Everyone Says Hi To Mr. Bowie

There are some songwriters everyone seems to want to cover. David Bowie's one. It's strange when you think about it. So much of his appeal relies on, well, being him. You're on a hiding to nothing taking on Bowie, or so you'd think.

YouTube must have hundreds, maybe thousands of version of the Bowie Back Catalog. Most of them are probably best left unheard but I do have a handful of favorites I'd like to share.

That was Aurora. She's a Norwegian singer-songwriter, apparently best known in the UK for the 2015 John Lewis Christmas Advert (It's a thing. If you don't know about it, be grateful.) for which she covered Oasis' "Half The World Away".  Can't say I'm sorry I missed that cultural milestone.

Her take on "Life on Mars", a strange, dislocated song at the best of times, borders on the surreal as she dismembers the melody and emphasizes the most unexpected syllables. If she knows what the lyrics are about she's keeping it to herself. Then again, does anyone know what Life on Mars is about?

What is there to say about Puddles Pity Party? A six-and-a-half foot tall clown with a quasi-operatic voice who belts out covers with a mystifying intensity. An acquired taste, perhaps. His use of props in the video is inspired. Anyone care to explain the three coffee mugs?

Momus has made a career out of covering Bowie, even though he's a gifted songwriter and performer in his own right. I think this is probably the only time he actually impersonated the Master. Supposedly Momus released this arcane overwrite of Blackstar on the day of the official release, before anyone knew Bowie was dying. I imagine Bowie would have loved it.

Brett Smiley was supposed to be a big star in exactly the Ziggy Stardust mode. Along with Jobriath he had management who wanted him to ride Bowie's coat-tails to the top. Never happened for either of them but unlike Jobriath, Brett carried on making great music in a classic New York style until his untimely death in 2016. His louche, slurred version of "Kooks", one of Bowie's most straightforward songs, positively glows with affection.

So much for covers. David Bowie, along with Lou Reed, Andy Warhol and a few more of the arthouse crew sometimes turn up as subjects in other peoples' songs. In "Louise (My Girl Looks Like David Bowie") Papooz cram in several lyrical nods to the Thin White Duke, perhaps most appositely "Not sure if it's a boy or a girl".

Papooz are quite disturbing in a shudderingly ordinary way. I first came across them doing their signature hit "Anne Wants To Dance", the video for which is so ironic it probably ought to be played backwards. I wouldn't trust either of them as far as I could push them off their loungers.

I have absolutely no idea who Cranky are - or more probably were. Ok, I do, a bit, because I know how to research. They seem to have been a duo, one of whom goes by the unconvincing name of Parthenon Huxley, the other by the more feasible Rick Pierone. Huxley has a website and he released an album under the name P. Hux in 2018 for which Pierone played piano on a single track. I suspect that's more than we will ever need to know about either of them, except perhaps that Huxley was also in ELO Pt II.

From the ridiculous to the sublime. Lilly Hiatt really only uses Bowie's death as a signifier for a bad decision and a state of mind as she looks back at a rough patch in her life but she wears the Aladdin Sane lightning flash with elan throughout the moving and memorable video. I'm not a big country or country rock fan but when it's done right it hits harder than just about anything.

Tori Amos is the undisputed queen of reinterpretation. She does a superb version of Bowie's "After All" but it's her hard-rocking, glam original "Not David Bowie" that I want to single out here. It seems to be a revenge song, or a vindication. The chorus protests "Take me back to the fact that you still blame me/But I am not the reason you are Not David Bowie" even as Tori resignedly allows that "It is what it is". I'll just stand over here.

And finally the man himself. Bowie liked to cover other people's stuff but it wasn't really his strong suit. This cover of Sigue Sigue Sputnik's controversial classic Love Missile F1-11 was the B-side of a 2003 single and that was probably as much as it deserved. I do like the way it morphs into a Bo Diddley chugger towards the end, though.

David Bowie Cries For No-One

One of the strange things I discovered when I began trawling YouTube and other video-hosting platforms for musical curiosities was the predeliction of musicians, particularly singers, to jump each other's trains. In the quarter of a century that I spent going to see live bands, anywhere from the back rooms of pubs to the Hammersmith Odeon, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times someone brought on a "special guest" that no-one was expecting.

In fact, discounting the occasions when the headline band brought on someone from the support band, like the time John Otway made the mistake of inviting The Flies to join him for an encore (as I remember they peppered him with projectiles from pea shooters although that might just be wishful thinking....), I can only recall seeing one significant guest appearance.

That was the one and only time I saw Mott the Hoople, on the tour immediately after guitarist and songwriter Mick Ralphs had left. His replacement, Luthor Grosvenor (aka Ariel Bender), late of dull rockers Spooky Tooth, wasn't up to much in my opinion. Judging by the rapturous respnse of the audience when Ian Hunter brought Ralphs out for the encore, that was the general assessment of Bender's "talent".

In retrospect, that particular moment was extraordinarily similar to the scene near the end of This is Spinal Tap, where Nigel Tufnel, having left the band in a fit of pique, gets the nod from David St. Hubbins to rejoin mid-song in front of a delighted Japanese crowd. Sadly, Mick Ralphs didn't rejoin Mott, going on instead to even greater fame and fortune with dire AOR plodders Bad Company, who were managed by Peter Grant, on whom Spinal Tap's cricket-bat wielding Ian Faith is partially based. Incestuous or what?

What I then deemed to be exceptional, and which probably was fairly unusual, has now become not just commonplace but virtually required. Every day when I read the Latest News from Pitchfork there'll be a clip of someone I've never heard of  "bringing out" someone else I've never heard of.

Digging back through the archives, there are countless gems to be found, although for some reason I don't seem to have downloaded many of them. Of the ones I have, a disproportionate number feature David Bowie. He crops up with everyone from Lou Reed (many times) to Tina Turner (in a hideous reggaefied version of Tonight, which I'll spare you. I certainly never want to hear it again).

Let's have this crunching version of Fashion with Damon Albarn instead, from some French TV show, in front of the traditional zombie audience.

Bowie can uplift just about any show although he never upstages the host. I don't have a huge amount of time for Pink Floyd post Wish You Were Here, but Dave Gilmour bringing out a rather pudgy Bowie to front Arnold Layne is a joy. Shame the sound's so muted but you can't have everything.

It's not possible to have too much Bowie but you have to stop somewhere. Here he is with Robert Smith for a killer take on The Last Thing You Should Do followed by an ethereally beautiful Quicksand.

Some of the collaborations and guest spots almost beggar belief, not just in how inappropriate the match-up sounds on paper but how successful it is in practice. Nu metal pioneers Korn are a long, long way out of my comfort zone but their version of Inbetween Days with Robert Smith is a doom-laden triumph.

Other combos seem so obvious the universe just demands they have to have happened. Damon Albarn dueting Waterloo Sunset with Ray Davies, for example.

Then there are the edge cases, where the band whose gig it is bring on someone to perform while the singer goes off for a towel-down and a glass of milk. Or something. Brett from Suede rarely breaks a sweat but he seems quite keen to hand over the stage to Siouxsie Sioux, who performs an austere version of Lou Reed's existentially bleak "Caroline Says II".

The very first band I was ever in did a version of that song, although only in rehearsal. We never played it live, which is probably a blessing, at least for the audience. I had a recording of it, taken during one of our first rehearsals, when not one of the four of us had a clue how to play the instrument we'd chosen. I really should try and find that tape. And destroy it.

You don't always get to play what you want with who you'd like. Sometimes a star finds themself watching another, greater star and no-one asks them up so they just do it where they stand. That's Halsey, watching Lana del Rey at The Outside Lands Festival in 2016. Someone filmed her because of course they did. If this doesn't make you feel all warm and at peace with the world then I'm sorry but it does it for me every time.

Enough of that. Collaborations lead on to cover versions. I freakin' love covers. And that's probably where we're going next time.

I Am The Dragon, I Am The Drug : David Bowie

Although this blog is about MMORPGs I do, naturally, have a number of other interests in life, many of which predate gaming and even stand above it in my personal hierarchy of needs. I sometimes give that away as I attempt to shoehorn a reference to movies or books or comics into some post where it scarcely fits, trying and often failing to carry it off without wrecking the flow.

When I first started Inventory Full I even had the idea of including a link to a song or video in every post. I managed it for a while but it felt awkward and before long I rowed back to slipping in links here and there, whenever they'd fit. It's an eternal trial to me that Blogger doesn't allow links in post titles.

I'd love to do more. I often think of starting a second blog to cover all the things that interest me that aren't appropriate here.

Accordingly, it's difficult to come up with an MMO hook on which to hang a response to the strangely disturbing news of the death of David Bowie. I could, I should, I will link to Bhelghast, the first and so far the only blogger in my Feedly to have given vent to his feelings on this untimely, unexpected event. Will more follow? Is there even a hinterland here?

Well, of course there is. It's not just that Bowie was at one time so ahead of the curve when it came to all things digital that he even had his own ISP, Bowie.net , which launched in 1998. Someone probably played EverQuest on dial-up using that. I wish it had been me.

No, we can do better than that. David Bowie, fingers in every fresh new media pie, wrote and starred in his own video game, long forgotten. It was "Omikron", primarlily for the Sega Dreamcast but also for the PC, released, again in 1998, to a largely disinterested world. And what's more I own a copy.

To be accurate, Mrs Bhagpuss owns a copy. I bought it for her for Christmas that year. It was the year before we began playing EverQuest, when we were still running through offline RPGs like Return To Krondor and Might and Magic VII faster than game developers could pump them out, and since Mrs Bhagpuss is a huge Bowie fan it seemed like the perfect gift.

It wasn't, as things turned out. Not like when, a couple of years back, for her birthday and at her request, I bought her almost all Bowie's albums on CD. The video game, however, which we knew by its UK PC release title "The Nomad Soul", despite being a surprise, didn't get anything like the response, let alone the use, the CDs did.

In fact I don't believe Mrs Bhagpuss ever played it at all. I vaguely remember installing it and giving it a quick go but for whatever reason it didn't grab my attention either. I don't think I ever gave it a second try.

So, I never heard this song, or not in this version. I certainly never saw this "performance". I wish I had. It's stunning. And imagine the impact, coming across it embedded in a video game.

It's just a terrible, terrible shame the only reason I'm seeing it now is because its creator is no longer here, no longer around to create more magnificent moments like this, another of the long list of ideas that no-one other than David Bowie would ever thought of or, if they had, would never have carried off half so well.

I'll close with a couple of lines from my favorite ever Bowie song, one I can barely listen to at the best of times, it's so ineffably sad. 

"I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do
So I'll just write some love to you"