Music

These are David Bowie's 25 favourite records

by Richard Howard

In the wake of David Bowie’s passing, a slew of articles, live performances and other media resurfaced. One of the coolest was a 2003 Vanity Fair article titled ‘Confessions of a Vinyl Junke’ penned by Bowie.

In it, Bowie lays out his 25 favorite albums – and the list is as esoteric and varied as you’d think. Quipping that it shouldn’t be too tough since he “only [has] about 2,500 vinyls,” he decided the best way to go about it was to go through the albums important enough to him that he had or was in the process of re-buying on CD.

He also set himself some ground rules: anything too obvious (“Sgt. Pepper, Nirvana”) he would toss back in, little rock because it would be “the same as everyone else’s” and not getting too heavy into the blues because he had “so many blues and R&B albums that it would topple over into trainspotter world if I went that route.” The result was a genre-hopping list ranging from a 1970 album he called “one of the fundamental building blocks of rap” to a recording of “folkish [Chinese] music played on traditional instruments” so rare he was forced to burn it onto CD himself. Take a peek into the wonderfully weird music world of The Thin White Duke.

[h/t Fact Magazine]