Station To Station, Bowie's tenth studio long player isn't ever likely to be added to such a perennial collection, as the "Thin White Duke" sounds bizarrely befuddled on the comprehensively theatrical eponymous opener, melding together idiosyncratic yelps with Suffragette City honky tonk, squealing train tracks, and Hard Rock Café guitars in a muted, almost mundane reentry into chameleonic Bowie transformation. Yet even on the original analogue master, it's as polished as a Beverly Hills pavement, perhaps due to its conception in Cherokee Studios, Lala Land. Ten minutes later, the Culture Club-meets-KC & The Sunshine Band shimmer of Golden Years recalls the wailing Les Paul's and dripping ceilings of the 100 Club, and the emblematic falsetto chirps up emphatically. Word On A Wing, tinged with more Christian innuendo than a Mumford & Sons baptism, is effervescent balladry at its most clerical, TVC15 fogged with soupy wafts of incinerated nicotine regularly reserved for evenings in Quintette du Hot Club de France somewhere around 1940, and Stay revolves around a Funkadelic refrain that eventually morphs into a wonky, off-kilter chorus as glammed up as a sequined Bryan Ferry dragging his ego around Blackpool panto. A Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington cover follows in Wild Is The Wind, a woefully wallowing six minutes of self-indulgence that's more waiting room background fodder than bullet train exhilaration.
The RCA CD master transports Station To Station to rejuvenated realms, sounding altogether less fuddled, fuzzy and crackly, although the sound of a dusty needle coursing its piercing way through vinyl grooves is a watermark that's as welcome as discovering any half-decent faded 12" sleeve in a charity shop, Word On A Wing now sounding like a lost track in Jeff Wayne's extraterrestrial armoury. Previously unreleased, the single edit of Station To Station lifted from a French factory single sample in '76 entirely remakes, remodels and renews previous extravagance, slim-lining Bowie's exuberance, hacking away on the platform until all that remains is a quintessentially electrifying slab of elaborateness. There's also something inherently endearing in the dying embers of every one of the Singles Versions EP's five tracks, as every last one fades out into an insatiable longing for just one minute more. The extensive 5-CD collection comes to a rather cacophonous close, as the much heralded and infinitely more desired Live Nassau Coliseum '76 bootleg sprawls languidly over two discs, a riotous Suffragette City, overtly effete Velvet Underground cover that'd have Lou Reed's slackened hips gyrating to Waiting For The Man, a bristling Life On Mars?, and rambunctious Rebel Rebel added inevitably to Station To Station, Word On A WIng, TVC15 and Stay.
With more bits and bobs than there are glittered stars in Nicky Wire's ring-bound memento diary, the individually numbered Deluxe Edition is inescapably aimed at the obsessive although just as with Wire's incessant stabs at commercialism, capitalism and the contemporary, a fair few of these bits and bobs ring truly gloriously.
For clinically obsessed Bowie completists:
For everyone else:
