David Bowie’s self-titled debut album to be released as picture disc

Wil Wander | December 9, 2020 | News | No Comments

Deram Records originally released David Bowie’s self-titled debut album on June 1, 1967, the very same day as The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. While it was not a hit at the time, over the past 50 years it’s gained a reputation for being a perfect snapshot of the time and has earned plaudits for being one of the first contemporary pop albums to be sung in an English accent. Bowie himself revisited songs from this era in 2000 re-recording the likes of “Silly Boy Blue” for an album called Toy which remains unreleased. The album may not have been a huge success but there were music writers who saw something in Bowie.

The biography prepared at the time describes David Bowie thus “His remarkable powers of observation enable him to write with humour and wit about the people, loved and unloved, and the attitudes, lovely and unlovely, that constitute today’s society. A recent bout of ‘flu enabled him to pen half a dozen songs to go on a forthcoming Deram LP. In fact, David is one of the very few artists commissioned for an album before a single. Simultaneously, David is writing songs and situations for a colour film in which he is to star and putting the finishing touches to a unique cabaret act.”

The album will be released for the first time as picture disc on January 29th.