Sunday, February 9, 2025

David Bowie : Divine Symmetry: The Journey to Hunky Dory (Super Deluxe Edition) ...and More

EVERY TIME I THOUGHT

I'D GOT IT MADE

IT SEEMED THE TASTE

WAS NOT SO SWEET..

David Bowie’s

‘Divine Symmetry’

Box Set

Shows How He Made

‘Hunky Dory’

His Mission Statement

Demos, Live Recordings,

and Outtakes

show how the Artist

took a moment

of crisis

and used it to

set up the rest

of his career

Five years after the release of David Bowie‘s first masterpiece, HUNKY DORY which replaced the perception of Bowie as a one-hit space oddity with the idea Bowie as an ever-ch-ch-changing moon-age messiah — he offered up some characteristic mythmaking. In a 1976 Melody Maker interview, Bowie claimed Hunky Dory‘s “Song for Bob Dylan,” a piss-take extraordinaire that Bowie had shrugged off by saying it was how “some” people saw Dylan, in fact, “laid out what I wanted to do in rock.” “It was at that period that I said, ‘OK, if you don’t want to do it, I will,'” he continued. “I saw the leadership void.”

Divine Symmetry, a new box set subtitled The Journey to Hunky Dory, suggests Bowie’s claim was only partially true. With five years of hindsight,

he was hiding the panic he had felt while making Hunky Dory. The collection’s treasure trove of five discs contains raw demos, radio sessions, a rare live concert, and alternative mixes that show how Bowie was desperate to figure out his next step. He was mired in the quicksand of novelty status, and after his third album, 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World, bombed, he clammed up. He mostly stopped touring, and he bickered with his backing band. But a trip to the U.S. reinvigorated him, allowing himself to open up to nuanced pop songs that traded an ethos of inclusiveness for the solitude of his previous record, giving him the courage he needed to figure out a path forward.

After traveling across the States, he started writing songs for his friends to perform, à la Andy Warhol’s Factory, and wanted to tour as a troupe. “Song for Bob Dylan” was meant for his buddy George Underwood to sing, while “Andy Warhol” was for Dana Gillespie, who performed the tune with a Nico-like drawl on the BBC Peel Session included here. “Oh! You Pretty Things” was a hit for Herman’s Hermits’ Peter Noone before Bowie released it. If he couldn’t make it as an artist, he knew he could at least write good songs. He just needed to decide who he was.

Divine Symmetry’s demo recordings, nearly all of which have never been officially released, show all the ways Bowie tried to figure out how to fill Dylan’s “leadership void.” All of the discarded demos make up a blueprint for the rest of his career, as he tried on different personae. On the rough version of “Song for Bob Dylan,” he imitates Dylan’s voice, which he describes as sounding like “sand and glue,” and he plays tinny harmonica throughout it (he wisely ditched both affectations by the Hunky Dory sessions). Similarly, on the primordial “Queen Bitch,” his mordant Velvet Underground impression, which he renders a little slower here, he chuckles mid-verse coolly like Lou Reed. (His solo acoustic cover of “Waiting for the Man” sounds similarly deferential.) And on “Port of Amsterdam,” an anglicized Jacques Brel cover a nod to another one of Bowie’s heroes, Scott Walker, he belts desperately about drunken sailors and sullen prostitutes. (“Amsterdam,” incidentally, nearly closed out Hunky Dory before Bowie wrote the transcendent “Bewlay Brothers” at the last minute.)

TRACK LIST

CD 1

Tired Of My Life

(Demo)

How Lucky You Are (aka Miss Peculiar)

(Demo)

Shadow Man

(Demo)

Looking For A Friend

(Demo)

Waiting For The Man

(San Francisco Hotel Recording)

Quicksand

(San Francisco Hotel Recording)

King Of The City

(Demo)

Song For Bob Dylan

(Demo)

Right On Mother

(Demo)

Quicksand

(Demo, 2022 Remaster)

Queen Bitch

(Demo)

Kooks

(Demo)

Amsterdam

(Demo)

Life On Mars?

(Demo)

Life on Mars?

(Abbey Road Remix)

CD 2

Changes

(Rough Demo)

Changes

(Just Vocals)

Bombers

(Rough Demo)

Bombers

(Remastered Version)

Queen Bitch

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

Bombers

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

The Supermen

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

Looking For A Friend

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

Almost Grown

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

Kooks

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

Song For Bob Dylan

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

Andy Warhol

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

It Ain't Easy

(In Concert: John Peel, Mono)

Queen Bitch

(In Concert: John Peel, Stereo)

The Supermen

(In Concert: John Peel, Stereo)

Looking For A Friend

(In Concert: John Peel, Stereo)

Kooks

(In Concert: John Peel, Stereo)

Song For Bob Dylan

(In Concert: John Peel, Stereo)

Andy Warhol

(In Concert: John Peel, Stereo)

It Ain't Easy

(In Concert: John Peel, Stereo)

CD 3

The Supermen

(Sounds Of The 70s: Bob Harris)

Oh! You Pretty Things

(Sounds Of The 70s: Bob Harris)

Eight Line Poem

(Sounds Of The 70s: Bob Harris)

Kooks

(Sounds Of The 70s: Bob Harris)

Fill Your Heart

(Sounds Of The 70s: Bob Harris)

Amsterdam

(Sounds Of The 70s: Bob Harris)

Andy Warhol

(Sounds Of The 70s: Bob Harris)

Introduction