20. Luke HainesSpace Oddity
I had an older cousin who was a Bowie freak and I gradually worked through all the albums. I think you could put any album of that run. The first I bought was Scary Monsters, but I’ve heard them so many times I don’t listen to them for five years. I’m the sort of fucking Bowie head to the point that I have everything, apart from Tin Machine II. I’ve even got the one where he narrates Peter & The Wolf, more for my son, I say, than for completion’s sake… I chose Space Oddity because out of all those albums it’s the one that, up until the late ’80s, I hadn’t played that much. It always strikes me how it’s misrepresented in a lot of ways. The first copy I had was vinyl and it had the Ziggy Stardust photo on the sleeve. But you put it on and it’s doesn’t sound like the Ziggy period. It was always bastardised. It was only when you start hearing it for what it is, and the CDs come out and on the picture he’s got the ‘fro that it starts to make sense. I love the sprawling epics on that. ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ is one of my favourite Bowie songs. It’s all quite whimsical, and I like that, and when on tracks like ‘Cygnet Committee’ it doesn’t quite work; I like that too. I like flawed stuff, it’s always more interesting than the perfection of Low, or something like that. Space Oddity is almost Bowie’s first ’70s album a year too early. Things like ‘Janine’ on that album would fit on Aladdin Sane. I love ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’. You know the story about that, there was this free festival he organised in Beckenham or somewhere, and 30 people turned up, and at the end of it when he’s singing "the sun machine is coming down, we’re going to have a party", apparently he punched someone and burst into tears. I love that when you read books about Bowie in the ’70s there’s a lot of bursting into tears and storming off.
