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In 1973, David Bowie released Pin Ups, a loving if slightly over-wrought collection of covers from the mid-60s: the moment when the previous driving forces of British pop, Merseybeat and the blues revival started giving way to something noticeably weirder, noisier and more expansive. In an accompanying promotional interview, he waxed lyrical about his memories of seeing the Pretty Things, the Who, the Creation and the nascent Pink Floyd “with dear old Syd” in impeccable mod lingo (“up the Windmill or the Elephant, get blocked, bust over to Richmond”) but tactfully neglected to mention that he was more than an amphetamine-fuelled fan: he’d wanted to be a participant, and had recorded a handful of mid-60s singles inspired by his idols.
That elision shows what a strained relationship Bowie had with his pre-fame material. For most of his career, he simply tried to ignore it, although it doggedly refused to go away: his former labels kept re-releasing it, usually in sleeves that attempted to fool the buyer that it was current. Then, in his 50s, he seemed to reconsider, revisiting his 60s oeuvre on Toy, a 2001 album that was rejected by his then-label EMI – a baffling decision, if you buy the posthumous rewriting of Bowie’s history that insists his Glastonbury performance in 2000 utterly reinvigorated his career and made him as revered as he was in his peak years.
That Glastonbury performance actually did nothing of the sort – as with his 90s releases, the next couple of albums continued to receive respectful but not ecstatic reviews and sold well rather than extraordinarily so – but Bowie’s history often gets rewritten like this, to the point where he is deemed an unimpeachable genius who released nothing but masterpieces, and the muted contemporary reception afforded some of his work was simply a matter of said masterpieces being misunderstood. This makes his career seem vastly less interesting than it really was, with its astonishing artistic peaks and troughs, where Bowie seemed uninspired or lost or wrong-headed before marshalling his talent and producing something extraordinary after years in the doldrums.
But the mindset that he could do no wrong has resulted in The Shel Talmy Recordings, in which the era that produced two flop singles released by Bowie when he was still Davie Jones – one with the Mannish Boys and the other with The Lower Third – is re-examined with a 21-track compilation that comes with its own range of merchandise: four different T-shirts, a hoodie, a baseball cap, a tote bag, a commemorative mug and a pair of socks.
It also comes with a quote from the late Talmy, best known as the producer of the Kinks and the Who: “He and I were about six years ahead of the market.” It’s difficult to know what this is supposed to mean, given that the music on The Shel Talmy Recordings couldn’t conceivably be more redolent of 1965, the year of the Yardbirds’ Heart Full of Soul, the Sorrows’ Take a Heart, the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction and Get Off of My Cloud and the Who’s explosive trio of early singles.
The latter in particular hang over the compilation’s contents. A year away from Bowie writing his first truly great songs – Can’t Help Thinking About Me and The London Boys – the actual material, some of which has never been officially released, is pretty flimsy.
Take My Tip is a straight-up impersonation of Georgie Fame, Baby Loves That Way an uptempo re-write of Smokey Robinson’s You Really Got a Hold on Me, and I Pity the Fool a wan blues riff with a bit of Slim Harpo’s I’m a King Bee in its DNA. You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving and I Want Your Love, meanwhile, might have been B-sides by the Swinging Blue Jeans or the Dave Clark Five. What interest there is lies in the arrangements, which erupt into distortion and noise, or frantic drum rolls, or guitar solos that squeal a little more painfully than would have been permissible 12 months previously. The only thing worth noting about the instrumental Keeping Up With the Jones is the crunching guitar riff that opens it, a fair forgery of Dave Davies’ work on the Kinks’ breakthrough singles.
As a document of British rock in transition – the sound of middling bands nevertheless alive to some cutting-edge developments – it’s fine, although there’s something telling about a handful of demos that strike out in noticeably different musical directions: Walker Brothers-influenced balladry on Today, very vaguely Dylan-ish folksiness on Bars of the County Jail, the dreamy easy-listening pop of I Want My Baby Back. It’s as if Bowie realised that his efforts weren’t up to the standards set by the bands he loved and sought to hedge his bets as a result. At their most intriguing, the demos throw up I Live in Dreams, which – with a spit and a polish – might conceivably have ended up on Bowie’s eponymous post-Space Oddity album in 1969: it doesn’t really sound like anything else, which isn’t something you can say about everything else here.
Were they judged on quality alone, rather than Bowie’s involvement, the songs on The Shel Talmy Sessions would be filler for collections of obscure 60s freakbeat, with the real purchasing incentive provided by superior, if similarly unsuccessful, peers: the Syndicats’ deranged Crawdaddy Simone, the Eyes’ When the Night Falls, or Leaving Here by Ronnie Wood’s mid-60s mob the Birds, the latter a single so tough and potent it provided a lifelong touchstone for the musical approach of Motörhead frontman Lemmy. That they’re instead deemed to warrant special treatment – an exclusive red vinyl collectors’ edition, 8,000 words of excellent sleevenotes by 60s rock historian Alec Palao, and indeed an accompanying pair of socks – tells you less about their quality than about the posthumous rewriting of Bowie’s history, and the industry it fuels.
