mick ronson : slaughter on 10th avenue

mick ronson
slaughter on 10th avenue
rca records (1974)
apk1-0353


Mick Ronson's debut album released in 1974. Tape which I bought with my well-earned pocket money for all of £2.35 from a Boots the Chemists store. At that time Boots sold both vinyl and cassettes as did a lot of other chain stores whose principal business wasn't selling records. Of course, Ronson I knew as the guitarist in Bowie's backing band, The Spiders From Mars, and was curious to find out what he had to offer as a solo artist. It's a short album -clocking in at just under 36 minutes- but it has its moments. Particularly the 'Only After Dark' track which is also the B-side to the 'Love Me Tender' single released a couple of months before the album.

The Bowie connection is furthered with two tracks; 'Growing Up and I'm Fine' by Bowie himself and 'Pleasure Man / Hey Ma Get Papa' co-written with the Thin White Duke. Not forgetting fellow Spider From Mars, Trevor Bolder, on bass. Bolder and Ronson had played together in The Rats in their native Hull before joing up with Bowie. Bolder would go on to join Uriah Heep and later, Wishbone Ash.

'Slaughter on 10th Avenue,' which became more or less Ronson's signature tune, was originally music from a ballet by Richard Rogers which was first used in a Rogers & Hart Broadway comedy musical in 1936! Apparently Ronson had listened to the original music often as a child and had always liked it. His version does it well.

All in all, 'Slaughter...' is a pretty decent album but not a great classic like 'Ziggy Stardust' nor 'Hunky Dory.' Still, it's worthy of a place in any music fan's collection. Never bought a vinyl copy though.

david bowie : station to station

david bowie
station to station (tape)
rca records (1976)
apk1 1327

design : AGI
photography: steve schapiro

 Another classic album from Bowie's best decade; the 70s. The year was 1976 and this was incredibly Bowie's tenth album release! Station To Station was recorded after he completed shooting Nicolas Roeg's Sci-Fi film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. The actual album artwork features a still from that very same film. As does the first of the "Berlin Trilogy" albums, Low.

Musically, Station to Station is a bit of a transitional album for Bowie. Developing the funk and soul music of his previous release, Young Americans, Bowie takes a new direction towards synthesisers and deutsch-motorik rhythms. Rhythms highly influenced by German electronic bands such as Neu! and Kraftwerk that were beginning to emerge and become known to a wider audience.

This trend would culminate in some of his most acclaimed work, the so-called
"Berlin Trilogy", recorded with Brian Eno in 1977–79 at the famous Hansa Tonstudio in the Kreuzberg district of '70s Berlin. Interesting to note that Bowie's buddy, Iggy Pop, who accompanied the Thin White Duke on his German sojourn, also made what are probably his two best solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life, during the same period.

After recording Station to Station in the USA, Bowie heavily addicted to cocaine, decided to get away from his Los Angeles base. In an attempt to flee the substance-fuelled years that had taken a toil not only on his sense of judgement but had also seen him go from thin to downright emaciated, Bowie departed for Berlin.

Incidents such as the infamous and supposedly "Nazi" salute photograph in the New Musical Express, under the headline "Heil and Farewell", as well as Bowie's apparent fascination with fascism and collecting Nazi paraphenalia really weren't doing his public image any good at the time. So, Bowie and Iggy packed their suitcases and set up home in the then very much divided and isolated former Reich capital. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Anyhow, I'd sort of gone off Bowie with  the Diamond Dogs and Young Americans albums -albums which I've since reappraised and found that they belong up there with Bowie's other great seventies recordings- but Station To Station put back him on track (no pun intended!) as far as I was concerned and gave us a glimpse of what was to come with the fabulous "Berlin Trilogy." Golden Years indeed!

david bowie : ziggy stardust

david bowie
the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars
rca international
INTK 5063

Ziggy Stardust was released in 1972. At that time I acquired, first of all, a long since lost cassette tape copy. I bought it where I usually bought tapes at that period from a small shop in Glasgow called Casa Cassettes; which I think was in Jamaica Street near Glasgow Bridge. It would be around that time or maybe a wee bit earlier that the first Virgin Records record shop opened: a scummy, hippy hangout near Central Station. Anyhow, I did eventually get a vinyl copy. This tape version in the pic above dates from 1980. I imagine that I picked it up at some car boot sale a few years ago. Though the j-card is a tiny bit soiled the tape still plays perfectly well.

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Ziggy Stardust was my first real introduction to David Bowie as I wasn't really aware of his recordings apart from the Space Oddity single which my mother had bought when it was released. Of course, what really initiated my interest in Bowie had been the Starman single as well as his outrageous appearance with his band on the Top of the Pops BBC TV show in July, 1972. As far as music goes that Summer was a great one. First we had Bowie's Starman, then Mott The Hoople's All The Young Dudes (a Bowie song) followed in August by Roxy Music's debut, the utterly stunning Virginia Plain single, and Lou Reed's Transformer album the same month. All stone cold classics and defining moments in my interest in music. Mott the Hoople apart, all three others became the foundation of my record collection for a long time and indeed still are today.

Bowie's Ziggy Stardust set me off on a quest for his other releases. His earlier albums aren't as good but, in my opinion, Hunky Dory is far superior and remains probably my favourite Bowie album to this day. Needless to say, up until his untimely death in january 2016 and the release of Blackstar, the seventies were Bowie's best years.

In that decade, a whole spate of his best recordings were released: Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Heroes, Low, Station To Station, The Lodger, Diamond Dogs. A decade of quality releases that Bowie never quite succeeded in reproducing over the next 36 years of his career. That is until his swansong; the brilliant Blackstar released only a couple of days before his passing.
On his death I recall endlessly hearing the Let's Dance single on radio and TV as if it had been the only thing that he'd ever recorded. The same-titled LP might well have been Bowie's biggest-selling album but I imagine that any die-hard Bowie fan would agree with me that it certainly wasn't his best.

Still, even the lowpoints in his career stand above most of the dross that made up the mainstream charts over the years. On the other hand though, I always liked Lou Reed; whom I'd discovered through Bowie, more
than I ever did The Thin White Duke. But that's another story.


Album artwork : Terry Pastor
Album photography : Brian Ward

david bowie : christiane f - wir kinder vom bahnhof zoo

david bowie
christiane f - wir kinder vom bahnhof zoo
rca records (1981)
BK 43606


This is the soundtrack to Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo; a 1981 German film directed by Uli Edel that portrays the drug scene in West Berlin in the 1970s, based on the non-fiction book of the same name written following tape recordings of teenage girl Christiane F.*

The film, to which David Bowie composed the soundtrack, actually features the musician as himself in it.

According to the book, the real Christiane F. had had her first experience with heroin at a David Bowie concert some years earlier; this is told in the film with David Bowie starring as himself.

The soundtrack is made of tracks from several Bowie albums: Heroes, Station to Station, Lodger, Stage, and Low.

The artwork on the cassette (here) varies from the vinyl release in such that David Bowie does not appear on it whereas Natja Brunckhorst, who plays Christiane F in the film, appears on both the vinyl and cassette covers.

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*In real life: Christiane Vera Felscherinow.
In the early 1980s, Felscherinow's boyfriend was fellow heroin addict Alexander Hacke, from the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. Together they released two albums under the name Sentimentale Jugend. Felscherinow also appeared in a couple of films. In 2013 she wrote and released a new autobiographical book; Mein Zweites Leben (My Second Life) which tells the storyof her life after Christiane F as well as her continuing drug abuse.
(Source : Wikipedia)