the shadowman

For someone so forward-thinking and, apparently way ahead of his time, he didn’t half spend a lot of time looking back. As he realised that his musical integrity was on the line by the mid-eighties, following an artistically-disastrous, but commercially-prosperous run of albums, he began to analyse his previous output.

His back-catalogue had been subject to various degrees of remastering and repackaging. By 1990 it reached a peak with the Ryko collection, where an exhaustive trawling of the archives took place. Many gems were unearthed, but unfortunately remained locked away. Ready for Pin-Ups 2? I’d love to hear The Spiders’ version of If There Is Something or Ladytron. No wonder Tin Machine got the nod to cover the former, just as the Ryko research was kicking in.

In Tin Machine he could reconnect with his own energy and whatever was missing from the past. There is a tale that Gabrels was presented with one of Bolan’s stratocasters at the initial sessions to get the vibe from the past. Bowie had kept the gift. This was typical of his new-found exuberance for creativity.

As the 90s progressed Bowie found his material reflecting and intertwining with certain elements from his past or even entire albums connecting with his contemporaneous work. So, in 1995, 1 Outside hinted at parts of Diamond Dogs, Lodger and The Man Who Sold The World. Even Aladdin Sane and Moonage Daydream reappeared. Something was being rekindled in the Bowie psyche and all for the better. This wasn’t just treading over old ground for nostalgic purposes. In tracking The Buddha of Suburbia in record time (a couple of weeks) he discovered the excitement of his muse again and wrote extensively about this in the original sleevenotes for the album. It’s a terrific record and mainly ignored by the Bowie fan club, being mistaken for a soundtrack for the UK TV drama. It’s an experimental tour de force which paves the way for Bowie’s later second-coming.

Heathen gets partnered with Low; Bowie plays the two albums back-to-back at various venues in 2002. There are brilliant shows at Roseland, New York, at Montreux and at the Meltdown Festival in London.

The Next Day confronts the back-catalogue head-on and references sounds from the past and even vandalises one of his most iconic albums, Heroes, instead of creating a normal cover for the album. Such iconoclasm of the self and of his stardom was bewildering for many and still is.

In 1999 and 2000 Mark Plati had managed to plant a germ in Bowie’s mind. Instead of rejecting all those hits as a millstone round the neck, why not try a couple and see how you react to them? Thus, Golden Years returns for a brief time, as do Station to Station. Thankfully, not all the dross reappears but there’s a gradual acceptance that the back catalogue contains many gems waiting to be refitted and explored.

It’s not too long before Bowie has a brainwave. He decides to produce an entire album of older material, mainly from his mod-band days in the 60s. This is crazy. But he also wants to add some material from other periods which had not been recorded as well as he’d wished or even at all.

So, we finally come to the point of this blog post. Bowie commits to tape a fantastic version of one of his best songs, outrageously overlooked for decades. When Gail-Anne Dorsey was asked about the sessions, she recalled one tune which was outstanding, but which didn’t then have a title as far as she remembered (song no.7 or something). Of course, we now know it to be The Shadowman, a lost demo from the Ziggy Stardust period. Mike Garson plays brilliant low-key piano on the track. It’s a magnificent production and one of Bowie’s best recordings ever. Imagine how pissed off he must have been when Virgin kept putting off the release date. What would he have been thinking when they actually shelved it completely?

That probably was the final straw for db and record companies.