Off The Record: David Bowie

Very well done and a good companion to listening to Bowie’s catalogue. The interviews are great and really rounded the whole thing out for me.

As a music fan, it’s difficult to listen to a music podcast that does not showcase the music in conjunction with the artist’s development and song, album, and era stories. I know there are licensing issues but several shows at least get the rights for 30 second clips that add so much to the story and listening joy. Sure some of these are Rolling Stone and we can’t all be RS but even some independent podcasts do too. Tried to listen but going elsewhere.

The writing is cliche and the host sounds as if he’s reading a Wikipedia entry on Bowie - probably is.

I’m enjoying Off The Record: David Bowie so far, and it does a good and accurate job of capturing the chronology of events in Bowie’s biography (as have been conveyed in other Bowie texts and sources). Though it would have been good if audio recordings of interviews of some of the principals quoted (Eg. Tony Visconti, Iggy Pop, Bowie himself) could have been used instead of being read out by the narrator. Maybe this is a copyright issue - which no doubt is the reason why Bowie’s actual music isn’t played here either. An annoying detail in the ‘Thin White Duke’ episode: the lack of an attempt at German pronunciation on phrases related to Bowie’s time in Berlin, like “die brücke” or “kosmiche musik”. Just typing and playing words in Google Translate would have given this podcast’s creators the necessary guidance, and would add some authenticity to the proceedings.