“I haven’t much to say in its favour”: The album David Bowie wanted to delete from history
Every single album David Bowie made felt more like an experiment than a proper album. Whereas most people try to put out the best songs they can and hope that they find an audience, Bowie was never afraid to share his wildest ideas with the world and let his fans try to make sense of whatever he was feeling. Anyone with that many chapters of their discography is going to have rough patches, and Bowie would have rather not have shown this embarrassing record to the world.
Then again, Bowie was usually willing to admit to many of his career failures. Even though Let’s Dance put him on the same level as artists like Madonna during the MTV generation, he wasn’t willing to go back to his “Phil Collins years”, when things started to get overly processed with horrific 1980s production.
For someone like Bowie, though, the worst albums in his catalogue tend to be the ones that are objectively boring instead of outright terrible. Even though not everything on the Tin Machine projects worked, for example, many would gladly listen to Bowie dip his toes into hard rock than have to take the musical equivalent of a sleeping aide on Hours.
Everyone has to start somewhere, though, and when Bowie was first finding his feet, he didn’t have a real idea of where he wanted to go. And while his debut shows a lot of promise for him as an artist, it tends to feel like a bunch of genres crashing in on each other rather than anything that holds together as cohesive.
Every now and again, there will be a trace of a great song like ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, but the vaudeville style that Bowie played with sounds like someone trying to put on a dreadful one-man show at a local theatre rather than someone who would one day introduce glam-rock to the world. Especially with the more fruity songs on the records, you’d be forgiven if you thought that this version of David Bowie didn’t even know what the term “rock and roll” even meant.
Although Bowie would be diplomatic about most of his early records, and couldn’t even begin to defend what he had put out on his first release, saying, “Aargh, that Anthony Newley stuff, how cringe-y. No, I haven’t much to say about that in its favour. … Musically, it’s quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at.”
While Bowie would recover from his debut nicely with the single ‘Space Oddity’, that one single is so good that it actively makes his first outing look worse. If anyone knew that he could make a song this good, why would they want to cater to a tune like ‘Sell Me A Coat’ or ‘We Are Hungry Men’?
Then again, maybe Bowie was trying to tell us something when looking at the final track, ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’. The whole thing is an interesting avant-garde piece where Bowie sees over the person who will look over his burial site, but knowing where he would go, he may as well have been burying the person that we had grown to loathe over the course of the record.
