Stephen Holland - Multimedia Journalist

The Bowie Project #10 - Station to Station (1976) Station to Station  is David Bowie’s 10 th  studio album, it was released on 23 January 1976 by RCA records. The commercial success of his previous record  Young Americans  gave Bowie renewed creative freedom, allowing him to further develop the funk and soul sounds of that album while also delving into a more art rock experimental direction. In early 1975, Bowie had moved to Los Angelas to play the lead role in the Nicolas Roeg film  The Man Who Fell to Earth , which tells the story of an alien named Thomas Jerome Newton who comes to Earth with the goal of shipping water back to his own planet which is suffering from severe drought, however the alien finds himself getting drawn in to human vices, sex, and corruption. The part would greatly influence Bowie for the next year leading the development of his controversial Thin White Duke stage persona. Bowie’s addiction to cocaine peaked in this period to the point w...

The Bowie Project #9 – Young Americans (1975) A change was taking place within David Bowie, after waving goodbye to the glam-rock aesthetic that had brought him so much success in his previous record Diamond Dogs , he was ready to embrace a new soul-based sound that we find we find on Young Americans , his ninth studio album first released on 7 March 1975 by RCA Records. It was throughout 1974 during the “Diamond Dogs Tour” that Bowie’s style started to majorly shift, the tour originally consisting of elaborate props and set-pieces meant to highlight that concept album’s dystopian Hunger City setting, however Bowie’s continued and worsening cocaine addiction meant the high-levels of theatricality required were too difficult and in October of that year he re-branded it as “The Soul Tour”, a stripped back affair with a more soul and funk influenced sound. This tour is expertly captured in the 1975 BBC television documentary “Cracked Actor” which highlights his fragile mental state during...

The Bowie Project #8 – Diamond Dogs (1974) David Bowie’s eighth studio album was released on 24 May 1974 by RCA Records. The album marks Bowie’s departure from the glam rock genre he had been exploring on his last three records and sees the beginning of a funk/soul influence that he would embrace more fully in his next releases. This album is an amalgamation of three different projects Bowie had been working at the time and while it is usually described as a concept album there is no real narrative running throughout but it’s more a collection of interconnected ideas and themes. One of the projects was a musical based on Ziggy Stardust which was ultimately scrapped, however fragments of songs written for it have found their way onto this release. Another was an adaptation of the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , Bowie attempted to secure the rights to the dystopian novel but was denied by his widow (as she denied any and all requests for adaptations right up until her death)....

The Bowie Project #6 – Pin Ups (1973) Click here to listen to an audio version of this review on Spotify  David Bowie’s seventh studio album Pin Ups (some say Pinups or Pin-Ups ) was first released in 1973. A covers album it features mostly British 1960s bands that influenced a teenage Bowie, and besides some shining moments here and there the songs do not improve upon their originals and the entire records feels a little bit like a wasted opportunity. Pin Ups was released just six months after Aladdin Sane but Bowie’s label RCA Records wanted a new album for the Christmas season and according to his biographer David Buckley this album was envisaged as a “stop-gap” record to keep the label happy and hang onto his new original songs while his music published negotiated for larger royalty rights. In essence, this album is not a passion project and its rushed recording, which took place between July and August 1973, shines through when you see how little the arrangements of these s...