Never underestimate the toughness of a Compact Disc. I’m not
talking about the episode of “Tomorrow’s World” where one still plays after Kieran
Prendiville smeared jam on it, because that never happened – a report on the
BBC’S “Breakfast Time” showed someone doing that with honey, while Prendiville
was presumably safe at home in bed.
What I am talking about is owning a CD playing as perfectly
as when it was pressed in 1987, a testament to the error-correction technology
built into CD players as long as forty years ago, and the record company printing
instructions on how to care for it inside the cover.
Why do I have a CD as old as this? It is because David Bowie
disliked a song on one of his albums so much, it was deleted from all future
releases of it, even after his death. Its
only other release was a rare promo record in the US, before the record label
decided not to release it as a single.
The song is named “Too Dizzy,” and I quite like it.
When David Bowie released "Never Let Me Down” in 1987,
it became one of his biggest-selling albums. Having scored a phenomenal hit
with the “Let’s Dance” album, resulting in a scramble for bigger stadiums than
usual to play the Serious Moonlight tour, “Never Let Me Down” needed to play to
a much wider, much broader audience than would have taken in Major Tom, Ziggy
Stardust, and the Thin White Duke.
However, “Never Let Me Down” became one of David Bowie’s least
regarded albums, particularly by Bowie himself, who described playing to the
broader crowd in the 1980s as his "art-school Phil Collins" period:
if the audience should be at a Phil Collins gig, then what was he doing? Like “Let’s
Dance,” and 1984’s “Tonight” album, “Never Let Me Down” is less the work of “David
Bowie,” which remained a stage name throughout his life, but more the fit,
healthy and perfect David Jones, about to get his teeth fixed.
"Never Let Me Down" is the most commercial album
David Bowie ever released, in that its polished, smoother sound could have come
from other 1980s artists. Its synthesised sound dates the songs, and is reminiscent
of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" album – “Beat of Your Drum”
sounds close to “Glory Days.” Lyrics are concerned about social problems -
"Day-In Day-Out" talks about poverty, while "Time Will
Crawl" deals with ecology and nuclear paranoia after the Chernobyl
disaster. Oh, and the actor Mickey Rourke does a rap on one song too - on a
David Bowie album...
If anything, "Too Dizzy" is a welcome breeze, following
the statement on Margaret Thatcher that was “87 & Cry.” A very upbeat song
about 1950s teenage jealousy, and apparently a throwaway song written to see
how Bowie worked with instrumentalist Erdal Kizilcay, “Too Dizzy” could either
be seen as a breather from the socially aware songs on the album, or a distraction
from them – that Bowie was surprised he left it on the album suggests the
latter.
With a sound that demands to be played on big speakers as
loud as possible, ”Never Let Me Down” feels good on the surface, and is worth a
listen in the mood for a hard slap of Eighties, but it doesn’t feel like a David
Bowie album. Bowie had always intended to re-record the album at some point,
and the group that did so in 2018, for the “Loving the Alien” box set, had been
chosen by Bowie before his death. The new version of the album sounds more
stripped back and folk-like, more strings and brass in place of synthesisers,
which mostly benefitted “Zeroes,” a song about the music of the late 1960s –
you can hear the Mellotron now. However, Erdal Kizilcay has been left out of
the album entirely, including “Too Dizzy,” and was considering a lawsuit if his
arrangements were used without credit or compensation.
Would “Too Dizzy” have fitted among the re-recorded version
of “Never Let Me Down”? It has a very peppy sound, with lots of saxophone, so making
any change to that would be reductive, even if it would make it fit more with
the rest of the album. Perhaps the song could be released as a separate song,
but to prevent its release in any form just seems strange.
For me, there does come a point where, if you have put
something out into the world, then change your mind on how you think about it,
you can't then decide it didn't happen, especially when it really isn't that
bad. No wonder Bowie finished the 1980s by submerging his ego in the hard rock
of Tin Machine for a while.
I still love David Bowie and his songs, but rock gods are
not infallible.
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