What does it sound like?:
In June 2001, David Bowie said, “Toy is finished and ready to go.” A collection of remakes of his old, pre-fame songs, plus three new ones, recorded by his then hot touring band, was meant to be a surprise release. Record company reticence or, possibly lack of funds, resulted in it being shelved. By the time Bowie found a new label, he’d moved on to the next project and Toy was ‘lost’. Two of the new songs were refashioned for Heathen and five of the tracks were deployed as B sides or bonuses. Ten years later, a free high quality download of early mixes was posted on the internet. Ten years further on, the material has just been officially released as part of the Brilliant Adventure box. Now, to celebrate what would have been Bowie’s 75th birthday, Michael Plati, Toy’s co-producer, has overseen this three disc set, including one of alternate mixes and another of stripped down versions.
Bowiephiles will be very familiar with Toy already and how it came about. He’d put together a versatile band with a powerhouse rhythm section, more than capable of handling anything from his diverse back catalogue for an Hours Tour that morphed into a greatest hits tour, peaking at Glasonbury in 2000: Earl Slick guitar, Mike Garson keyboards, Gail Ann Dorsey bass, Sterling Campbell drums, Michael Plati guitar and Holly Palmer and Emm Gryner backing vocals. Toy began with an episode of VH1 Storytellers. The premise of the show is that an esteemed guest performs some of their deeper cuts and tells the story behind the songs. Bowie, a born raconteur, was in his element, describing the background to Drive-in Saturday, Word On A Wing among others. Can’t Help Thinking About Me was his first single as David Bowie rather than Jones, recorded in 1966 by Tony Hatch, and was the deepest cut on that day. It channels his own London Boys, The Who and The Kinks. Its reception whet the appetite for more. Recording of Toy was quick. As far as the band were concerned it was all new. Bowie claimed he wrote the three new songs in his sixties style, which is odd because back then he changed style as often as he changed his clothes, attempting to find something that suited him. In any event, they had a great time for a couple of weeks, nailing most in a handful of takes. Bowie took two months paternity leave for his daughter Alexandria. When he returned, Plati had lined up Lisa Germano, Gerry Leonard guitar and Chuong Vu trumpet for overdubs and Visconti was asked to arrange strings for a couple of tracks.
There is a joyful exuberance about disc one of the three, the sound of a band and a singer having fun. They are peculiar little songs, full of Bowie quirks, an unexpected chord here a strange lyrical avenue there, an unruly disruption to the beat. A playlist of the original versions is eclectic to say the least, full of uncertain vocals, fragile ego, some pleasant surprises and the artist’s struggle to find his ‘voice’. The rhythm section is tremendous. Campbell gives his best performance as Bowie’s drummer, leading from the front, out-Mooning Keith, powering along with rocket fuel. Dorsey more than keeps up, adding little flourishes and melodic twists. Garson and Germano are classy musicians whose creative fingerprints are everywhere and Slick proves himself to be supremely innovative. Collectively, they draw out some vibrant and passionate performances from their vocalist. You Have A Habit Of Leaving, Can’t Help Thinking About Me and the new title track are enhanced by some great backing vocals. Within all the excitement, it’s the ballads that are most impressive. Conversation Piece is a description of a crisis of confidence at a time when Bowie doubted he would ever amount to anything. Shadow Man is a remarkable song, written for Ziggy, a meditation on our secret lives. Sung by a wistful, older man and backed by this sensitive band, both are deeply moving.
So, what irks? There is the feeling that this isn’t the Toy that was ready to go, delayed purely because of scheduling issues. On the 2011 download, Uncle Arthur, later Slip Away on Heathen, and Afraid were scene setters putting the songs in context. Also, the sequencing pushes the slower songs together just when things need to pick after an overlong and repetitive Karma Man. Disc Two consists of more alternative mixes plus Liza Jane and In The Heat Of The Morning not otherwise included on disc one, the latter absence being a particular grievance. Alternative remixes usually have a specific purpose, such as making them appealing for the dance floor or to shed new light on old friends. These mixes don’t do either. Disc Three contains a third set of versions, this time more acoustic with additional strings, the energy sapped out of them by removing the dynamic rhythm section, all because Bowie is said to have expressed a liking for a stripped down version of one of the songs. Plati seems to have added recent overdubs in a similar fashion to The Stones on their recent expanded edition extras, over-egging the pudding. Garson shines, than man can clearly play anything even a cheesy Hammond, but, otherwise, disc three highlights the songs’ weaknesses, their wobbly structures and inherent naivety. It’s is a shame for a project that was meant to bring maturity and a sense of perspective to a developing songwriter’s efforts. To cap it all, the cover may have been put together according to Bowie’s own instructions, but once he saw it, he would surely have rejected it. Who knows what he would have made of the 6×10 inch vinyl package?
The truth is that it barely matters. It is all available on streaming services. You can spend some time putting together your own Toy, plucking a couple of songs from Heathen, and you will have a thoroughly enjoyable playlist with wonderful sound quality. There are some outstanding performances here and a few of these songs rank highly in Bowie’s vast archive. We should be very grateful that Toy has finally been officially accepted into his core catalogue. No less a luminary than Nicholas Pegg described Toy as “fascinating, thrilling and beautiful.” He wasn’t wrong, despite those irks. If only there was a nice punchy single disc available.
What does it all *mean*?
David Bowie had a vivid, imaginative, creative brain. He made Toy. People who claim to know what was in his mind have put together Toy:Box.
Isn’t it strange how things turn out? Toy would have made money in 2001 but we might not have the colossus that is Heathen.
Goes well with…
David Bowie’s core catalogue.
Release Date:
7/01/2022
Might suit people who like…
David Bowie’s core catalogue.
You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving
As with the Beach Boys SMiLE box set, this is all very welcome but the itch remains unscratched. This version is a mess.
Get to work, Purple Chick!
Not included in the set, exclusive to the new single release.- an early studio demo version recorded in the closing months of 1970 — not recorded during the Ziggy Stardust album sessions as often stated.,
Is that cover art for real? Sorry I didn’t read your review Tiggs, I have no interest in Bowie but that artwork(?) stuck out like a smack in the gob. Absolutely grotesque.
I have a lot of interest in Bowie and I won’t buy it almost entirely because of that. If I wanted a mid-90s videofit image of Phil Mitchell I’d ask for one. Also, 6X10″ LPs? Oh fuck off.
Cheers, Baron. Happy New Year!
…and a Happy New Year to you and yours Tiggs and while I`m at a Happy New Year to everyone who comes to the Forum and those nanorobots AKA The Admin Team.
I guess Mr. Bowie would have loved the cover as it appears now, ugly and amateurish as it is.
For a long while in the 1990s Bowie’s own “computer-generated” artworks (as they were usually called) were laughed at in all the graphic/design/Mac magazines – you could always tell which new & fancy update of Kai’s Power Tools he had on his home computer. Just look at the “1. Outside” booklet…
The front of Outside is quite cool but the rest of it is, as you say, pretty hideous.
This, however….
The moral is: natural is best. (Though a bit of eye-shadow won’t hurt)
He may well have liked it from the art point of view, Fatima. However, Bowie the Rock Star always had one eye on the charts. It’s only my opinion, but I think he would said, “That’s great but let’s try something else.”
Probably the damaged eye though.
Dilated pupil – so he would have, like, seen MORE with the damaged eye.
Bowie’s visual art could be dismal, what with the affected efforts at German Expressionism, even if well intended. He was to this what Madonna is to acting. Both like the clothes and attitude of the creative arts they aspire to, and had / have nobody to discourage it, although they have been stellar in the areas they are successful in. The cover here is desperately adolescent.
He was very enamoured of the YBA mob at the time: their motto being “It’s shit, but we’re artists, so what you gonna do?” His taste was often supernaturally good (eg in drummers) but definitely not infallible, otherwise his last appearance on stage wouldn’t have been with the utterly fradulent Arcade Fire.
This is all very true. I love the mans work and his curating basically a half century of culture for suburban adolescents to up their game, but he could also be a wannabe hack, as his desperate efforts before fame showed. This is fine, the point being there was no master plan, and he could make mistakes and make bad creative judgements.
Worst Cover of the Year winner already agreed in first week!
There *is* a single-disc version, but only included in the 11CD (or 18LP) Brilliant Adventure [1992-2001] box.
I think the cover is great! It’s funny.
Ooh, maybe I should cancel my pre-order. Already have the semi official download from 2011.
And there wasn’t a 2000 tour that peaked at Glastonbury. He finished the hours tour the year before and then did just a couple of small shows in New York beforehand.
But nice review of course.
Just checked status of my order with tax dodgers Canada. Seems I never actually ordered it. It was $22 when it first became available and is now $45. Guess I won’t bother.
that’s the opposite of TDUK. £32.99 when I ordered it on first announcement, £23.99 today.
Nice
Here’s a playlist that follows the 2011 download sequence using the most recent versions. I think it works better.
This playlist has become my new standard version, Tiggs – I agree that it works better…
Thank you.
Love Heathen, hate all the songs on Toy. Thank God it’s not actually part of his official discography, thank God he never did that covers LP after Aladdin Sane, and thank God he never released anything between Let’s Dance and BTWN too, while I’m at it.
Can’t hear you la la la!
No This Is Not America. No Absolute Beginners. No Too Dizzy. Are you mad?
I’m paraphrasing for comedic effect
Arf!
The glut of recent Bowie releases have just felt like cynical cash grabs. However, despite the grotesque cover design, this one does interest me. Is there any indication that DB himself had a preferred running order, or that the bootleg tracklist came from an official source?
Dan LeRoy dedicates a chapter to Toy in The Greatest Music Never Sold. Even he doesn’t know.
The Real New David Bowie Album.
I held the cassette version of »Toy« in my hands today (yes, there is an official pop-up Bowie Store in Berlin…). If this is really aimed at some collector market out there, why didn’t they give it a decent packaging – It comes in a cheap-looking cardboard wraparound like those cassette singles in the 80s. Even the free cassettes that came with pop mags in those days had more information on the cover.
(I bought the »remastered« cassette of »Nevermind« instead.)
A cassette of Nevermind? It’s not just the baby that’s underwater, it’s the whole band.
And yet people still proclaim the merits of never judging a box by its cover
Hanging out with Camille Paglia…
“That’s why sex with men is so hot. You get the best sex from men. Actually, if you pretend you’re not so dominant. It’s so easy to make men wilt – if feminists don’t realise that, they are stupid. What I see is a worldwide conspiracy by women to protect men from the knowledge of their own limitations. Men are very, very simple beings. They just want approval and attention. You pat them on the head and they go and conquer the North Pole. But they are desperate. They are exiles from the world of intimacy…Their confidence is utterly frail . They need daily maintenance”.
Professor Camille Paglia is shrieking this at me and having ignored the male photographer in the room, acknowledges him for the first time. “The life of men is one of anxiety” she continues. She never stops talking. I catch his eye. He fiddles with his equipment.
Its 1992 and I am in Professor Camille Paglia’s office which is wall to wall pictures of Madonna and stickers that say things like “I don’t have PMS – I am a Natural Bitch’ while she machine guns me with her philosophy. She talks faster than Scorsese. She remains one of the rudest, crudest ,scariest and hilarious people I have ever interviewed.
She turned up the other night in a 2013 documentary about David Bowie: Five Years. I mentioned on Twitter that I had once spent 48 hours with her and asked if people would like to know something about that and they said they would. So heere you go!
For me, she remains as awkward a figure in 2022 as she was in 1992 and for that, I have to admit a grudging kind of love. No one who ever read Paglia ever really needed Jordan Peterson but she was dismissed as a batshit crazy dyke while he is revered for saying many of the same things, in much less interesting ways.
Paglia should of course, be interviewed about Bowie. She worshipped him. “David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” I can remember that eerie, mesmerizing moment as if it was yesterday. An elegy for a lost astronaut (inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey), the song marked an epochal shift from the utopian triumphalism of the counterculture 1960s. I learned long afterward that Bowie had prophetically written the song a few months before the Woodstock Music Festival, with its heady populist dreams. Communal idealism was over. “Space Oddity,” with its bleak isolationism, looked forward to the darker 1970s, a decade of disillusion and decadent hedonism.”
He had been a “staggering influence” on her, a living embodiment on her interest in androgyny in art and literature.
He loved her work too, naming Sexual Personae as one his favourite books. He tried to get in touch with her but it did not work out. She is not sad about that “With artists of such towering stature, it’s best to keep a respectful distance.”
I cannot say exactly what drew Bowie to Paglia, only what drew me to her. She was seen as bit of an anti-Christ in the circles I moved in then , though most people did not know who she was. I had seen her on chat shows in the States during my frequent visits there. She was always set up to slag off other feminists which she did brilliantly. She called Naomi Wolf “a pampered twit”. She said that the Ivy League universities were producing idiotic , bourgeois women out of Women’s Studies Programmes . She insulted everyone from Susan Faludi (“hopelessly deluded” ) to Marylin French (“someone filled with buried resentment”) to Gloria Steinem (“Her record with men – horrible”)
Or as she said to me. “Right now, feminism has just become this whining. Oh, nasty men. You did this to me. I think many of these women are depressives. Okay, so now you get these women’s studies programmes that deny the greatness of male artists.
They don’t even have the category of greatness because hierarchy is like a dirty word. Okay? They say that greatness is a projection, a value judgement about a bunch of dead white males.
These namby- pamby, wishy washy, little twits, cannot even admit how great Michelangelo was. These people know nothing about art. Now everything is “great”.
So they go, but some quilt made by some woman in Kansas is as important an object as the Sistine Chapel. Give me a break. I mean, pu..lease”.
So, when you say “hanging out….”
Truly scary woman
Question @Tiggerlion is the first disc the same as the one in the Brilliant Adventure box set?
Yes. Disc One is identical to the one in the big box.
Ta
Conversation Piece is just beautiful – it has ear-wormed its way into my Bowie top 20 already. It works so well in DB’s older man voice – so much wistful loneliness there – and the band is perfect. Love a bit of sad cello, and sparse Garson piano tinkling.
Let Me Sleep Beside You on the other hand… surely a young man’s song? It feels somewhat icky coming from a 50-something chap.
It’s just not very good is it? A bit bland. Like a collection of b-sides. I always thought his band from this period were a bit dull. Great musicians and all that and they could play the songs but they were boring. He was his own tribute act for a while.