Bass Oddity
2009-11-20 by Hal BerstramDavid Bowie – Crystal Japan
No posts for a while so I thought I’d come through with a little something for the weekend. David Bowie is a rather divisive figure among Dilate Choonz bloggers – some of us think he’s a genius, others think he’s a complete dud. I must admit that listening to 80s albums like Tonight and Never Let Me Down would swing one towards the latter category fairly quickly, but if you look at his 70s work, he put very few feet wrong.
Browsing at a car boot sale back in the summer I picked up an RCA compilation album I’d never seen called Rare Bowie. It’s a real mixed bag to be honest, with amusing but inessential fare such as an Italian version of “Space Oddity” (called “Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola”), an alternative mix of “Young Americans” that sounds almost identical to the original and a live version of “Panic In Detroit” from the infamous “Philly Dogs” US tour of ‘74 that yielded the highly inessential David Live album.
However, I do like this particular track. Originally recorded in 1979 and released in 1980 as a Japanese-only 7-inch (backed with his cover of Brecht/Weill’s “Alabama Song”), it got released in the UK in ‘81 as the B-side of “Up the Hill Backwards” (the least successful single from the Scary Monsters lp).
It’s a nice instrumental tune, falling stylistically somewhere between the ambient instrumentals Bowie recorded with Brian Eno on Low and “Heroes”, and some of Vangelis’s work. The slight wobble in tone isn’t synth modulation but is an off-centre pressing courtesy of RCA records.
“Crystal Japan” was unavailable for many years before being reissued as an extra track on the Rykodisc reissue of “Scary Monsters” in the early 1990s. WhenIn a shocking turn of events, when EMI remastered the Bowie albums in the early 2000s, they decided to rip the customer off by removing all extra tracks from the new versions of the CDs. They then reissued some on new compilation albums – “Crystal Japan” turned up on a compilation of instrumental Bowie (and Bowie/Eno) pieces called “All Saints”. It was a goddamn rip-off, but there you go.
Download MP3 (0:00min / 0MB)
- Discogs page for Rykodisc release
- of Scary Monsters
- Buy here
- from EMI downloads site if you aren't lucky enough to find Rykodisc
- Discogs page for original Japanese single -
- superb cover photo!
Comments 
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I was expecting an instrumental of Space Oddity for some reason. Duh.
Not a big admirer of David. I always prefered the stuff that real fans hated, stuff like Let's Dance. Having said that, I just bought those Changes compilations for a quid each secondhand and found I like some of his classic stuff too.
Still not sure what all the fuss is about though ..