David Bowie – I Can’t Give Everything Away

What does it sound like?:

This is the sixth and final box set in the ‘Eras’ sequence that started with Five Years in 2015. The template was set by Bowie himself: freshly remastered studio albums, contemporary live sets, Re:Call collections of officially released singles, B sides, EPs, and a different take on one of the albums. Five Years had a Ken Scott mix of Ziggy Stardust, Who Can I Be Now? a Harry Maslin mix of Stationtostation and Tony Visconti’s view of The Gouster, A New Career In A New Town Visconti’s mix of Lodger, Loving The Alien a Mario McNulty remake of Never Let Me Down, and A Brilliant Adventure included Mark Plati’s version of Toy. Live albums that have received a first official release on these boxes include an extended Stage, Serious Moonlight, and a complete BBC Theatre. Otherwise, Eras boxes do not include any outtakes or previously unreleased material, which are held back for a different collection of box sets covering approximately a calender year, a series that is up only up to 1973. Surroundsound was never a part of the offer, so no Blu-Rays.

I Can’t Give Everything Away covers a period of just four studio albums, Heathen, Reality, The Next Day and Blackstar, all produced by Tony Visconti, returning for the first time since 1980. There was a second disc of studio extras with a special edition of Heathen, a hefty amount of material on The Next Day Extra EP, and the No Plan EP. Everything is remastered except for Blackstar and No Plan and corresponding Re:Call 6 tracks. The Reality Tour album is re-sequenced to match the Dublin performance it is taken from. There is a new, exclusive, Montreux Jazz Festival 2002, the final European gig of the Heathen Tour. Re:Call 6 has forty-one tracks. This time there is no remix nor any re-imagined lost album. Nevertheless, the box consists of 12 CDs, retailing at around £110, or 18 vinyl LPs, at about £390. When you consider that Bowie was professionally inactive for nine of these years, recovering from a major heart attack and angioplasty, it’s quite a haul.

Bowie was fifty-five when Heathen was released. It is the work of a mature man contemplating a god-less future and a god-less death. In his youth, he’d been energised and excited by impending apocalypse but this is serious and sombre, partly a reaction to the twin towers, a re-evaluation following the scrapping of Toy and a response to Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind. Its melancholy melodies hang attractively in its spiritually empty air. On the cover, he wears a distinctly unglamorous tweed suit. In an interview, he spoke about no longer becoming and simply being, a chameleon no more. He likened Sunday, Heathen (The Rays), 5:15 The Angels Have Gone and I Would Be Your Slave to Richard Stauss’s Four Last Songs. Visconti’s production is beautiful, the best work he ever did for Bowie, wonderfully enhanced by this remaster. Carlos Alomar makes an appearance on Everyone Says Hi. Three covers liven things up. He delights in the depravity of Pixies’ Cactus, covers a Pixies cover of an ancient Neil Young song and settles his debt to The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. At the time of its release, Bowie was no longer regarded as relevant, but it is an album that has grown in stature as his fan base has grown older, and is now considered one of his best.

The Heathen Mini Tour began with the band performing the whole of Low and the whole of Heathen. Both albums have a pall of depression hanging over them, hardly the most exhilirating for a live audience. By Montreux, they were playing more old favourites, just eight Heathen tracks but retained Low apart from Weeping Wall. Bowie sounds very at ease, in his element with his extraordinary live band of the time: Earl Slick guitar, Mike Garson keys, Gail Ann Dorsey bass, Sterling Campbell drums, Mark Plati guitar, bass, keys, Gerry Leonard guitar and Catherine Russell keys. They prove they can play absolutely anything. Montreux can be seen as a bridge between Glasonbury and Reality.

Reality is a New York City album. Bowie was settled, content, accepting of his place in life and the world of music. At various points, that didn’t stop him from being angry, disillusioned, flippant and depressed. He had lost much of his trademark strangeness, integrating back into the human race, but retaining certain peculiarities. He still had loose ends to deal with, one of which was finishing Bring Me The Disco King, a song he wrote in 1991, and another was a triumphant major world tour. A Best Of release had preceded Reality, reminding everyone of the quality of his catalogue. He needed some new ones to blast from a stage. Reality is a romp in the studio with his touring band, Mick Garson back in the fold. Organised rehearsals, if you like. He covered Waterloo Sunset and Try Some, Buy Some but Pablo Picasso was the big success live with its asshole line bellowed by the audience. Somehow, Bowie had become a master interpreter of other’s songs.

The tour was scheduled for 110 gigs with the aim of reaching over a million spectators. The focus was on the music, rather than the spectacle, a cunning mixture of big hits, lesser known and new, 33-well rehearsed songs lasting over two hours. The only change in personnel was the exit of Plati. The crowd at Dublin were ecstatic and rightly so. The performance is excellent, Bowie teasing and cajolling the audience, a master showman dazzling them with his youthful energy, pacing the peaks and troughs to perfection. A Reality Tour is Bowie’s best live album, now sequenced as it was meant to be. Nevertheless, it was dogged by tragedy and misfortune. In Florida, lighting engineer, Wally Thomas, fell to his death. In Oslo, a fan threw a lollipop for Bowie and it stuck in his eye. On 23rd June, Bowie could not complete the Prague show. He soldiered on for the Hurricane Festival in Germany on 25th but was then diagnosed as having had a heart attack two days earlier. The rest of the tour was cancelled and Bowie retired.

Announced on his sixty-sixth birthday, officially a pensioner, The Next Day was an unexpected surprise. It teems with life, full of loud guitars, gargantuan riffs, steamrolling drums, booming bass, and big choruses, the production deliberately compressed to turn it up to eleven, proving to the youngsters that Rock and Bowie himself weren’t dead. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) and Love Is Lost are among the best rockers he ever recorded. The 2025 remaster softens the shrill attack but gives the instruments, and therefore the music, more air. It should please those who never took to Visconti’s production. The sparse first single and its video weirdly reminisce about his time in Berlin, the second depicts him and Tilda Swinton as a domesticated androgynous couple, and the third features stigmata. Bowie was back to being very odd and capable of controversy. There was so much material that three tracks were added to make a deluxe version, then a further seven spilling over into an EP. It could have been a triple album but was released when streaming was king and CD still the preferred physical product. In this vinyl box, it is a double with the leftovers on Re:Call 6.

It is now impossible to view Blackstar rationally. The band are all very experienced, if relatively obscure, jazz musicians. They play ‘rock’ music deliciously with an extraordinary touch. The seven songs are full of weird twists and turns, wilfully obscure lyrics and glorious melodies. The production is warm and expansive. Bowie’s vocals are magnificent. The lyrics are full of darkness, regret and anger but you can hear the twinkle in his eye. In the dusk of his career, Blackstar is the quintessential Bowie album, back to his imperious best, a fitting finale. The video of Lazarus seems to be mocking death but there has been no resurrection.

Taking into account that many Heathen B sides have been included on Toy, Re:Call 6 is pretty comprehensive. There are some SACD mixes of Heathen tracks and songs Bowie featured on as a guest: Lou Reed’s Hop Frog, Kristeen Young’s Saviour and Earl Slick’s Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary). Versions of Bring Me The Disco, Rebel Rebel and (She Can) Do That were used in movie soundtracks. His appearance at Fashion Rocks in 2005 is represented by Life On Mars? and Wake Up and Five Years with Arcade Fire. There is also a performance with David Gilmour singing Arnold Layne at The Albert Hall in 2006, but not Comfortably Numb, perhaps for licensing reasons. Maria Schneider’s collaborations for Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) and ‘Tis A Pity She’s A Whore are both here in all their glory.

The book, 128 pages in the CD box and 84 in the vinyl set, features previously unseen notes, drawings and handwritten lyrics from Bowie and photos by Sukita (who took the set’s cover shot), Jimmy King, Frank W. Ockenfels 3, Markus Klinko, Mark ‘Blammo’ Adams and more as well as memorabilia, technical notes about the albums from co-producer Tony Visconti and design notes from Jonathan Barnbrook. The box covers for ‘Eras’ have been consistently simple, a contemporaneous, previously unseen shot of Bowie set against a plain background with straightforward lettering. This time, the tone of blue and the style of font is particularly stark but Bowie looks happy and relaxed.

The ‘Eras’ boxes are as complete an overview of David Bowie’s solo career official canon as we are going to get. Has there been any other popular music artist with such variety, such breadth and such depth across so many decades? He had such a good ear for a tune and an eye for an image, he made otherness and uncoventionality relatable and cool. ‘Eras’ demonstrate that he made outstanding music almost every time he was in a studio. A consummate songwriter, his worst albums are sprinkled with gems. His singing, right through to the very end, is incredible and achieved in so few takes. It’s the later boxes that hold the most under appreciated treasures. The remastering is uniformally superb, though some of A New Career In New Town sounds shrill and there was the drop out in “Heroes”. The exclusive material has never been less than interesting and sometimes eye-opening, though Gouster and Toy don’t quite live up to their promise. The remixed albums have their detractors but they provide a welcome difference in perspective. The remake of Never Let Me Down has improved that album significantly. The live concerts are all astonishingly good, none better than A Reality Tour in this final box. Even Glass Spider sounds exciting. The Re:Call collections have missed very little but these discs are unlikely to be played often for themselves. They are more a library of songs to be dipped into now and again, but ‘Eras’ is the right place for them. Not quite perfect, then, but almost. All involved deserve our gratitude. Bowie fans, overall, must feel very privileged to have lived long enough to enjoy these six boxes.

Tin Machine is a glaring absentee. Expect a specific box once the legalities have been settled. The way physical product is evolving, Bowie’s albums are likely to move to Blu-Ray at some point. Meanwhile, the box sets collecting calender year outtakes, wilderness demos, broadcast performances, etc continue and are up to 1973. At this rate, we can expect to hear Leon in twenty years and Blackstar outtakes in fifty.

The tenth anniversary of Bowie’s death and the release of Blackstar is just a few months away.

What does it all *mean*?

David Bowie’s musical legacy is secure. One of the very best Rock stars that has ever lived. He may not have given everything away but he gave us so much. Hail the Dame.

Goes well with…

The other five ‘Eras’.

Release Date:

12/09/2025

Might suit people who like…

Pop/Rock in the slightest

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