The Bewlay Brothers. The surreal wild-western finale on the Hunky Dory LP is loaded with dark mystery, high plains drama and Dylan-esque doggerel. It’s a proper psychedelic trip, right to the creepy coda about pie and gravy.
Lady Grinning Soul. It’s a sumptuous collision of loose-time piano shenanigans, passionate flamenco and Bond-theme thrills. It took us a good year to get our tiny strings around this little bad girl but it rarely misses a gig these days. Mr Bowie never performed it live, so it’s the least we can do.
Fame. You know what they say about the great soul songs – if you can break ’em down to three ukuleles and a brain-melting matrix of call-and-response harmony vocal lines, you’ve got a keeper.
Slip Away. We could croon through two-dozen of Mr B’s most crowd-pleasing singalong smash hits and everyone would go home happy – but then they’d never get to hear the gems that got away. This plaintive little beauty from Heathen finds the maestro in an unusually nostalgic mood. The chorus is a license to fiddle with yer neck hairs.
Blackstar. Betty thought it would be a good idea to wrestle with the uber-dark title track from Mr B’s final album in cahoots with free jazz freaks Bohjass at the Croxton last year. We’ve since done it with Monique DiMattina, with the Models’ Andrew Duffield, and (gulp) on our own. Somehow, it always feels like the closest we’ll ever get to the man who made it all possible.
