David Bowie’s early artistic distinctiveness is further blurred by The Shel Talmy Recordings, a 21-track Parlophone package of singles and demos from his mid-1960s Davie Jones period that mostly confirms he was following trends rather than setting them.
The compilation documents material from a year before Bowie wrote his first acclaimed songs, Can’t Help Thinking About Me and The London Boys, and includes the two flop singles he released while still using the Davie Jones name, one recorded with the Mannish Boys and the other with The Lower Third. The set arrives with a sizable merchandising bundle, including four T-shirts, a hoodie, a baseball cap, a tote bag, a commemorative mug and a pair of socks, and carries a remark from the late producer Shel Talmy: "He and I were about six years ahead of the market."
As a snapshot of 1965 British rock in transition, the collection is period-authentic. Many tracks are heavily indebted to contemporary acts. Take My Tip reads as a Georgie Fame pastiche; Baby Loves That Way recasts Smokey Robinson’s You Really Got a Hold on Me in brisker, poppier terms; I Pity the Fool rests on a small blues riff with obvious links to Slim Harpo and to the early blues covers that fuelled the British scene. Other cuts, like You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving and I Want Your Love, have the feel of B-sides by the Swinging Blue Jeans or the Dave Clark Five.
The arrangements occasionally show flashes of ambition, with bursts of distortion, abrupt drum fills and guitars that squeal harder than might have been expected a year earlier. The instrumental Keeping Up With the Jones opens with a crunchy guitar figure that echoes Dave Davies’ work on early Kinks singles. A handful of demos point in different directions: Today favours Walker Brothers-style balladry, Bars of the County Jail leans toward a very mild Dylan flavour, and I Want My Baby Back drifts into dreamy easy-listening territory. The most original moment here is I Live in Dreams, a demo that, with production polish, could perhaps have sat alongside material on Bowie’s 1969 post-Space Oddity album.
Judged purely on their musical merits rather than on Bowie’s later fame, most of these songs belong among obscure mid-60s freakbeat fare, where superior but unsuccessful peers offer stronger claims on listeners’ attention. The package will interest collectors and completists, but it does little to revise the familiar narrative of Bowie’s career, in which his highs are remarkable precisely because they rise above long stretches of lesser work. A decade after his death, these releases remind listeners that parts of his catalogue remain archival curiosities rather than essential additions to his musical legacy.
