Search - David Bowie :: Very Best of 1969-1974

The best of Bowie's finest years.

John Peter O'connor | 05/19/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a great album simply stuffed full of great songs. I was very pleased to find this CD. I had a couple of albums from this part of Bowie's career but there were a few songs that I really wanted but that I was not going to buy a whole CD for just yet. All of those songs that I wanted were on this compilation. So, I certainly agree with the taste of the person who put this together.There were only two songs on here that disappointed me. The first was "Let's Spend the night Together" and the second was "All the Young Dudes." In both cases I felt that Bowie was trying too hard to sound unlike the original recording artists. Of couse, 'Dudes was written by Bowie and given to his friends at Mott the Hoople so it is a Bowie song but here he just camps it up to an excrutiating degree and spoils the song.The sleeve insert that came with my copy gives no information as the to provenance of the songs and certainly, the songs that come from the Ziggy Stardust album do not sound as good as the remastered versions on that album. But this is a subjective matter and it's not a big deal anyway.The highlights of the CD are "Space Oddity", all of the tracks from "Ziggy Stardust", "John, I'm only Dancing", "Oh you pretty thing" and "Changes" but there are so many other great tracks too.The music covers a number of different styles reflecting the changes in the artists music over the years. If you don't know much about Bowie in this period, I suggest that you buy a copy of this and then see which tracks you really like and buy the original albums from which they came.This CD is available in two versions distributed in the UK and Japan. They differ in track order and one song from "Ziggy" is different. This seems to be a cynical marketing ploy as much as anything else."