Until the heat death of the planet, some of us will never stop seeking out David Bowie rarities, because nothing feels quite as good as communing with him. And if any artist can escape the sad trap of diminished-return posthumous releases—the same gluttonous estate mindset that insists any time Jimi Hendrix sneezed, it deserves a pressing—it’s the Starman, whose innovations and recalibrations were so often two steps ahead of the rest. In the three years since he died, Bowie’s catalog has been expanded modestly in comparison with other departed rock greats—a handful of live sets, unreleased experiments, and collected eccentricities; this has yielded shocking, empathetic peeks into his most troubled era (Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74)’s live pyrotechnics), victory laps in front of enormous crowds (Glastonbury 2000), and a bittersweet coda to Blackstar (No Plan).
The latest offering is an assemblage of strange outtakes and demos. Spying Through a Keyhole collects nine late-1960s tracks, smattering them across four 7” singles for no terribly clear purpose. (A boomer collector enticement, perhaps, since Parlophone released them digitally last winter?) Written circa “Space Oddity,” which will turn 50 this June, the tracks nestle in the long-haired, bucolic folkie vibe Bowie batted around in his early career, the era when he still went by Davie Jones and, shortly after, warbled about “The Laughing Gnome” to a wholly disinterested populace. Even for demos, they’re surprisingly rough, in a way that only sometimes breeds intimacy; most often, he bashes around on an acoustic guitar, both his verve and falsetto well into the red.
Though Bowie’s folk period is ignored today by all but his diehards, it does offer some insight into the man’s mind, and Keyhole adds several moments to that discussion. “Mother Grey,” a cheery dash of singsong twee, nods towards the pleasantly shambolic harmonies of the Beatles’ “Two of Us,” interspersed with the requisitive agrarian imagery: leafy surroundings, cozy kitchens cluttered with pots and pans. Young Bowie bids farewell to this hearth, twitching out of the beat a few times on his guitar before a brash, boxcar harmonica solo. Its b-side is even more evocative: “In the Heat of the Morning” is an extremely rough draft of a song that will be more familiar to fans, as Bowie and Tony Visconti eventually smoothed it out enough that Bowie performed it on the BBC in 1967. Remarkably, this one has a pristine, prophetic fingerprint: Bowie fiddles around with the same vertiginous vocal jumps that will reprise in “Ziggy Stardust” in 1972. But here, he’s still far from that psychedelic bombast; in the demo, he strums his guitar with the blithe zeal of Meg White at a drum kit, nudging it out of tune as he yelps, in flashes of that rebellious wit to come, “Señorita sway, dance with me before their frozen eyes.”