DAVIDBOWIE: ALBUMTOALBUM – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Nicholas Pegg and I continue our voyage into the heart of darkness as we venture deeper into the depths of Bowie's 1984 album 'Tonight'. Can we find our way back from the sadness of 'God Only Knows' into the light? Will there be redemption with Tina Turner on the title track? How do the ongoing Iggy covers fare? And what on earth does the surreal 1960 TV series 'The Strange World of Gurney Slade' have to do with the wonderful 21 minute mini epic 'Jazzin For Blue Jean' produced to promote one of the album's clutch of solid gold bangers? It's real, it's 'Tonight' and we're here for it. 

Returning to albumtoalbum for a long-overdue reunion is renowned actor, occasional Dalek and author of The Complete David Bowie, Nicholas Pegg.

Nick's an old friend of the podcast and has tackled some of David Bowie's most acclaimed albums in previous episodes - as well as exploring entire eras (our 198More series of chats take an overview of Bowie's singles, soundtracks and various off-extramural activities 1981 - 1989). Now, he's back to tackle one of the most challenging artefacts in the Bowie oeuvre - the much-maligned 1984 album Tonight.

A rag-tag bag of semi-sentient cover versions, marimbas, an absolutely bracingly brilliant long-form promo video (very 1984) a couple of superb Bowie evergreens, some blue-and-brown-eyed reggae and uncharacteristically insipid production, Tonight might not be the worst album of 1984, but it fell short of what long time Bowie fans had come to expect. Clearly geared to what Bowie assumed were his new Let's Dance-era fans, the album was recorded almost straight after the massive Serious Moonlight tour, without the satisfying thwack that conceptual cohesion and creative conviction characterising Bowie's best work to date.

Here, Bowie opted to work with a young British producer, Derek Bramble, who had little awareness of Bowie's work. As Nick says in this episode, Bramble's lack of public profile might have appealed to Bowie, after the megawatt presence of Nile Rogers on Let's Dance. Fair enough. But then, getting happening, in-demand producer, most recently with The Police, Hugh Padgham on board, in the junior role of engineer, wasn't Bowie's brightest idea.

In this episode, we kick off by looking back at the lead-up to the album's recording (in Canada), a cast of characters including Derek Bramble, Hugh Padgham, Iggy Pop and Carlos Alomar and the album's first three tracks - Loving The Alien, Don't Look Down and the unforgettable cover version of the Beach Boys' God Only Knows. 

With thanks to Nicholas Pegg, and Leah Kardos for the background music. During the conversation, we have references from Chris O'Leary, Charles Shaar Murray and that Bowie resource par excellence, bowiebible.com

In this, the first of an epic conversation about life, music, art, noise, haircuts, farts, Tin Machine, Buck Owens, Mick Ronson, Mick Jagger - oh, yes and more Tin Machine, legendary guitarist, composer and performer Reeves Gabrels joins me for a wonderfully random chat that charts our hero's early years, his career as a lawn-mower, wedding-party guitarist par excellence right up to meeting the man with whom he would spend the next ten years as a co-writer, guitarist, performer and friend. 

Join us as we while away an hour or so looking back on an extraordinary life and make sure to check out Reeves's numerous projects over at his site! Do share and comment on this podcast if you like it and let me know what you think. 

https://reevesgabrels.bandcamp.com

Welcome back to albumtoalbum the David Bowie Albums Podcast with me Arsalan Mohammad and in this second part of our chat with David Bowie’s long time collaborators Mark Plati and Sterling Campbell, we recall the making of albums including Black Tie White Noise, Earthling and of course, the great lost album of 60s tunes revisited, TOY, all of which feature in the new box set Brilliant Adventures. During the course of this episode, Mark and Sterling dig deeper into the sessions for TOY and the anecdotes come thick and fast. Do you know, for instance, what classic Bowie track inspired Sterling’s drums on ‘Conversation Piece’? What was the track that Mark was invited to mix and so impressed Bowie that he ended up working with him for seven years? How many kids does Mark have? And what did Bowie think of his appearance at Glastonbury in 2000? All of these nuggets and more await you in this episode of albumtoalbum! 
With thanks to Mark Plati and Sterling Campbell and Julian Stockton
Mark Plati is at www.mark-plati.com
Please share and review this podcast and follow us at @albumtoalbum 
Brilliant Adventures (1992 – 2001) is out now! Buy it here 

Welcome back to Albumtoalbum, the David Bowie albums podcast with me, Arsalan Mohammad. And it’s a very exciting podcast indeed today as we welcome not one but two Bowie alumni, producer/musician Mark Plati and drummer Sterling Campbell, to talk about a new old classic lost collection of remakes, the legendary TOY.   
TOY was released last month as part of the Brilliant Adventures box set, which covers the 1992 – 2001 period, an era in which Sterling and Mark worked with Bowie, together or individually, on albums like Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, hours and TOY as well as some of the most high profile live shows of the era – the Glastonbury performance in 2000, the BBC Radio Theatre show of the same year and the subsequent TOY sessions, where Mark and Bowie selected a number of David’s songs from the 1960s to remake and remodel with a full band. 
Strangely, from the perspective of 2021, when TOY was offered to Bowie’s then-record label Virgin, it was met with some degree of perplexity, a distinct lack of energy and never got released, although the energy and positivity of those sessions led naturally onto 2001’s magnificent Heathen.
By all accounts, these were amazingly creative, enjoyable sessions, a fact that is audibly evident in the charismatic interpretations of the songs. Tunes that were barely heard by the record-buying public at the time, subsequently ignored by their creator for thirty years were now lovingly revisited by a band who knew just what to do with them. 
In part one of this conversation with Mark and Sterling, we begin by going back to New York in the late 70s and 1980s, rediscovering the music that shaped their lives and creative outlook. It’s the stories of two future musicians growing up in the midst of a cultural new wave shaped by punk, hip hop, disco, techno - and Bowie. 
Fast forward to the 1990s and the pair fondly reminisce about their time in the studio working with David Bowie and his collaborators, including Brian Eno, Gail Ann Dorsey, Gerry Leonard and many others. The group dynamic was productive and creative – and hugely enjoyable. Sterling recalls Bowie’s devotion to British contemporary comedy colouring the mood of sessions, with David frequently insisting on group breaks to watch videos of Alan Partridge and The Office. Mark affirms how, in the studio, Bowie would pounce on random ideas and accidents, a characteristic recalled by so many of his collaborators over the years. 
The pair also reflect on the shifts in pop culture and technology from the time of the Beatles to the present day as successive generations have accrued a shared pop culture history and debate how the pandemic might change things for the future. 

Join me and Nick Pegg for the fourth and final part of the 198more show, an all-singing, all-dancing odyssey through the wildly underrated Bowie 80s. In this part, we address post Live Aid Bowie, his work with Iggy Pop, Tina Turner, Jimmy Murakami, Martin Scorsese, La La La Human Steps and a fellow called Reeves Gabrels, who would play a huge role in reorientating our hero with his muse, as the 90s loomed. 

I hope you enjoy this episode and do share and spread the word about the series if you are so inclined. Meanwhile, keep an ear out for new episodes on the way soon!

It's Live Aid Special! Join us as we join Bowie behind the scenes at the global jukebox on July 13 1985 for a day that changed pop'n'roll history

Join us for this 90 minute epic as we continue our mid 80s odyssey through the hectic schedule of D. Bowie, who is dressed in a frightwig and tights hurtling around labyrinths, or smoother than a filtered Turkish gasper, suave and Soho-sexy for Absolute Beginners. We get to grips with the music from both movies, debate Bowie's astonishing work rate, enjoy his Iggy Pop impersonation, tell you all you ever wanted to know about the Italian evergreen 'Volare' and Pegg shares some fruity opinions on Chris de Burgh and the Thompson Twins. We're very happy with this one and I hope you like it too! STAY TOONED: Next up - Live Aid and beyond. Join the gang, share the love. 

The 1980s were Bowie's lost decade. True? No, says Nick Pegg. Join me and the much-loved author of The Complete David Bowie for a reappraisal of Bowie's musical adventures around and beneath the official albums released between 1980 and 1990. We're looking at Baal, Queen, Pat Metheny, Cat People, Live Aid, Band Aid, Labyrinth, Absolute Beginners and of course, as is always the case with Mr Pegg, a whole load of assorted trivia, facts, opinions and theories. Whatever you think of Bowie's notoriously divisive EMI albums, one thing's clear - there's much more to Bowie in the 80s than Never Let Me Down and Tonight. 

Recorded via Zoom in November 2020, with some occasional input from my dog Otto in the background. 

If you enjoy this podcast, please do follow us, review and share the episode and let me know what you think! 

Nick's book, in case you haven't yet read it, is something of a Holy Grail of Bowie info and detail - available here: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-David-Bowie-Revised-Updated/dp/1785653652/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2VA9CC0ZX6SVO&dchild=1&keywords=nicholas+pegg+the+complete+david+bowie&qid=1615294898&sprefix=Nicholas+Pegg%2Caps%2C228&sr=8-1

Furthermore, edited out due to space, but we briefly talked about Nick's fleeting cameo in the recent, brilliant TV series "It's A Sin". If you've missed THAT and can access UK TV, then really, what are you waiting for, go and watch it and then come back. It is a superb, heartrending and life-affirming piece of drama (and Pegg-watchers, look out for the Dalek).

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/its-a-sin

OK, thanks for reading, thanks for listening, thanks for supporting us - let's dive in! 

Part Two of my megachat with comedian and author Adam Buxton and in this episode, we’re joined by the one and only Chris O’Leary, returning to Albumtoalbum after his chat with us on ‘David Bowie’ (1967) some months back, author of Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog and collected essays on Bowie’s canon in ‘Rebel, Rebel’ and ‘Ashes To Ashes’.

We travel through the album’s tracklisting in this episode, from Ashes to Ashes to the closing Its No Game Part II and a bit beyond too. Chris and Adam swap nuggets of Bowie trivia and anecdotes and Adam blesses us with his incomparable tribute to Gary Numan. We talk about pirates, midwives of history, broken pizzas, bad theatrics and s-s-s-s-s-ociet-t-t-t-t-ty. Additionally, Chris shares a prized Tom Verlaine anecdote whilst I generally burble and chuckle along.   A fuller meander through my thoughts on the absolute belter Scary Monsters is included in the notes for Part One, but if you want to explore Adam and Chris’s work in greater detail, as well as following up on some of the topics that arose in the chat, here’s a handy cut out and keep list:  
Chris O'Leary's study of Scary Monsters at 40 

https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2020/10/08/scary-monsters-at-40/   Adam’s Bowie Spotify compilation

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6ZtTS8N3Qwx2oX1X8jRxL2   General Buxton stuff   www.adam-buxton.co.uk   ‘David Bowie in New York 1980 • The Elephant Man, Scary Monsters & Other Strange People’ by Nacho 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1fTtwGqdQw&t=5s