well, here we are again, look you see. me doing that thing where i said that i would not write something or other related to bowie once a month after completing that whole "random bowie" thing. but here we are.
it was a couple of years ago, or so (at time of writing) that one more previously unreleased bowie recording was announced as going to get released. this instance saw Glastonbury 2000 presented for the consideration of us fans. whilst not immediately bouncing off the walls with excitement at the news, that it would be available as either a 2 CD set or as a 2 CD and 1 DVD set, i went, yeah, will have a look when it comes out.
sadly (or alas), when it came out, it was priced at a level which suggested either greed or no comprehension at all on what would be reasonable was at the fore of thinking. going on other releases of a similar nature (be it CD and DVD or bowie), i had, like many, reasonably expected around £9.99 for the 2 CD set and something like £14.99 for the 2 CD and 1 DVD. so it was quite a surprise, in this era of "streaming" and downloads being easy and convenient, that the 2 CD set came out at £19.99 and the 2 CD and 1 DVD set was an eye watering £34.99.
these were prices which i could, kind of, afford. but i saw no sense in squandering money on something which felt remarkably overpriced, no matter how much of a fan i may be. rather helpfully, it was the bbc who helped me decide to give it a miss. they screened an abridged, or if you will truncated, version of this Glastonbury 2000 set. i watched, and noted with interest how mediocre, dull and very average it was. money saved, then.
how is it that i now have it? well, i have monitored the release. alas the 2 CD and 1 DVD release has never fallen to a reasonable price, as i've not seen it below £24.99. a fee of £19.99 would probably have seen me buy it. no matter, for at the moment, brand new and sealed copies of the 2 CD version, which shall do fine, are all over ebay for south of £7. actually might be south of £6. quite a few "big" titles tend to end up with wholesale buyers and cheap sellers on ebay, especially when sales are not what studios had banked on. to this end, right now there are stacks of brand new copies of Honk off of The Rolling Stones in a 2 CD format for south of £4. no, i have not, for the 3 existing "best of" from 1971 onward sets i have from them are enough for the moment, thanks. but that may change.
at the lower price, then, Glastonbury 2000 became a straightforward purchase. it may well be so that not blindly forking out over the odds for it on release means i am not a "proper" fan, but still, at the least i am enough of a fan to get it at such a price. no, for those satisfied that the provenance is established but all the same wanting a quick review, it is not a very good record or album or live recording, at all.
pictured above is just about the only worthwhile thing from this set, and in fairness if i did pay around £7 for it all then it was worth it for this alone. inside the booklet is a diary what bowie kept, running from agreeing to do Glastonbury through to just before he went and performed. for some peculiar reason i have a feeling (or sense) that i have read this before; perhaps he did it for some magazine like Q or similar, as a promotion for it all. should i be mistaken, and this is simply an extract from diaries bowie kept for his whole life, well then wow, sat somewhere the greatest ever book(s) on rock and roll are sat there unpublished.
what's wrong, or what is the problem, with Glastonbury 2000? it is just not that great a performance of a mildly interesting but not all that inspiring set list. bowie, as mentioned in the diary and as he says during the performance, was struck with laryngitis just before the gig, and so his main focus was a not unreasonable wish to protect his vocal cords from much damage. in quite general, or broad if you like, terms, it is also true that seldom, if ever, does any performance at the Glastonbury festival ever quite seem like it matches the well crafted mythology of the event.
you have to remember that this was then, not now. in 2000 we all reasonably assumed that we would have such a thing as a david bowie forever, always doing whatever he felt was smart. this was also an era in which Glastonbury was not quite as ludicrously hyped up as it is now. an unavoidable truth, then, is that the reactions to bowie playing Glastonbury, as the celebrated "main closing act" on the sunday, ranged from "meh" to "oh" all the way to "that's nice".
an obligatory gander at the set list for you, then. nothing too wrong with the set as such, except yes, there are indeed two selections from Earthling to endure. actually, they sound ok as proper songs rather than the album version. some of my all time favourites are on there, but apparently done in a quite random, disjointed, no feel of flow to them way. he said that he shuffled the set to do "easier on the voice" songs first, which is fine, but i would not have thought the astonishing requirements of Stay met that criteria at all, and yet there it is as the 4th song.
going back to the time, and it was more or less so that no one particularly seemed all that eager for bowie to "do" Glastonbury. no less than Michael Eavis, the founder, owner or creator of the Glastonbury festival, at the time said he did not want to as he believed Bowie would be "boring". yes, this is indeed the man who booked Coldplay 6 (six) times to play the festival, so let no one doubt his authority or knowledge on what boring is. as explored in the diary, bowie agreed to it, was not quite sure why, got briefly excited by it, became frustrated with the time limitations and such on the set expectations, and then immediately got more excited about what to do after it (which seems to be recording Toy that had to get ditched by the record label and became Heathen).
in the second half of the booklet, you get (pictured below) an "i was there" account from someone of the gig. this is brilliant, frank and honest. essentially it reflects exactly what, with only a few rare exceptions, what a Glastonbury performance is - just another gig. yes, sure, of Glastonbury 2000 one over excited reviewer (probably NME) claimed that this was Bowie's "best, greatest and most important gig since Ziggy in 1973", which is nearly as laughable as the follow up claim that it somehow "was essential in him reclaiming his crown as the king of cool". oh, really?
usually the claim is that Glastonbury is the "biggest, best and greatest" festival of them all. in terms of attendance figures, demand, interest and sheer number of acts, i would absolutely not doubt the first two, at all. i am unsure that equates to "greatest". some quite like to engage in "fantasy festival" stuff, speculating that the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Smiths and The Stone Roses might one year "reform for a one off gig at Glastonbury". i doubt it. playing Glastonbury means you get a small fee for a big gig, generally do not play in front of your own fan base demographics, and sign away lucrative rights to exploitation of your set to the bbc. for what reason would any band do that?
well, to get back to the actual album at hand, the overall sense, feeling or mood one gets from playing bowie's Glastonbury 2000 CD set is "flat". it would be unfair to say that he doesn't sound interested, as he has a fair go. but, if you are battling laryngitis and the audience, who had been there by this stage for 4 or 5 days and were more likely keen to be home than appreciate bowie, are giving you nothing, well.
of course what could have been the greatest moment of the set, a full tilt, in full, done properly performance of Station To Station is marred by the sound going wonky during it, specifically bowie's microphone. but, there are still one or two moments which save this from being a complete write off. for a start, Absolute Beginners here reminds all why it is very foolish to overlook his usually not fondly looked upon 80s stuff. and Under Pressure is always a thing of beauty to hear.
the thing which also distracts from Glastonbury 2000 being considered as any good is that within a week of the festival shenanigans it was so that david bowie did a much, much, much better concert. and there it is, pictured above, Live At The BBC Radio Theatre 2000. not sure if this ever got a separate release, i got mine with the Bowie At The Beeb set, which i paid whatever they asked for. it was also filmed, and i saw it on the tele. a CD & DVD reissue (or first release for the visuals) of this gig would be very welcome indeed.
of the above, latter, not Glastonbury performance, from what i have been able to work out it is so that, at the least, Always Crashing In The Same Car, Survive and This Is Not America were songs he had to cut for time from the festival. possibly Fame too. they are all superb performances, and i am not sure he did This Is Not America all that much over the years. in truth, i had also forgotten what a brilliant song Survive was until playing it again here. should you really for some reason want a recording of bowie live in 2000, then it is this one you want.
it would be pretty safe (i think) to assume that if one can now buy Glastonbury 2000 for around 35% of the price it was originally out for, then the initial sales were not all that they had hoped for. once again, i would suggest that this is down to them having a far too high price on it in the first instance, especially mindful of the fact that it is not very good. my hope is that this venture has not made anyone in control of the bowie estate think it is not worth releasing anything else, for they are sat on stacks of stuff which would be much better to put out, either as a re-release or for the first time in an official sense.
some examples of this? sure. leaving aside tours what have already had a DVD release of, and mindful of that as far as i am aware sadly only some poor quality footage of rehearsals from the 1976 tour exist, there is bowie live in 1978.
as far as i am aware at least two concerts from that tour were filmed, or at the least filmed in an professional way. one of them, i am sure, was put out as a video or laserdisc in Japan only, for Japan seems to get lots of exclusive stuff.
the below picture is from a different gig in 1978, also professionally recorded. for those keen on knowing the provenance of these images, depending on who is asking these might be from the section of my collection which is sourced from rather more independent, non-traditional distributors, but the important thing is that someone somewhere is sat on this footage.
with 2 CD releases covering this tour, Stage and Welcome To The Blackout, it may well be that they feel they have covered the period pretty well. that said, i believe a 3rd set from the 1974 tour is due for release this year, so you never know. sadly i don't believe any full gigs from that tour were filmed, just the bits one can see in Cracked Actor. which would also be nice to have an official DVD release of.
it is so that the two big tours of the 80s, Serious Moonlight and (ahem) Glass Spider, came out on VHS (maybe even Beta for the first) and on DVD too. no need to cover them here, then.
but, yes, the 1990 shenanigans of the SoundAndVision "greatest hits" tour were indeed recorded and filmed, with it being so that (that i know of) no official release has been made. this is a little odd, as the inevitable "greatest hits" sets are what they seem to like to package up the most. in order to sell people like me the same thing again and again throwing in something new helps soften the financial blow, so i would expect this one to get bundled up with a release one day.
no the whole SoundAndVision thing as a tour wasn't all that great performance wise, but still. its purpose was to let bowie feel "free" of having to always play the hits live, as he was well tired of things like Space Oddity, with that song not ever being done live again after this.
one that got a VHS release but has not yet surface on DVD is Oy Vey Baby, which is of course Tin Machine live in Germany at some point in 1992. this was the It's My Life tour, ostensibly in support of the Tin Machine II album. also, the final tour of Tin Machine.
a possible block to the release of Oy Vey Baby as a DVD (other than the incorrect assumption many have about Tin Machine not being good) is, or was, that there was a "rights issue" with the now out of business label which released the Tin Machine II album. further, there are some stories which suggest Hunt & Tony Sales have blocked any reissues of anything Tin Machine over a royalties dispute. but, as Tin Machine II is about to get a welcome reissue, presumably such matters have been resolved.
back to bowie on his own, then, or at least as the only person billed on tour posters and records and that. 1996 was a time what felt like every single thing he did got recorded. this is of course a very, very good thing, but none of the footage (or not much of it) has had an official release as of yet.
to the best of my knowledge some single song performances from 95 to 97 have turned up on various compilations and what have you, but we've not had a dedicated bowie release. well, somewhere or other i have a CD that came with a magazine, Earthling In The City, which had a few live things on it, but that's it.
it is so that there's a stack of fully recorded gigs from this era in audio form alone, never mind video. probably the most widely bootlegged of them is the gigs bowie done with his mate Trent and Nine Inch Nails. that such has been widely bootlegged is not necessarily a barrier to an official release. it was, after all, that Santa Monica 72 was probably the single most bootlegged record in history, but they did give it an official release eventually anyway. the same is true of bowie's 50th birthday gig, which is also up for an official release.
flavour of the month for the bowie estate seems to be 1997, going on the release of is it any wonder a short while ago. as luck would have it, there's a full on, pro shot, full tilt concert sat in the vault from this year.
but i very much doubt this one shall get a release. other than the polka dot trousers bowie has on, this was a corporate gig for the GQ awards. most musicians are absolutely delighted to do such corporate gigs, as they are very lucrative. but few like advertising it. also, GQ. giving this an official release would probably see GQ expecting a cut, and it might be seen as a dubious yet tacit endorsement of the dubious "biography" someone off of GQ recently published about bowie. even if one left aside most or all of the contentious or controversial comments in a book about someone who has no right to reply, one does really have to wonder how credible a book can be if pages are given over to paul morely to drone on about what he thinks of something.
and on we go to 1999, then. in this particular year bowie went ahead and arranged a gig at the Astoria, down in London (innit) for the specific purpose of filming it to be released. it was done, but not released, although bootlegs are widely available. and usually the whole thing can be found on that you tube thing.
not sure why this one didn't get a release, really. it's not so bad, featuring a set dominated by selections from the then current hours.... album, plus a few that would turn up on Glastonbury 2000. and then some what were on his VH1 Storytellers thing. maybe this will turn up as an official release one day, since he went to all the trouble of making it.
yes, indeed, there probably is / are a whole load more things recorded tucked away. i had and have no intention of providing an exhaustive or extensive list of them, but hopefully it gives anyone interested an indication that the well of bowie material not yet to be released (properly) has not run dry just yet.
back, then, to finish off, to the ostensible point of this blog post. which would be that Glastonbury 2000 CD release that i haven't said too much of, overall.
i have just checked and yes, you can indeed get the 2 CD set of Glastonbury 2000, at time of writing, off of a number of ebay sellers for south of £6. even if just a penny south. frankly, at that price it is pretty much a straightforward "yeah go on then" purchase. others, like NME journalists for instance, may well appreciate the performances more than me. also, the nice pictures of bowie resplendent in a posh jacket, plus the diary thing, are very much worth having.
live albums are, generally, more miss than hit. it is quite rare for any musician or band to release a concert record which could be deemed as essential or as important as their studio works. off the top of my head, i can only think of three genuine examples - Live At Leeds by The Who, Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads and Live (X Cert) by The Stranglers. for the most part they tend to be either contractual obligation things, or hasty cash-in releases. sometimes the "live in concert" releases are very suspiciously note perfect and so polished that they are of virtually no difference to the studio variations of the songs on them. examples of these would be Arena by Duran Duran and, most infamously, Live In The City Of Light by Simple Minds.
considering the sheer volume of bowie recordings i have to select from for listening pleasure (yes i am fortunate and indeed probably showing off a bit), i really cannot see any point of time in the future, as opposed to the past, where i shall willingly take this off the shelf and listen to it again. but, i guess, i needed to get it and listen to it so as to know this now.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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