trés butch little number whines

howdy pop pickers

well, f***. after some serious resignation to simply (and very easily) getting on with life without it, one circle, or rather collection, is now complete, look you see. despite the very best efforts (and they were good) of the Bowie Estate to completely f*** over me and many thousands of other fans, just for having the disgrace and temerity to love Bowie's music, i managed to obtain a copy of the sixth, and final, volume of the misleadingly named Brilliant Live Adventures. got it despite the Bowie Estate too, not from or because of them. which is sad, but that's how they rolled these dice. 

provenance, or origin, of my copy of the sixth Brilliant (ahem) Live Adventure, titled as it is "Live At The Kit Kat Club", rather than given a name (like the others)? the great virtual car boot sale of the internet. oh, sure, it's been available on that (there) ever since release, as a hefty percentage of the limited number released, i am led to believe three thousand, were bought by people just to sell there, for two, three or even four times the price they paid. don't hate the players, hate the game. anyway, one seller clearly got bored of sitting on a disc no one seemed particularly interested in, and sold it to me for, oooh, about (and this includes postage) 30p more than what i would have given the Bowie Estate for it. 

is it any good? perhaps the best way to answer that is by saying it's not completely sh!t and not, in the end, entirely a waste of time, yet strives to be as close to those two as possible. alas. most of us, i would have thought, had reasonably expected us fans to get royally f****d over with the sixth and final set being a DVD and CD of the London Astoria 99 gig. you know, the one that Bowie staged purely to record and release, but then did not release. instead we get this, a set which is very similar to the fifth of these Brilliant Live Adventures (here you go), just considerably shorter and featuring a very, very average performance. 

from what i remember of terminology, when music mattered, one may well describe Bowie's efforts in this gig as "phoning it in", really. he didn't do bad performances, per say, says biased moi, but some were better than others. everything about his level of performance here suggests that the receipts from the gig displeased him, or it was in some other way a contractually obliged performance. that, or this Kit Kat Club happened to be on the path David walked past to go and fetch the paper, or maybe a packet of cigarettes, and one day he just popped in to do a few tunes, on a whim. 

these theories (speculative thoughts) of mine would certainly explain the brevity of this disc. it runs for just south of an hour, but that is not the issue. for the most part, with nearly every song (and the only exceptions seem to be the then "new" ones off of hours....) it is so that David appears keen for it to be finished within moments of it starting. which is a shame. still, i am sure all at the gig enjoyed being in the presence of the great one. 

a lack of a title for this live release, beyond Live At The Kit Kat Club, does tend to suggest that absolutely no one involved had any interest. this is emphasised greatly by the choice of picture on the inside, which would seem to feature David sitting around looking quite bored with it all. 

by no means am i an expert in "sound quality", instead just knowing what i like, but i am highly suspicious of what happens between the first and the second songs. the quality, and sound, of the whole gig appears to change rather dramatically. it is almost like these performances may not be of the provenance suggested, and they have been taped together from other sources. should this be so, well, it would make this release all the more hard to understand the point of. 

lacking, too, is any sort of comment, interaction or "banter" with the crowd. most unusual for a Bowie concert, that. either it has all been inexplicably edited out, or such simply never happened. at best, i think once i heard him say a slight "thank you" to the crowd. mostly rushed performances that David didn't seem particularly interested in, then, and didn't appear too fussed if them what were there had any care for. 

yes, this was all expected, really, the moment i saw the concert and the tracklist selected for number six in this series. so why, then, did i bother? because i could, i suppose. it did annoy me to not have the complete set, and i was checking the official website daily to see if they had agreed to accept money off of me and many others once more. so far, no, they have not made them available again. 

still, quite unfair to dismiss this release entire. as mentioned earlier, the performances here of the songs from hours.... are almost as good as those on the (actually) brilliant fifth outing. driving around i have had this disc on repeat (well, a copy of it, the original being too scarce and valuable cost wise to trust to a vehicle stereo) and what sinks in is just how really, really good (no, great) much of hours.... actually is. Bowie, perhaps, made a mistake rushing out other releases so soon after it, as it kind of led to this one being "a bit" forgotten. lyrically, musically, however, things like Thursday's Child, Seven and Survive sit right up there as being of his finest. also Something In The Air. well, maybe not so much The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell, but even that's not so bad. 

maybe, perhaps i might (as in i most decidedly will) do a more general whine and rant retrospective thing on this whole Brilliant Live Adventures fiasco, looking at how us simple fans got frequently f****d over for just loving his music, and how around 50% of the releases were, being kind, average if not outright mediocre. yeah, first world problems, etc. 

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!