Ten years ago Alec Palao was casually flicking through a collection of old records when he noticed some faint pencil markings that were enough to draw a gasp. What he had found was musical gold: five unreleased songs by a young David Bowie, filed away under his birth name. From Friday, those tracks, plus another five unreleased songs that came Palao's way after the initial discovery, will be available to buy and stream.
"They are probably the most visceral, raw you'll ever hear the man," said Palao, a music historian and archivist. For the music industry, David Bowie is big business. He entered the mainstream with his 1969 single, Space Oddity, and went on to achieve 11 number one albums.
He died in 2016, but remains one of Britain's most recognisable cultural icons. Six of the previously unreleased tracks from the new collection will be available on vinyl, tapping into Bowie's popularity in that format specifically. In 2022, Bowie was named the best-selling vinyl artist of the 21st century by Music Week, ahead of The Beatles.
"It's just a fascinating window into London in 1965 and its possibilities," said Palao. In the early sixties, Bowie was a teenager, performing as Davie Jones at London clubs and dreaming of stardom. Many of the tracks he recorded in that period are either little known or lost to time.
But his first professional producer, Shel Talmy, had kept a recording from 1965 among his collection of material by other artists he had worked with: The Kinks; The Who; Manfred Mann; The Easybeats. It was within Talmy's collection that Palao came across the valuable 12-inch acetate. That material and the five other previously unheard tunes, as well as demos and remastered songs, form part of a new, posthumous album called The Shel Talmy Recordings.
A limited edition vinyl will be sold at Record Store Day and HMV outlets. In 2022, David Bowie's estate sold the publishing rights to decades of the singer's work to Warner Music Group. For this new material, Palao, along with Talmy Enterprises Incorporated, licensed the album to Warner, and it will be released by the company's subsidiary, Parlophone.
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