Blackstar

Let's jump right in with today's podcast.

A set of early 60s David Bowie recordings have been dusted off and released on streaming today.

The drop comes a decade after music historian Alec Palau found a 12-inch acetate marked Davy Jones while cataloguing late producer Shel Thomas' archive.

The disc contained five unreleased tracks from 1965, recorded before Bowie adopted his iconic stage name, with another five songs surfacing during Palau's later research.

The material forms a new posthumous collection titled The Shell Tama Recordings.

A limited-edition vinyl version will be available through records Store Day and HMV.

Palau says the recordings, which include You've Got a Habit of Leaving and Baby Loves That Way, originally released as singles and re-recorded by Bowie and his Glastonbury band for the album Toy, released posthumously in 2021, show Bowie at his most direct.

He said, they are probably the most visceral, raw you'll ever hear the man.

mean, despite you saying it dark and unhinged, I mean, especially Shell, I mean, despite if you listen to the lyrics and the soundscape, it's not a real kind of dark, dark piece, if that makes sense.

You know, in the fact that, say, you listen to Blackstar and it is a very deep album, very dark and really takes you places that you think, you know, you have to be in a certain mindset to listen to that album.

Yeah, it's got a bit of twisted positivity to it, I think, Shell.

I think the character is a bit unhinged and a bit kind of emotionally unbalanced and unsure and also kind of dreams of something that she doesn't have.

I start crying and I go, oh, man, I'm going to have a migraine in an hour or two.

Kim, as your medical advisor, I recommend that you take two aspirin and one Blackstar and call me in the morning.

Yeah.

And you know what? There have been bands that I've seen live and I think are great live.

And until his death, he didn't.

I mean, Blackstar, if you didn't follow David Bowie or weren't in the David Bowie soup, you wouldn't know that Aladdin Sane and Blackstar are both David Bowie.

Yeah, well, it's true.

He explored everything, though.

Very cool.

And another influence that I have outside of rap for this record, It's actually David Bowie, because I don't know if y'all have heard Blackstar.

Yeah.

Yes.

final album.

And the idea of that record was him speaking from the grave.

So I said, what if I spoke from my past life? What if I flipped it? And then at the end of my discography, I kind of have that Blackstar moment.

So at the end of my discography, I do at some point want to make an album called Sunsetting.

Yeah, it's, as you know, as you said, it's called Meet Me in the Ashes.

And it's the second single from a band's new album, which will be released in about the next five or six weeks.

The album's called Artist or Enemy.

And essentially it was about a situation that I found myself in last year that became unsafe and I had to remove myself from it.

And the album, thematically, is about the experiences that happened to me.

So there is an arc on the album, which I'll touch on in a little bit.

But along with doing the album, that's how I sort of got into poetry as well.

So there's the album, Artist or Enemy, and there's also a collection of poems as well, which explore poetry.

They are lyrics written by today's guest, musician, producer, actor, and author, the unique and wonderful Jehnny Beth.

She's a former frontwoman of post-punk band Savages, and she went solo almost a decade ago, and since, she's released two brilliant albums.

She's collaborated with Bobby Gillespie, supported PJ Harvey, Depeche Mode, Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails, published a collection of erotic fiction, and has acted in an Oscar-winning film.

I am so excited to have Jehnny Beth on the show today.

Um-

That's, okay, yes, that's right

... yeah, with Johnny Hostile, and we did two albums.

Yeah.

However, he never fully abandoned the occult.

His final album, Blackstar, released two days before his death in 2016, is laden with esoteric symbols, including the Villa of Ormen and references to solitary candles and ancient rituals.

Conspiracists argue that Blackstar was Bowie's final ritual.

a prepared exit from the physical realm.

The Black Star itself is a term used in certain occult circles to describe the midnight sun or the internal light of the soul that persists after death.