toys r us: a paradigm of corporate bullshit

"wear that dress that your mother wore"

Sounds mundane, but on closer inspection it's much more A Taste of Honey and with a soupcon of the sinister, deviant and threatening.....written in the 60s and too much for Virgin, the Mighty Corporation, founded on dodginess and now revelling in hypocrisy, in the Noughties. So Bowie's breezy jaunt through some of his back-catalogue with a shit-hot well-toured band gets short-shrivel and one of the early great albums of the new Millennium is abandoned.

Bowie is understandably furious and it's the straw which breaks the camel's back, as far as his relationship with the recording industry is concerned! He's never had any contractual luck, irrespective of sides.

And so, we arrive at the wonder that is Toy. It has no right to be acknowledged as a good Bowie album - it all sounds too preposterous and indulgent. You take tracks from your early career which is a commercial failure and you "tart them up and release them coz you can't think of anything to do." Very unfair, that. But that was the general consensus.

Toy, however, is a revelation. The arrangements are brilliant, the playing is tight and affectionate. The voice is nothing short of sensational and in the Shadowman we have a classic, lost to the mainstream music fan. But let's be selfish...who gives a fuck? And in the finale, London Boys, we have a show-stopper, of which any middle-aged crooner would have been proud. But they all have the Bowie hallmark, class - he COULD write back then. It's just he wasn't famous and had no clout. Also, we have some new songs and unusual bits 'n bobs. Some of these are awesome and very playful, like Uncle Floyd, which is still great, though it's a different arrangement from the Heathen version.

But this is no throwaway compendium of bullshit or stocking-filler which Virgin maintained. It's the vision of a mature selfless artistic great. But that's the problem. Virgin's execs wouldn't recognise a song if it slapped them on the arse! It's an insult to Bowie and musicians everywhere that this actually happened.

Noone's perfect, not even DB. But to put quantity over quality is the pits!