Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
It came out the same year as Reflection, and I have that album.
So, because it knows I play a lot of Eno, the Google algorithm put this at the top of my You Tube page, and I jumped on it, listened, saved it in my Eno file.
A CD of it seems to be unavailable. I cannot even find a download. Though I have not explored every resource.
Here's the album and some reviews. I don't agree with much of what's in these reviews.
https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/calvino/album/74130-sisters/ Now that I am back on my Brian Eno grind, I'd like to talk about his first of two 2017 albums, Sisters. This album is a pretty straightforward 4 piece Ambient experience that all connects together pretty nicely. Much like a lot of Eno's more recent work (in context to this release) it isn't his most interesting or engaging but it is still pretty decent in the execution. It is a very simple and occasionally progressive piece that can feel a bit repetitive in the grand scheme, but for the most part is pretty harmless in its' overall effect. Not Eno's most interesting project by any means but also not his most awful or repulsing either. Nuff said. https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=54100
An unexpected event....
An app for those who paid in full for Brian Eno's "REFLECTION", 2017, at its special priced edition, which would have allowed users to fiddle around with the algorithms of any given music piece, therefore being able to virtually interact and recreate an imprint of personal touch to the piece(s),, but due to the Brexit, the pre-order price became unresonable to do business with, so in able to work things out for both artist and consumer, ENO gave birth instead to this "Generative Music" recorded sampler "SISTERS" (2017) and was given out as a free download (consolation prize), until the end of February, as a way of saying thanks to those eagerly waiting for the app+album, which never came to be.
Well, SISTERS,without its unavoidable red tape is ,to put it simply, 4 remixes of one piece EP, sequenced (remixed) by Peter Chilvers, who is himself, alongside Eno, the technical wizard behind the interactive software's planning and creation.
This kind of conceptual presentation is no stranger in Brian Eno's ever changing discography and sonic/visual installations. He possesses a truly healthy iconclastic spirit, even if those icons are his own.
Peaceful, bright and perfect pitch in detail (Eno's "Ambient Music" oriented) the four versions are intriguing by themselves, the subtle alterations between each one accentuate the myriad of possibilities any composer faces on a daily basis, yet opens the door by crashing the monumental task, of having to choose a single option.
Here it is then, victims – the latest in a long line of whatthefuckisms, delivered courtesy of our beloved Conservative party. Yes sir! As a direct result of on-going negotiations for Britain to leave the European Union, former glam-rock pioneer cum minimalist composer, Mr. Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, has released a second, eventless charade to accompany his previous, PearShaped-lambasted soirée, Reflection. Truly, it would seem, these are the darkest of ages.
Recently, I took up the mantle of reviewing Reflection. I awarded the record a very low score, attacking ambient music as a larger entity through the album’s adjoined single release; proof, I posited, on the potentially trite marketing of the famously minimalist and widely divisive genre. This week, its follow-up is released – a sister record, aptly titled, Sisters.
Unlike Reflection, which was a single, 58 minute work, Sisters is divided into four parts of equal length – each is 15 minutes and 14 seconds exactly. They’re also all named after girls – Hannah, Irial, Darla and Anya. If it means something, it’s tenuous. And that sounds throwaway of me, but take a moment to consider, from the surface at least, what we’re dealing with here: extremely minimal textures articulated through four, near-identical quarter-hour hunks. If the argument for Reflection and ambient music generally is an experience of the whole, then just as with Reflection’s controversial ‘excerpt’ single and the pressing of the album onto the interactivity-necessitating medium of vinyl, track dividers on Sisters seem unwelcome to the defence of ambient… _just saying_…
Is there not also something a bit pretentious about naming the tracks after girls who could (ostensibly) represent a sister-formation to a record named after the abstract living process of ‘reflection’? Argue all you want that ‘it’s a bit of fun’ – there’s nothing here. That’s like visiting a children’s play-park where the only features are black asphalt slabs and a sign that says ‘take care when using the equipment’.
That’s not strictly true though, is it – because in amongst all this glorified white noise, there is the algorithmic app, Reflection. “As a result of the Brexit-related fall in value of the British pound,” Eno wrote on Facebook.
“Apple have increased the prices of all apps sold in the UK by 25%. While we always intended Reflection to be a premium priced app, we feel this increase makes it too expensive, so we will take the hit in order to keep the British price to the consumer at its original level. In other territories this decision will translate into a reduced price for the app. As a thank you to anyone who has paid the higher original price for the app, we are making available a free download of a new piece of music created with similar algorithms to those in Reflection. This will be available to anyone who has purchased the app to date and will be available to download until 28th February.”
Excellent. Tell you what – I’ll let you finish Brian, but first, let’s have some actual fun with this release.
In light of the Brexit context, we might then possibly regard Sisters as a dull nationalist gesture, given to Britons as an apology for their own magnificent lack of foresight – ambient fans the world over are offered paltry monetary discount (let’s be honest; fans of Eno already had this app) in the face of our mistakes, while we revel in the benefits of our stupidity. That comes of course, with consideration of the irony at play: ambient fans are most likely (admittedly, a generalisation) outspoken defenders of the arts generally. Chances are then, a large chunk of Eno’s fandom didn’t even vote for Brexit, but now directly benefit from it. The icing on the cake is that that ‘benefit’ is over an hour of, well, not much.
As if that weren’t enough, were you lucky enough to have the app in the first place, you could’ve just generated the ambient music yourself. So Eno just invalidated himself as artist. Yet, in issuing Sister, patronisingly reassured everyone of the elitism in artist-fan relations, by suggesting (through the official manifestation of his work and its distribution) that he handles the generative algorithm better than you.
I’m potentially going on a little bit here, but you get the idea. Brian Eno’s got a new thing out. A computer made it, not him. Brexit forced him to release it. You can only get it if you live in the UK. You can also only get it if you’re clandestine about your means – the download link expired on 28th February. It is, quite predictably, a crock of shit. I hope you enjoyed my crock of shit review to go along with it.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2609.07 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 4085 days ago & DAD = 738 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3999 - Listening to all the David Bowie Albums This Month (and how this activity is still about writing...)
This is David Bowie Month because of his birthday (January 8th) and the day of his death (January 10th).
And because David Bowie is my single favorite artist in all of the arts.
So, this month, I am listening to all the Bowie albums. I am pretty much done with that project. I am listening to Space Oddity now, which was the last one, not counting the live albums, which will be the final listens.
Usually Wednesday is WRITING WEDNESDAY. And this post is SORT OF about writing because I have always learned a great deal about writing and art from David Bowie's music.
He was a fascinating thinker and creator with a rich literary experience of reading hundreds and hundreds of books, seeing films, engaging in the world of art within and outside of music.
And everyone has opinions, like this bloke who made the graphic below.
I don't agree with these ratings.
Albums like Scary Monsters and Super Creeps and Outside belong in the iconic category, which I see a synonymous with "masterpiece." Though I can see the argument that 1. Outside would not qualify in the same list of masterpieces as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Low.
I would move all but those two and Blackstar to the great or good categories (which I would split). I also acknowledge that my assessment of Blackstar may be colored by it being his last album. It's surely great, but is it only a masterpiece because it's his last words?
Diamond Dogs is definitely great, and one could argue that it is a masterpiece.
I would also rank Hunky Dory, Lodger, and Buddha of Suburbia above Young Americans or The Man Who Sold the World.
But I am biased. I love all the Bowie albums; I just love some of them more than others.
Yes, even Never Let Me Down.
This bloke's "what was he thinking" category is stupid. Let's Dance???I can tell you what he was thinking. He made a boat load of money. And though I felt it was a let down after Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, I have come to respect how Bowie reversed direction, read the signs of the times, and exploded at the dawn of the MTV era. Brilliance also seen by Bruce Springsteen, Dire Straits, and, a bit sadly, Van Halen among several others.
...Hours has grown on me and continues to grow on me to the point that I feel it's one of Bowie's bast and most underrated albums.
When I did this post two years ago, I ranked ...Hours seventh.
4. 1. Outside: The Nathan Adler Diaries-A Hyper Cycle
5. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
6. Diamond Dogs
7. ...Hours
8. Heathen
9. Station to Station
10. Blackstar
I might revise this list today. My re-discovery of 1. Outside: The Nathan Adler Diaries-A Hyper Cycle
prompted me to over-value it.
And likewise, Buddha of Suburbia ranked highly because like Low I listen to it A LOT.
However, I listen to ...Hours and Heathen just as much and more than Ziggy. This is a very personal list as you can see.
This year I have been listening to Diamond Dogs many times and have actually applied myself to multiple listens of Young Americans and Heroes.
Listening to Bowie's music but the albums as unique art works start to finish always spark my imagination, illuminate new ideas, prompt me to wonder how he composed those lyrics and the music to deliver them.
In a not quite related thought but on writing, I have said many times, any progress is progress. I just literally wrote a couple of lines in two chapters as the minimum of today's output. I might not be able to do more later as I am writing a final project due tomorrow, but at least, I did something.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2601.28 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3862 days ago & DAD = 517 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3989 - David Bowie - The Making of Diamond Dogs
No Comic Book Sunday this week because it's David Bowie Month.
So, this article on the making of Diamond Dogs.
When I ranked the Bowie albums two years ago (today!!), Diamond Dogs came in at sixth, but I might shuffle that list today as ...Hours has risen and on more thinking, I might put Diamond Dogs above Ziggy just in terms of my favorites, now. However, years and years ago, Ziggy was probably second.
In Diamond Dogs, I especially love the triad of "Sweet Thing," "Candidate," and "Sweet Thing Reprise." That set is featured below in a live video from the tour in 1974.
David was in great
danger physically and could have gotten electrocuted or killed": The
making of Bowie's Diamond Dogs and the tour that failed
By David Sinclair ( Classic Rock ) published 24 May 2024
Diamond Dogs marked the point at which David Bowie began to shed his glam-rock skin. He then embarked on one of rock's most expensive – and dangerous – tours
Released in the summer of 1974, Diamond Dogs found David Bowie navigating the dog days of the glam-rock era – a hot and sultry period before the cultural weather broke. Having surfed and defined the pop zeitgeist about as well as any individual star since Elvis Presley, he was now cresting the last stretch of a wave as it came crashing into shore.
Diamond Dogs was a resounding commercial success – No.1 in the UK, No.5 in the US. But the album was marked down at the time. “A rather grandiose mood piece… It’s okay, you know, but is it really necessary?” was the NME’s verdict. And, retrospectively, it tends to get brushed aside in the grand sweep of things as a transitional album, marking the point in Bowie’s artistic timeline at which he was shedding his glam-rock skin and stepping into his role as the ‘plastic soul’ man of his next studio album Young Americans. (NME later revised its opinion and, in 2013, rated Diamond Dogs one of “The 500 Greatest Albums of all Time” – albeit ranked at No.447, a long way behind many of his other albums.)
Bowie himself was quick to recognise the record’s limitations. “It was not a concept album,” he told Robert Hilburn in September 1974. “It was a collection of things. And I didn’t have a band. So that’s where the tension came in. I couldn’t believe I had finished it when I did. I had done so much of it myself. I never want to be in that position again. It was frightening trying to make an album with no support behind you. I was very much on my own. It was my most difficult album. It was a relief that it did so well.”
Whatever the sense of “tension”, both musically and personally, which overshadowed the making of Diamond Dogs, the album is nevertheless a remarkably pure distillation of Bowie’s genius. Indeed, if you are looking for a collection of recordings that stands as a monument to Bowie’s across-the-board prowess as a songwriter, singer, guitarist, saxophonist, keyboard player, producer and allround media maven, there is no other album in his entire catalogue that compares to Diamond Dogs. Transitional or not, it remains as true an expression of his artistry on every front as anything he ever released.
The album was recorded in London, mostly at Olympic Studios, and Hilversum in the Netherlands, between December 1973 and February 1974. Having famously disbanded the Spiders From Mars live on stage at Hammersmith Odeon the previous July, Bowie’s first challenge was to fill the guitar genius-shaped hole left in his musical life by the departure of Mick Ronson. In a defiant display of ambition and bravado, Bowie resolved to do the job himself.
“I knew that the guitar playing had to be more than okay,” he said, looking back in 1997. “That couple of months I spent putting [Diamond Dogs] together before I went into the studio was probably the only time in my life where I really buckled down to learn the stuff I needed to have on the album. I’d actually practise two hours a day.”
Having also dispensed with the services of longstanding producer Ken Scott, Bowie’s initial plan was not only to produce the album but also to play every instrument himself – perhaps reaching the point at which ambition gave way to hubris.
Wiser counsel prevailed and he found a new rhythm section comprising session bass player Herbie Flowers (the man responsible for the swooping bass line on Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side) and drummer Tony Newman (best known for his stint in the Jeff Beck Group). Pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who had both contributed to Pin Ups, the album of cover versions which Bowie had somehow slotted into his schedule and released in October 1973, were also brought in.
All sorts of grand ideas were floated in the build up to Diamond Dogs. Bowie had spoken of his intention to mount a “full-scale rock musical” re-telling the story of Ziggy Stardust. He’d also let it be known that he was planning to write and direct a musical production for TV of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his favourite novels.
“I’d failed to obtain the theatrical rights from George Orwell’s widow,” Bowie told the Mail On Sunday in 2008. “And having written three or more songs for it already, I did a fast about-face and recobbled the idea into Diamond Dogs: teen punks on rusty skates living on the roofs of the dystopian Hunger City; a post-apocalyptic landscape.”
The scene is set on the opening number, Future Legend, a brief, howling, growling, synthesised soundtrack with a voiceover from Bowie introducing us to a ghastly, ruined cityscape where ‘Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats/ And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes…’ The recitation ends with the jarring proclamation: ‘This ain’t rock and roll. This is genocide!’ The title track, which follows, actually sounds a lot more like rock’n’roll than mass murder – with an influence that owed a noticeable debt to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
As chance would have it, the Rolling Stones were in Olympic Studios recording their album It’s Only Rock’n’Roll at the same time as Bowie was working on Diamond Dogs. Olympic’s in-house engineer, Keith Harwood, who engineered Diamond Dogs, had previously worked on several Stones albums.
And if the general fraternising that went on during the course of the sessions wasn’t enough to reinforce the connection, Bowie and his then-wife Angie (Angela Barnett) had recently moved into a grand terraced house in Chelsea where they were now near neighbours of Mick and Bianca Jagger, with whom they socialised. Indeed, according to the American singer and model Ava Cherry, who stayed in the house for a time with David and Angie, there was a lot more than socialising going on.
“Mick Jagger knew David, and I was friends with both of them,” Cherry told Bowie biographer Dylan Jones. “So all three of us used to hang out a lot, and yes we did have some fun together.”
According to Cherry, at the end of one party in New York, everyone had left apart from her, Bowie and Jagger. “So it just ended up with the three of us sleeping together. That was it. And we had a wonderful time and we had a lot of fun.”
Diamond Dogs performed disappointingly when released as a single in June 1974 (after the album was released) in the UK, where it peaked at No.21. Far more resonant and enduring as a flagship track for the album was Rebel Rebel – the song that most clearly marked both the end of an era for Bowie and the jumping off point for Diamond Dogs.
Recorded on December 27, 1973, Rebel Rebel was the first song of the sessions and the last song that Bowie recorded at Trident Studios in Soho where he had recorded the majority of his work since 1968. Released as a single in the UK in February 1974, ahead of the album, Rebel Rebel reached No.5 and remains one of Bowie’s touchstone songs.
The lyric is as pertinent today – maybe even more so – as it was almost 50 years ago: ‘You’ve got your mother in a whirl, cos she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.’ And the riff is a masterpiece: simple, original and instantly recognisable in the way that only a handful of pop-rock riffs – Sweet Jane, Jumping Jack Flash, You Really Got Me – could ever truly claim to be. Did Bowie really come up with that and play it completely off his own bat?
“He had the riff about seventy-five per cent sorted out,” recalled Alan Parker, a session guitarist credited for his contribution to one track (1984) on the album. “He wanted it a bit like a Stones riff and he played it to me as such, and I then tinkered around with it. I said: ‘Well, what if we did this and that and made it sound more clangy and put some bends in it?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, I love that, that’s fine.’”
Whatever Parker’s contribution to the sculpting and performing of the song behind the scenes, Bowie is the sole writer and guitarist listed on the credits. While Rebel Rebel and the title track echoed the triumphs of Bowie’s glam-rock past, the rest of the album offered a tantalising glimpse of the future-Bowie that was yet to fully materialise.
At the heart of Side 1 is the three-piece song suite Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise), which was originally intended to be the centrepiece for the would-be stage production of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is a yearning yet chilling sequence, with lyrics rendered as a collage of bittersweet images and ideas. ‘I guess we could cruise down one more time, with you by my side it should be fine/We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band, then jump in the river holding hands.’
The sequence is notable for its intensely detailed arrangement – brought to life not least by Bowie’s contributions on saxophone and guitar. The end of the Reprise section (which runs into Rebel Rebel) has him conjuring a screeching, crunching, overdriven guitar noise that prefigured the industrial sounds that Earl Slick would later develop on Station To Station and Reeves Gabrels would take to another level on the Tin Machine albums. Bowie wrote the lyrics for these and other songs on Diamond Dogs using the ‘cut-up’ method popularised by the ‘beat’ writer and literary figurehead William Burroughs.
“You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects,” Bowie explained. “Creating a kind of story ingredients list, I suppose. And then cut the sentences into four- or five-word sections; mix ’em up and reconnect them. You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations like this.”
While the mood and subject matter of the songs on Side 2 is clearly derived from the nightmarish gloom of Orwell’s novel, it is impossible to know where and how these cut-ups might have been made or what the precise meaning is. ‘We’re today’s scrambled creatures, locked in tomorrow’s double feature, heaven’s on the pillow, its silence competes with hell/It’s a twenty-four-hour service guaranteed to make you tell…’ Bowie sings mournfully on We Are The Dead. It certainly soundslike a bad trip.
The comparatively jaunty music on tracks such as Rock’N’Roll With Me and Big Brother sounds like it should be part of a stage musical – as indeed it was originally intended to be. The Rocky Horror Show, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1973, was on the way to becoming a cult phenomenon at the time Bowie was writing the album and there was a lot of musical theatricality in the air.
There was also evidence of the looming switch of musical pace and persona that Bowie would effect on his next album, Young Americans – most obviously represented in the track 1984, which took its inspiration from the wah-wah guitar and string arrangements of Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack to the 1971 film Shaft.
“When we worked on the song 1984 he was already referencing Barry White,” said Ken Scott, who had produced an earlier recording of the song as part of the Aladdin Sane sessions in January 1973. “He wanted the hi-hat and the strings to sound like they would be on a Barry White album. He was already anticipating the sound of Young Americans.”
The faintly shocking, sci-fi cover artwork by the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, featuring a picture of Bowie with his lower body transformed into that of a dog complete with genitalia (airbrushed from most versions at the time) became instantly iconic. Bowie got the idea after Mick Jagger told him that Peellaert was designing the sleeve of the forthcoming Stones album It’s Only Rock’N’Roll.
“I immediately rushed out and got Guy Peellaert to do my cover too,” Bowie admitted later. When It’s Only Rock’N’Roll was released several months after Diamond Dogs, everyone assumed the Stones had copied Bowie. “He [Jagger] never forgave me for that!” Bowie said.
The spectacular and technically ambitious tour to promote Diamond Dogs set new standards for theatrical invention and sheer scale of endeavour. According to the Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg the stage set “was more elaborate than any previously attempted for a rock tour and cost an unprecedented $250,000… A giant backdrop depicted the nightmarish Hunger City skyline, tilted in jagged perspective. To either side stood two massive aluminium skyscrapers, linked by a moving bridge which would rise and fall during the show. The specialist props, run by hydraulic mechanisms and early forms of computer control, were to be built from scratch.”
The early reviews were delirious. The reviewer from Melody Maker described it as “a combination of contemporary music and theatre that is several years ahead of its time… a completely new concept in rock theatre – the most original spectacle in rock I have ever seen.”
According to Bowie: “It was truly the first real rock and roll theatrical show that made any sense.” But he nevertheless remembered the tour as “quite an unbelievable headache”.
At times, the sheer ambition of the staging threatened to outstrip the technical knowhow. With cranes and cherry-pickers and bits of staging flying around, there was little margin for error.
According to stage manager Nick Russiyan, “David was in great danger physically and could have gotten electrocuted or killed.” There was a disconnect too between the sophisticated musicianship of the new stage band – featuring guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick – and the rough edges of the original Diamond Dogs recording, played by Bowie himself.
“That album had a quality of obsession with what I wanted to get over,” Bowie later reflected. “They played it too well and with too much fluidity. So to me Diamond Dogs was never played well on stage, or at least never with the sensibility that the album had.”
Despite the positive reaction, the production was scaled back dramatically after the first leg and morphed into the so-called Soul Tour, with a set-list featuring material from Bowie’s forthcoming album Young Americans (released in 1975).
“I threw the set away and came back with a completely different show,” Bowie later recalled. “They were supposed to be selling the entire show on this spectacular set, and the kids would come and there was no set, no nothing, and there I was singing soul music.”
“Diamond Dogs was a weird period because everything that David had done up to that point suddenly exploded,” said guitarist Earl Slick. “It was like a nuclear explosion… Bowiemania… Then he decided to just abandon the whole thing. Diamond Dogs is probably one of the most iconic things he did in his entire career but… it [the tour] didn’t even make the WestCoast.”
“It was pretty obvious that David was taking coke,” recalled Jayne County, the American proto-punk glam-rocker who was signed to Bowie’s management firm MainMan at that time. “He became very skeletal in his appearance and began rattling off speeches that sounded meaningless to the rest of us… He began to get paranoid… accusing people of ripping him off and stealing his drugs.”
“Diamond Dogs scared me because I was mutating into something I just didn’t believe in any more, and the dreadful thing was, it was so easy,” Bowie said, looking back in 2008. “The Diamond Dogs period was just an extension of Aladdin Sane, which in itself was just an extrapolation of Ziggy Stardust.
“But by the time of Diamond Dogs that persona had started to feel claustrophobic, and I needed a change… Diamond Dogs was making me sick, both physically and creatively, and I was shifting into melodrama."
DAVID SINCLAIR
Musician since the 1970s and music writer since the 1980s. Pop and rock correspondent of The Times of London (1985-2015) and columnist in Rolling Stone and Billboard magazines. Contributor to Q magazine, Kerrang!, Mojo, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, et al. Formerly drummer in TV Smith’s Explorers, London Zoo, Laughing Sam’s Dice and others. Currently singer, songwriter and guitarist with the David Sinclair Four (DS4). His sixth album as bandleader, Apropos Blues, is released 2 September 2022 on Critical Discs/Proper.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2601.18 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3852 days ago & DAD = 507 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
.JPG)
