David Bowie Rock Roll

Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet Bowie's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread…

Classic late period Bowie television broadcasts. David Bowie's output from the late 1980's and 1990's has been reassessed in all the right quarters since the great man's tragic passing in 2016, and has rightfully now been awarded plaudits often denied the releases and concerts from this era at the time they took place. This triple disc set goes some way to contributing to this effort by bringing together broadcast recordings form 1990 and 1992. The first of these was recorded at Bowie's gig in Buenos Aires in August of 90, while the second is from Tin Machine's legendary tour of Japan in the early part of 92, with the show presented here being the group's performance at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo on 17th February. The set is completed with a disc of television appearances recorded between 1975 and 1995, which features some of Bowie's best ever live TV spots.

"Of all David Bowie's many distinctive personae, none have done more to lodge this most ingenious of British artists in the world's consciousness than his 1972 amalgam of the alien visitor and Christ-like rock star: Ziggy Stardust. Cheap glamour, spacemen and ambiguous sexuality surface throughout the loosely conceptualised collection that is The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. If its premise sounds faintly ludicrous, then inspired and dramatic songs such as "Starman" and "Five Years" dispel all doubts about Bowie's genius, and the theatrically tragic "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" brings the album and it's fictional protagonist to a close. As a cultural and musical signpost, Ziggy Stardust points simultaneously backwards to early rock & roll and forward to the simpler, tougher inclinations of late-1970s punk and New Wave rock. As one of the defining rock albums of the 20th century, its influence is immeasurable."