David Bowie fans will know that last week saw the latest release from the man’s archives. These were the recordings Bowie made with Shel Talmy in the mid-’60s when he was still scrapping round for a direction in mod-era London.
The key figure in this interesting tale is Alec Palao, a California-based producer who became close to Talmy during his later years. In 2017, Palao was at the producer’s house helping the near-blind Talmy put together the anthology Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production, when he asked about an alternate version of The Kinks’ You Really Got Me.
Talmy’s wife Jan, pointed Palao in the direction of the loft where a box full of old records lay. “(Then) there was a bit of an Indiana Jones moment,” Palao says.
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“One of the last items I came across was a disc with no label with a barely decipherable pencil inscription, ‘Davy Jones,'” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. It was a long-forgotten acetate that included some of the never-before-heard tracks now included on the David Bowie: The Shel Talmy Recordings compilation.
Bowie – then still calling himself Davy Jones – signed with Talmy in 1965. The producer was then riding high on the back of his work with The Kinks and The Who. But he couldn’t work miracles with the material Bowie was producing back then. It would be a number of years and a few more musical reinventions before Bowie found lasting success.
“So many Bowie commentators don’t understand the context of these recordings,” Palao said. “When you hear the Hamburg Beatles, it doesn’t sound like Sgt. Pepper’s. Bowie would go to different places, hear something and immediately turn around to try something else.”
Of the material on the compilation, Palao says: “This was the most visceral I had ever heard David Bowie – primitive and somewhat unformed, but still instantly recognisable.”
Bowie would later return to this era of music. On 1973’s Pin Ups, he covered a number of the songs Talmy produced in mid 60s London, including Friday On My Mind by The Easybeats and The Who’s first two singles I Can’t Explain and Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere. Later in 2000 he re-recorded a number of his Talmy-era songs on the Toy album, which was only belatedly released in 2021.
“Listening next to early Stones, the Yardbirds and the Animals, these things will hold up against them,” Palao said. “He loved that period.”
