Awhile back, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was going through a Bowie phase and decided to track down as many of his non-album tracks as I could. I got a fair number of them, from various sources...in varying degrees of sound quality, bit rate, etc. I grouped them, roughly, in chronological folders with the best awareness I had of the tracks sans research, and earmarked it as a project to go back to more comprehensively at some point. Well, until recently, I never did.
After he died I went back into another big Bowie phase; and really pushed myself to explore the periods of his career I wasn't too familiar with...a mission I'm still completing. But part of this process involved going back to those old rarity folders I compiled and sorting through them, this time in earnest.
Using the excellent Bowie fanblog
Pushing Ahead Of The Dame as a primary resource whenever I could, I sifted through all of the tracks one by one and first tried to weed out anything that's been officially released...to that end, nothing in this playlist as far as I know has ever appeared as a Ryko bonus track on any of the album reissues or on any official comps like
Rarest One Bowie, or
The Deram Anthology, or the
Recall discs from the
Five Years box, etc.
Additionally, I took out anything that appears in the multi-volume bootleg
The Complete BBC Performances...(which I also have, in FLAC, and will try to convert to 320 and tag and upload at some point, if time allows.)
So what I was left with were 43 tracks from (roughly) the mid 60s through the late 70s. I do not claim to have these all in exact, anal chronological order..for instance, the last song,
I'm Divine, is a
Young Americans outtake and belongs a few spots up in the track sequencing rather than at the end. But having said that, this stuff is fairly chronological.
So, here you go.
PS...there is one song,
Rupert The Riley, which I think is from the Arnold Corns sessions, which Bowie wrote and plays on but does not -according to what I read; haven't listened to everything on here yet- sing. There are two takes of it here. Included anyway for completism, I suppose.
Also, I tried my best to add at least a rudimentary parenthetical clarification in the title of any song which also appears on an album, so as to differentiate between the rare version and the officially released one.
David Bowie_Genuine Rarities 66-79
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