The Listening Club - 31st January 2016

Hello listening clubbers...

...from @JimMcCauley and me, @holette, sitting in this week while our Captain does... something else.

Last week, those of us that made it through the drum solos, were digging @faberfedor's pick of Spirit's 1977 live album called, imaginatively, "Spirit Live".  Thanks to him and for tossing the frisbee from a frosty USA across to myself for next week.

But now it's over to @cdrose_writer to introduce tonight's #BowieVortex:

"I was about 9, had been given a transistor radio for my birthday, was off school sick and remember lying in bed, switching it on and tuning to Radio 1.  This sound came out of the tiny speaker: slowly descending shimmering notes, an octave’s worth, then a swift sashaying guitar lick and the words: blue blue.  

"Forty years later, I’m in bed again, and the radio clicks on at 8am, and this time there are no phosphorescent tones, no tremulous baritone, but a newsreader’s voice: David Bowie has died. 

"I can’t and won’t write any more of the many things that have already been written (he gave me the freedom to be the person I wanted to be, I once met someone who once saw him buying a cream bun in Greggs, he was from another planet etc. etc.), but as I spent that morning listening to the radio and hearing song after song I was drawn back to that moment so long ago, and realised that those few seconds of sound had haunted me ever since.

"I think so many of us are like this: there is no one, but no one, I realised, who doesn’t like Bowie.  Probably not the whole lot (we can forget about most of the 80s), but whether it’s Ziggy or Aladdin or the white soulboy or the moody Berlin aesthete (my fave, btw), those who stayed with the 70s or those who first saw him in the Labyrinth, to later ones who discovered his entire back catalogue synchronically via Spotify, the music touches everyone somehow.  I’d wager that were all the Listening Clubbers to get together, Bowie would be the one (and probably) only artist we could all agree on.    

"So this evening, let us rejoice! I hope your selections cover the whole gamut, and will be curious to find out if anyone has even picked some Tin Machine…"

Right right! Download is here, and HearThis stream is below:

#BowieVortex by Jedburgh on hearthis.at

See you at 8PM GMT!