David Bowie — The Width of a Circle
Qobuz reissue review (May 2021)
The Man Who Sold the World is either seen as the end of Bowie’s formative era or the genesis of his evolution as a truly unique artist. While 1971’s Hunky Dory is widely regarded as the first “classic” album in Bowie’s catalog, the years leading up to it were so incredibly busy and productive for the musician, with moments of occasional greatness (“Space Oddity”) occuring within a much larger batch of quite ordinary material. Between 1968 and 1970, Bowie would try out various permutations of baroque, acoustic pop and gloomy, semi-psychedelic hard rock, and by the time he presented the Metrobolist album to his record label (which then proceeded to change the title to The Man Who Sold the World, much to his chagrin), he had run himself ragged on the treadmill of promotional appearances, concerts, and traditional press interviews. Bowie was frustrated with his management, his label, his producer, and his creative output, and was ready for a change. Hunky Dory was absolutely that change, but the roots of that growth could definitely be heard on The Man Who Sold the World. Leaning hard into his rockist tendencies, the album was dark and heavy and decidedly devoid of the glam bounce that elevated similarly electrified later albums. Nobody dug it and despite early attempts by Bowie to promote it, the album was a commercial flop in the US and UK. Many of those attempts — primarily radio performances — are collated on The Width of a Circle.
Appropriately dubbed as “complementary” to the recently revised version of The Man Who Sold the World (reissued under its original Metrobolist title), The Width of a Circle feels like a bit of a stretch as a standalone piece, rather than as, say, an additional couple of discs included in some super deluxe edition. Along with the radio sessions (many of which have been previously released on Bowie at the Beeb and elsewhere), there are a few single cuts and other ephemera; the material here feels more like it’s been excavated rather than curated. A largely acoustic Bowie radio concert presented with middling fidelity takes up the first half of the set, and while it’s great to hear a little awkward banter between Bowie and John Peel alongside some unique performances of songs that rarely made concert setlists, the audio issues and tape dropouts can be quite distracting. Things pick up in the second half with a clutch of quirky (and slightly better sounding) songs recorded for a radio play. One of those songs — “Threepenny Pierrot” — is a rewritten version of “London Bye, Ta Ta,” one of the best unreleased Bowie songs from this era. It shows up here in three studio versions and all of them sound great. Beyond those highlights, this is very much a completists-only sort of release, both due to the wobbly audio quality on some of the tracks as well as the material itself. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz
