Play it loud and enjoy!
Mister Sussex
I put this together from a variety of sources of variable quality, some of which was originally silent, and synched it with the version of the song performed live in Santa Monica 1972.
Play it loud and enjoy!
Play it loud and enjoy!
updated 8 years ago
Play it loud and enjoy!
Due to life getting in the way, it's been nearly a year since my last Bowie video upload , but I wanted to put together something special in time for what would have been David's 71st birthday. So here it is.
I've created this edit with love and effort from various rare clips which I've collected over the many years I've been a Bowie fan. The clips originally had no audio and so I've synched them with the 1972 performance of 'Queen Bitch' from the Santa Monica live album.
As Bowie never performed this song the same way twice (often switching lines around), the synching proved to be a challenge but I'm reasonably happy with the way it has turned out.
I hope you'll like it too. Crank it up loud and enjoy!
As most Bowie fans know, footage of the 1976 Isolar tour is very scarce. The closest we have to a filmed record of a complete concert is the rehearsal video recorded on February 2nd 1976 in Vancouver. This has never been officially released but over the years it has turned up on bootleg VHS and DVDs and more latterly on sites like YouTube.
This is my attempt to clean up just one track and present it to the best of my ability. There are many technical problems with the bootleg footage including colours which bleed and smear, ghosting, jitter and VHS artefacts which show up as horizontal white dashes appearing randomly on each frame.
I’ve gone through it frame by frame and painted out the white dashes and repaired the damaged parts as much as I could with the cloning tool in After Effects. In total I looked at nearly 10,000 frames!
It took a while to do : )
There are still many, many faults which I couldn’t eradicate but I think the cleaned up end result is an improvement and looks more filmic than what I started with.
Hopefully the rehearsal footage will see an official release one day. There is a short clip from it showing in the 'David Bowie Is' exhibition and it looks pristine.
The audio used here is from the actual rehearsal, just tweaked a little to improve it. I’ve only replaced the piano introduction to the song because on the actual recording, it has some bum notes which are very jarring to listen to (well, it was a rehearsal after all). But once the drums come in, we are back to the original audio until the end.
It’s a great vocal performance by Bowie of one of the best tracks from ‘Station to Station’, especially considering there was no audience here to perform to. By the time he played the song live in Nassau the following month, the tempo was noticeably slower, almost relaxed. But in rehearsal, the song shares the same urgency as the studio version and is all the better for it in my opinion.
As always it's been a labour of love and I hope you'll enjoy it.
A huge thank you to Steve for providing me with the source footage to work with.
Lady Stardust is believed to be a homage to Marc Bolan and although it is not visible in the video, it is said that Marc's face was projected onto the screen behind Bowie whilst he performed this song at the Rainbow.
I initially created this edit in June of last year, putting it together from clips derived from various sources. I held off uploading it back then because I was always hopeful that some better quality footage would turn up to replace some of the rougher quality clips I was using. The excellent documentary 'The Last Five Years' included significant upgrades to some of the clips - so at last I feel I can upload my edit (after a very late night of reworking it). The footage is synched to a 1972 radio session version of the song.
It feels appropriate to finally upload it on what would have been Bowie's 70th birthday.
A slightly different edit of the song (including some footage not seen here) can be found on my Vimeo channel here:
vimeo.com/198560876
I hope you enjoy it.
This video was not made for profit, just for other fans to enjoy.
Check out my other videos of Bowie live in 1972 here:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0AMduz7O8xHBOBFvZz9qsXMP2FsHM-Bl
Turn the lights down low, turn the music up loud - and enjoy!
I've tweaked the picture to get the best out of it and replaced the audio with an higher quality version from a different source. I hope you enjoy it.
Many thanks to Michael Jewell for the original clip.
A beautiful, slower, pared down version of the more familiar album track, this mix of 'Blackstar' was used as the theme music for the TV crime drama 'The Last Panthers'. 45 seconds of the track played over the title sequence. The version used for this video is twice as long, and at the time of writing, is the longest version currently available. Hopefully one day we will hear a full length version of this mix.
Audio taken from a promo piece for'The Last Panthers' television series.
Visuals taken from the brilliant promo video for Blackstar directed by Johan Renck.
Renck, who also directed 'The Last Panthers' said of this version of 'Blackstar':
"The piece of music he laid before us embodied every aspect of our characters and the series itself: dark, brooding, beautiful and sentimental in the best possible incarnation of this word. All along, the man inspired and intrigued me and as the process passed, I was overwhelmed with his generosity. I still can’t fathom what actually happened"
http://sky.com/tv/show/the-last-panthers
"'Blackstar" from David Bowie's album Blackstar available on iTunes: http://smarturl.it/blackstar_itunes
Amazon: http://smarturl.it/blackstar_amazon
Spotify: http://smarturl.it/blackstar_spotify
Vinyl: http://smarturl.it/blackstar_vinyl
LimitedEdition Lithograph & Music Bundles: http://smarturl.it/blackstar_dbstore
Limited Edition Clear Vinyl: http://smarturl.it/blackstar_clearvinyl
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The recent re-release of The Man Who Fell To Earth has gotten people talking again about the mythical lost Bowie soundtrack for the film. Whilst those recordings remain in the vaults, we can only speculate what it might have sounded like by listening to the instrumental tracks on 'Low'.
As an experiment, I lined up 'Weeping Wall' with the opening scene of the film, starting it at the first frame that Bowie appears. I was intrigued to find it was the exact same duration as the opening music used in the film. Next I did some 'foley' work and searched for replacement sound effects to overlay on to the music to help 'sell' it as an authentic soundtrack; for example - footsteps, a steam train, birds, a running stream, the creaking fairground ride. I must have listened to a dozen belches before settling on the perfect one : )
The result was interesting to me in how it changed the mood of the film - so I thought I would share it here for anyone who is interested.
From Hugo Wilcken's excellent book on Low:
In December 1975, shortly after he’d signed off on Station to Station, Bowie was back at work on a soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth—although ultimately it wasn’t used in the film, and remains to this day unreleased. If Station to Station laid down the artistic groundwork for Low, its actual genesis came in these soundtrack sessions. Various Low tracks are reported to have been recycled from this time—Brian Eno has said that “Weeping Wall” started life there, although Bowie himself claims that “the only hold-over from the proposed soundtrack that I actually used was the reverse bass part in ‘Subterraneans.’” He is perhaps not the most reliable witness to the lost weekend of 1975 (Bowie on Station to Station: “I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was”).
Bowie worked with Paul Buckmaster (producer of his 1969 “Space Oddity” hit), who brought in a cello to accompany Bowie’s guitar,
Bowie had the soundtrack with him during the Low sessions for work on “Subterraneans,” and at one stage played it to the musicians: “It was excellent,” recalled guitarist Ricky Gardiner, “quite unlike anything else he’s done.” Months later, Bowie sent Roeg a copy of Low, with a note that said: “This is what I wanted to do for the soundtrack.”
The video quality is variable but the scarcity of some of the material makes up for it I think.
The footage mainly comes from performances at the Rainbow Theatre London and Friars Aylesbury 1972.
The audio comes from 'Santa Monica 1972'
Have a look at my channel for other rare Bowie material including more from 1972.
Made for fans, not for profit.
Play it loud and enjoy.
This is a completely new edit of 'I Can't Explain' constructed from the outtakes footage.
The broadcast version of this song used a series of freeze frames during the opening of the song. Trendy at the time but a bit dated now. I wanted to get back to more of a raw live experience. So now at the start of the song we see Ronson playing guitar and Bowie grooving along to it. The subsequent edit differs from the broadcast version too though it still has much in common.
I hope you like it. I'll be posting more '1980 Floor Show' re-edits soon.
Bowie performs a newly recorded vocal of this track. Check out his white nail polish (which I never noticed before).
This was shown on a TV tribute to Bowie earlier this year. I've cropped out the channel logos but otherwise left it untouched.
Also on Vimeo (with added skit):
vimeo.com/173541654
Enjoy.
The broadcast version of this song began with 30 seconds of library footage of a rocket launch playing over the intro. Later in the song, there were two further lengthy cutaways to NASA footage taking us out of the performance. Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it feels dated now, and I know I'd rather be watching Bowie and Ronson play than looking at stock film of a satellite in orbit.
So I've ditched all the 'space' footage and restored this to a pure performance film. I've used out-takes footage to fill in the blanks and matched it with the better quality footage taken from the actual broadcast.
I hope you like it.
Stay tuned for more new edits of '1980 Floorshow' material and other goodies coming up in the near future,
This clip appeared on a tribute show to Bowie earlier this year. The resolution and detail was better than previously available, but the sound was muddy and the whole thing was running slightly too fast.
I have slowed it to the correct speed and synched it with the best available soundboard audio of the song. I also graded it to remove a yellow/ brown tint and cropped out channel logos etc.
This is probably the best that this footage has looked and sounded so far.
Enjoy!
In the film, this scene shows the main character of the film, Christiane, attending a 70's Bowie concert in Berlin with her friends. In reality Bowie filmed his part on a set in New York in 1980 , miming to an edited version of 'Station to Station' from the 'Stage' album. (At the time, he was appearing on Broadway in 'The Elephant Man' and couldn't fly to Berlin for filming).
In the movie, the performance footage then was edited with crowd scenes from an AC/DC stadium concert. The scene was intercut with plot elements consisting of teenagers smoking drugs and popping pills. One of the teenagers is then shown having a bad time of it sitting with his head in his hands with a contorted face.
All of this is fine in the context of the film. But I wanted to remove these distracting plot elements and make a video which would serve as a stand alone performance video as much as possible. To this end, I've re-edited the video to replace the drug taking scenes with more Bowie performance shots. (I've also removed a brief wide shot of AC/DC on stage which was in the original edit).
The soundtrack of the film version overdubs the song with a lot of newly added crowd noise. Again, fine for the film, but it sounds excessive when viewed as a stand alone video. So I've replaced it with the 2005 remastered version of the song from 'Stage'.
In the film the song fades off into the next scene. Here I've extended it and given it an actual ending.
I hope you like it.
This clip appeared on a tribute show to Bowie earlier this year. The resolution and detail was better than previously available, but the sound was bad and the whole thing was running slightly too fast.
I have slowed it to the correct speed and synched it with the best available soundboard audio of the song. I also graded it to remove a yellow/ brown tint and cropped out channel logos etc.
This is probably the best that this footage has looked and sounded so far.
Hope you enjoy!
This clip appeared on a tribute show to Bowie earlier this year. The resolution and detail was better than I had seen previously, but the sound was muddy and the whole thing was running too fast. I have slowed it to the correct speed and synched it with the best available soundboard audio of the song. I also graded it to remove a yellow/ brown tint and cropped out channel logos etc.
So this is probably the best that this footage has looked and sounded so far.
It can also be seen here: (possibly the video quality is better)
vimeo.com/170143687
Hope you enjoy!
The clips used in this video vary in quality (one source had a watermark which I had to mask out), but I feel I've done the best with what I had access to.
I think the video captures the energy and excitement of seeing Ziggy and the Spiders perform live in 1972. It's been a labour of love to put together.
I hope you like it.
So it seemed fitting to replace the original audio for this performance with the later version of the song. Not so straightforward as it initially seemed because the new version is slower overall and Bowie uses a different vocal phrasing in many parts. Also one line was repeated a few times in the new version so I had to find a way of incorporating that.
I had to make many micro-adjustments throughout to the speed of the video in order to make the vocals synch with the picture. It's still not perfect but I've done what i can to create a convincing match. I've also removed much of the green tint on the source video.
Now the image and the song are a better match than what was originally broadcast (in my opinion). A mature version of the song sung by a mature Bowie.
Thanks to YouTube member 'david bowie tin machine' for uploading the original broadcast version which you can watch here:
youtube.com/watch?v=VPE1SqwqyDY
Thanks also to 'Nacho' who's refurbishments of many Bowie performances inspired me to do this in the first place.
His channel is here:
youtube.com/channel/UC6-GXe1clYKF8q4juAXPZIQ/videos
I hope you enjoy.