On a whim the other day I dug out my copy of David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” album to play for the first time in donkey’s years and looking at the sleeve reminded me just how freaky Bowie used to look and how I was a little creeped out by him when I was a kid. With his bony frame, dodgy eyes, wonky teeth, milk-bottle pallor and outlandish costumes he looked like a zombie in a gay horror film. I still remember back in 1973 going round a friend’s house after school and his older sister had just bought a copy of “Aladdin Sane” which he got out to show me and we both stared at the sleeve photos — especially the one on the inside gatefold — as if we were sneaking a peek at his Dad’s porn magazines, something about it looked a bit pervy and illicit. Sounds silly I know but I was only 10, and I loved science fiction too but Bowie seemed to be coming from a far weirder place than Star Trek.

Of all the iconic images on his 1970s sleeves the one on the front of “Diamond Dogs” is probably the freakiest, showing Bowie as some mutant half human-half dog stretching out across the gatefold like a depraved Ray Harryhausen creation. The original version of the painting was even more perverted with the dog half of Bowie proudly displaying his meat and two veg like a centerfold in Dog Fancy magazine, but when record label execs saw early proofs they worried that some shops wouldn’t carry it so the poor old dog was neutered by having his todger airbrushed out.

The cover was painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert who had just published a book of paintings called “Rock Dreams” which depicted various rock legends (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Hank Williams, Bowie himself) in fantasy settings. Bowie saw an exhibition of the paintings at Biba and commissioned Peellaert to do the cover which apparently ticked off Mick Jagger as he was after him to do The Stones next album too. In the end Peellaert did both “Diamond Dogs” and “It’s Only Rock and Roll” that year, though Bowie beat them to the shops by several months and his cover is far more striking. Take that, Mick.

“Diamond Dogs” was Bowie’s last Glam Rock album and his last proper rock album of any kind for the rest of the decade and I think it’s fallen through the cracks in his catalogue between his Ziggy pomp and the Thin White Duke/Berlin era and doesn’t get the attention they do which is a shame as I think it’s a better album than “Aladdin Sane” — though I’ll resist the temptation to call it the dog’s bollocks.

Download: Big Brother/Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family – David Bowie (mp3)
Buy: “Diamond Dogs” (album)

Download: Glow Girl – The Who (mp3)

Image from the Skingirls gallery.

Yes kids, this is how awful things were before the internet was invented. We actually had to go to places and talk to real people. I really don’t know how we survived.

I’m not planning on doing many repeats and/or requests around here but a lot of people have asked me to repost these tunes since I took them down nearly two years ago, and as they’re about the rarest and hard-to-find songs I’ve ever written about I thought this post was worth a second go.

Most Saturday afternoons in 1977 you’d find me in my bedroom listening to the Kenny Everett show on Capital Radio which was the perfect way to fill some of that dead time between getting back from the shops with my Mum and the football results coming on Grandstand. It wasn’t just the adventures of Captain Kremmen (which you can download here) that kept me listening, like myself Kenny had a major ELO obsession and was constantly playing their then-new “Out Of The Blue” album. He must have played the entire double album (parts of it several times over) and this was before I got my own copy so I was glued to the radio. Kenny’s musical tastes leaned heavily toward the polished and elaborate like ELO, he was the sort who thought “Sgt. Pepper” was the pinnacle of western civilization and that snotty punk stuff was just horrible. I thought so too at the time, it just sounded like a moronic racket to my ears and whenever my sister played the first Clash album I’d take the piss by singing “White Riot” in a retarded D.P. Gumby voice.

Another album that got heavy play on his show I ended up buying was “Looking Over My Shoulder” by Scottish singer/songwriter Chris Rainbow. If anybody has heard of him these days it’s as lead singer of The Alan Parsons Project in the 1980s (I’m so glad to say I never knew he was) but in the 70s he recorded three solo albums which are to The Beach Boys what ELO’s were to The Beatles, full of sunny, intricately-arranged pop symphonies with heavily multi-tracked vocals. While a lot of “Looking Over My Shoulder” now sounds as dated and cheesy as the shirt he’s wearing on the sleeve some of it still quite gorgeous.

“Dear Brian” is a fan letter to Brian Wilson who at that time was still a recluse, drugged out of his head in a sandpit somewhere. Over it’s sublime six minutes he laments the destroyed tapes and lost outtakes that ended up on a studio floor and implores Brian to “step in the sandbox” and make music again. The ghostly “In And Out And Round About” washes in like a mist coming off the North Sea and gets a bit Proggy (but in a very pretty way) with some highly pretentious lyrics and a grand church organ arrangement. Kenny played this a lot and would get all wobbly over the whispery ending.

Download: Dear Brian – Chris Rainbow (mp3)
Download: In And Out And Round About – Chris Rainbow (mp3)

All of Rainbow’s albums are out of print now and go for rather large amounts of money as he’s something of a minor cult amongst fans of 70s soft pop.

BRUCIE BONUS: Here’s a track from the album I didn’t include in the original post, this was a single.

Download: Give Me What I Cry For – Chris Rainbow (mp3)

ABC’s “The Lexicon Of Love” album is one of the high watermarks of 1980s pop, released in 1982 it’s shiny surfaces and theatrical romanticism pretty much set the template for the flashy, hedonistic, post-modern decade to come. Which makes it a little ironic that the day I bought it I found myself in a place haunted by the once-glamourous ghosts from another pop era and as a result it’s always linked in my mind with rather more dismal surroundings than the grand, velvet-draped ballroom you imagine ABC playing it in.

I bought the album one Saturday afternoon when I was down the King’s Road in Chelsea with some mates and when we stepped out of the Our Price record shop with our purchases it started to piss down with rain — real monsoon-like buckets of it — so we ran to take shelter in the nearest boozer, which happened to be The Chelsea Drugstore.

This was the first and only time I’d been in there and had no idea then about it’s legendary past, to me it was just this dingy place I’d walked past a million times that never looked very inviting. But when it opened in 1968 The Chelsea Drugstore was one of the epicenters of Swinging London counterculture and hangout for the beautiful people, with three glitzy floors containing a bar, restaurants, clothes and record shops and a late-night chemist. They even had a delivery service made up of young girls on motorcycles wearing purple catsuits — it doesn’t get much more groovy than that. It’s most famously mentioned in The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the place where Mick Jagger went to get Marianne Faithful’s “prescription filled” when they lived together on nearby Cheyne Walk and she had a heroin habit. It’s also where the record shop scene in A Clockwork Orange was filmed.

But the youth culture parade is always moving on and the place must have already seemed like a relic from another era in 1976 when Punk and the Sex Pistols emerged from Malcolm McLaren’s shop “Sex” down the other end of the King’s Road, and far as I know The Drugstore’s last fling with pop history was in 1980 when it was an early hub of the new futurist/electronic music scene with it’s Monday night “Sci-Fi Disco” run by a young DJ by the name of Stevo who later founded Some Bizzare records and discovered Soft Cell, The The, and Depeche Mode. By the time I ran in there soaking wet in 1982 it really looked like the party had gone somewhere else, the place was almost empty and with it’s dingy lighting, dusty black walls, tatty black carpet and cheap chrome trimmings the vibe I got was more of a working man’s club for ageing Motorhead roadies. The rather shabby atmosphere was compounded by the appearance of a stripper on the little stage, a young girl who had that pasty-skinned, bored Reader’s Wives look common to nearly every stripper I’ve seen in a grubby English pub. It was all a bit sad and felt more suited to a seedy Pulp song than the glamour of Swinging London.

Looking back now, it might have turned into a shabby dive but at least it had some character which the King’s Road is sadly lacking these days as it’s become just another bland British high street with no trace of the vibrant counterculture and underground scenes it once spawned. When I walk down there now all I see are the ghosts of what used to be there: The Great Gear Market, Shelley’s, Fiorucci, Robot, Flip, American Classics, Acme Attractions, Johnson’s — they’ve all gone, replaced by mobile phone sellers, supermarkets and dry cleaners, not exactly the sort of places you can imagine a youth explosion starting from. The Chelsea Drugstore is long gone too, and in a perfect illustration of how far the King’s Road has fallen, on the site of what was once the hippest, most-happening scene in London there now stands a McDonald’s. There’s a giant metaphor for all of modern pop culture right there too.

I don’t think anyone needs me to post any tracks from “The Lexicon of Love” so how about all the b-sides of their first three 12″ singles instead?

Download: Alphabet Soup – ABC (mp3)
Download: Theme From “Mantrap” – ABC (mp3)
Download: Mantrap (The Lounge Sequence) – ABC (mp3)
Download: The Look of Love (Part 3) – ABC (mp3)
Download: The Look of Love (Part 4) – ABC (mp3)
Read: “King’s Road: The Rise and Fall of the Hippest Street in the World” (book)