A four-disc compilation of demos and rarities offers a refreshing riposte to today’s ‘Bowie is perfect’ industry, with ill-advised covers and middle-of-the-road pop co-mingling with the decade-defining genius of his 1971 masterpiece
While it’s fascinating that Bowie was still dipping into these songs for inspiration nine years later, the overall impression is not of a laser-focused artist who’s finally worked out what he wants to achieve and how to achieve it. That impression is compounded elsewhere on Divine Symmetry by the lo-fi recording of a show at Aylesbury’s Friars club in September 1971.
It’s entertaining but offers no suggestion whatsoever that this is the artist who, within months, would be on Top of the Pops, his arm slung around Mick Ronson’s neck, imperiously pointing down the camera, announcing the arrival of a new decade even more emphatically than his old frenemy Marc Bolan had the year before.
Divine Symmetry is packed out with radio sessions and alternative mixes that are sometimes intriguing and sometimes make you wonder how many versions of David Bowie singinga person needs to hear. What emerges is a talented writer grasping uncertainly for a new direction, wildly throwing ideas against the wall and shaping an album out of the ones that stuck.
There’s something curiously refreshing about that. The posthumous Bowie industry has done an impressive job of turning a complex, flawed, brilliant but mercurial artist into an unimpeachable genius who was always right about everything. It has created a fantasy world in which even the cover of
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