David Bowie (1967 album)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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David Bowie is the self-titled debut studio album by English musician David Bowie. It was released in the UK on 1 June 1967 with Deram Records. Its style and content is often said to bear little overt resemblance to the type of music that he was later known for, such as the folk rock influenced "Space Oddity" or the glam rock of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray have said, "a listener strictly accustomed to David Bowie in his assorted '70s guises would probably find this debut album either shocking or else simply quaint", while biographer David Buckley describes its status in the Bowie discography as "the vinyl equivalent of the madwoman in the attic". Nicholas Pegg contends that "it seems a pity that David Bowie is only ever considered in terms of what we can extrapolate from it [...] Thankfully, it does seem that pop musicologists are at last beginning to regard David Bowie not just as a quirky set of embryonic twitterings, but as an album that's actually worth considering in its own right.
Influences
Bowie's influences at this stage of his career included the theatrical tunes of Anthony Newley, music hall numbers by acts like Tommy Steele, whimsical 'British' material by Ray Davies of the Kinks, Syd Barrett's psychedelic nursery rhymes for the early Pink Floyd, and the Edwardian flair shared by such contemporary songs as the Beatles' "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" The desire of Bowie's then-manager, Ken Pitt, for Bowie to become an 'all-round entertainer' rather than a 'rock star' impacted the songwriter's style. Bowie himself said that his debut album "seemed to have its roots all over the place, in rock and vaudeville and music hall. I didn't know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley".
