“Well, ain’t that poster love?”
On Friday 17th April (the day before RSD2020), Parlophone will release a limited edition picture disc replicating the 1972 RCA edition of Space Oddity.
The disc features the same iconic Mick Rock shots that were used on the front and back of the original sleeve, albeit in much better quality due to Mick Kindly supplying new scans of the negatives. The pictures were taken at Bowie’s then home, Haddon Hall, in the spring of 1972.
The album also comes with a replica of the cover image poster which was part of the package at the time and no doubt helped launch a thousand punk hairdos a few years later. The back sleeve image was taken in Zowie’s (Duncan Jones) pink bedroom.
Along with The Man Who Sold The World, the November 1972 edition of Space Oddity was repackaged for the new Bowie audience to make available the increasingly hard to find Philips and Mercury originals.
Needless to say, both albums performed considerably better released in the wake of Ziggy’s success, with Space Oddity peaking at #17 in the UK chart and #16 in the US.
The picture disc will feature the 2009 40th anniversary remaster of the album, which was undertaken to match as closely as possible to the original vinyl issue.
We’ll leave you with the notes that appeared on the back of the 1972 original…most likely very familiar to fans of a certain age.
+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +
SPACE ODDITY
Finally, words cannot speak of music, they cannot elucidate nor illuminate. Both sounds enter through the ears, but only music travels throughout and animates the whole body. David Bowie has always known this.
Space Oddity, which opens this album, and which in 1968 (sic) brought David Bowie into music’s world arena as one to be reckoned with, inhabits and charges the whole being. As with all of Bowie’s music it is both ecstatic and uncomfortable — discomforting. lt dates early in the mutable yet paradoxically consistent Bowie odyssey and remains archetypal. Its achievement, and this is so of Bowie’s music in general, is that it was NOW then, and it still is now NOW: personal and universal, perhaps galactic, microcosmic and macrocosmic.
Everything we are is engaged here. We have only to let it in.
+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +
Well, it was 1972.
DAVID BOWIE - SPACE ODDITY 1972 PICTURE DISC RELEASED BY PARLOPHONE 17th APRIL 2020
#SpaceOddity72 #SpaceOddityPicDisc #BowieVinyl