David Bowie - Outside Outtakes

Growing up, my father always talked about how great Bowie was. My first real experience with Bowie's music was 1995's Outside, and boy was I confused. In retrospect, it was clearly the wrong place to start, and I'm sure many other Nine Inch Nails fans have figured that out as well, but at the time I kept replaying Outside in hopes that I would figure something out. There is a lot of great music there but it's difficult to get through, so despite loving tracks like The Motel and A Small Plot Of Land, Outside has never been a favorite of mine.

Years later, having better familiarized myself with Bowie's catalog, I'm really into the trio of albums he did with Eno and a big fan of records like Scary Monsters and Station To Station. With that, after hearing the version of I'm Afraid Of Americans from the Showgirls soundtrack which is an Eno production from around the same time as the 1995 recordings, and reading about the then-proposed trilogy of albums with Eno that Outside was supposed to begin, I thought it was time to re-explore that album. Sadly, the results were about the same, but it did lead me to find some outtakes from those sessions.

Much has been said about the circulating Outside outtakes, so I'll spare you a reiteration and point you directly to this page which has lots of details. If you want the skinny though, these recordings feature some of the improvisations from those sessions, parts of which became interludes on the final album. There is some seriously "proggy" stuff going on with Bowie's truly strange storyline, so don't expect the unreleased pop version of Outside, this is for those who enjoyed that corner of Bowie's universe.

I went to college in 1996 and heard Bowie's next album, Earthling, while djing at one of the school's radio stations. It had a much larger impact on me as I was really into jungle at that time, but then I got to hear "Heroes" which changed everything. Great songwriting, real passion in the performances and such an engrossing atmosphere, all of which led me to discover what was really great about Bowie. Even when he stumbles, his songwriting chops and ability to conjure a sense of time and space are wonderful, and no matter what one thinks of Outside, he still had and still has a lot of life in him. Now if only someone would leak the Toy album.


David Bowie - Something Really Fishy (The 1. Outside Outtakes)
UPDATE: The download got nixed by the DMCA. Sorry guys.

01 Hello Leon
02 I Am With Name / Hide Me / We Creep Together (Part 1)
03 Hide Me / We Creep Together (Part 2)
04 I Wanna Be
05 The First Time
06 I Am With Name / We Creep Together (Part 3)


PS - Usually I'm on top of these things, but I've really got to explore Fripp and Belew's recordings. I'm more familiar with their appearances with Talking Heads than anything else they've done. So, can someone give me some advice as to some albums where their guitar pyrotechnics really get shown off? Please?