunky Dory , also began to achieve critical and commercial success as fans scrambled to consume everything the enigmatic artist had produced up to this point. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do next and how he would follow up his breakthrough concept album. The result was Aladdin Sane , an album that was admittedly a little rushed with most of the tracks written between shows while he was touring the US. This gives the record a distinctly American flavour as Bowie explores his own perception of the country and presents a landscape filled urban decay, drug, sex, violence, and death all while examini...

  The Bowie Project #5 – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) Click here to listen to an audio version of this review on Spotify  The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is David Bowie’s most popular album and for many represents the absolute peak of his career. Released in 1972, his fifth studio album brings together much of the styles and genres he had been experimenting with up until this point and epitomises the height of the glam rock style he helped to popularise. It has been described as a loose concept album and rock opera, although much of the narrative of the record was written after the album had been recorded. The album tells the story of a legendary androgynous bisexual alien rockstar Ziggy Stardust. It goes a little something like this; It is revealed that the world is going to end in five years due to an impending apocalyptic disaster due to a lack of resources; The alien Ziggy Stardust brings a message of h...

  The Bowie Project #4 - Hunky Dory (1971) Click here to listen to an audio version of this review on Spotify   David Bowie’s fourth studio release is commonly referred to as the album where “Bowie starts to become Bowie”, while his previous efforts laid the foundations for all that would come after and explored themes which he would return to again and again, this is the record where he truly finds his distinctive style and sound. This release sees Bowie move away from the hard rock sound of his previous album The Man Who Sold the World and into a more pop rock piano-based style. The themes explored reflect many of the same things Bowie had been writing about previously, such as occultism and Nietzschean philosophy, but it also explore his newfound fascination with America and American culture. This was a resulted of touring the U.S. the previous year which inspired him to write songs dedicated to three American icons: Andy Warhol , Bob Dylan , and Lou Reed . At this point B...

  The Bowie Project #3- The Man Who Sold the World (1970) Click here to listen to an audio version of this review on Spotify On his third studio album David Bowie moves away from the largely acoustic psychedelic folk of his previous self-titled release and shifts into a new hard rock sound with the backing of a full band. After the success of the single “ Space Oddity ” the year before failed to boost the accompanying album sales, Bowie decided to form a band with bassist Tony Visconti and drummer John Cambridge. They name themselves the Hype and recruit the now legendary guitarist Mick Ronson. This group (which would later evolve into the Spiders from Mars) wore flamboyant superhero-like costumes designed by Bowie’s first wife Angie, who he married on 20 March 1970, just one month before he started recording this album. Bowie was Rainbowman and wore a multicoloured outfit, Ronson was Gansterman and would dress in a sharp double-breasted suit, Visconti was Hypeman and dressed li...

The Bowie Project #2 - David Bowie aka Space Oddity aka Man of Words/Man of Music (1969) Click here to listen to an audio version of this review on Spotify Many call this the first true David Bowie album. After the commercial failure of his first record two years earlier (also called David Bowie ), the future Ziggy Stardust sought to reinvent himself and shed his jaunty music hall vaudeville past, and what better way to erase everyone’s memory of the first album than by giving the next one the exact same name? The origins of this album begin with the promotional movie Love You till Tuesday   which Kenneth Pitt, Bowie’s new manager, hoped would showcase his talents and introduce him to a larger audience. The film ended up being shelved and was not released until 1984 when it finally appeared on VHS. The half-hour promo was originally planned to include seven previously released Bowie songs and one mime performance, but before shooting began Bowie wrote a new song for the fi...