David Robert Jones, not yet David Bowie
London enthusiastically claims David Bowie as one of its own. But the global rock icon wasn’t too dewy-eyed about the relationship. The city he grew up in may have given him his earliest artistic ideas, even some cherished club neighbourhoods, but he found its box-like homes and high crime rate stifling. Bowie left for Berlin, Switzerland and then New York, where he spent the last 40 years of his life. This was before the anthemic ‘Space Oddity’, Ziggy Stardust and Major Tom made their appearance. Almost a decade after his death and more than 60 years after they were recorded, some of Bowie’s unreleased recordings from his London days will be released in September in a compilation, David Bowie: The Shel Talmy Recordings. These 1965 recordings give listeners a peek into the life of an artiste searching for his voice in a space occupied by The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. One of the already released tracks, ‘I want your love’, captures Bowie in a blues-rock mode. There is no obvious sign of greatness and no theatrical ambition. But that doesn’t diminish the significance of the music — it provides a glimpse into David Robert Jones trying to assemble the creative pieces that helped him become Bowie. Then there are collaborations with guitarist Jimmy Page, before he was part of Led Zeppelin, as well as The Beatles pianist Nicky Hopkins. Enough to have the listener riveted.
- 1While this piece is a cultural editorial rather than a constitutional one, it connects to India's own personality and publicity rights jurisprudence, an emerging area where courts protect a celebrity's name, voice, and persona from unauthorised commercial use, as seen in Delhi High Court rulings favouring Amitabh Bachchan (2022) and Anil Kapoor (2023). These rights derive partly from the right to privacy recognised as part of Article 21 in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), extended to commercial personality interests.
- 2Posthumous release of an artist's archival material raises cross-border intellectual property questions, since Bowie's estate and UK-based rights holders must navigate differing copyright terms across jurisdictions before international distribution, an issue India also faces when licensing foreign music catalogues under bilateral copyright treaties and the Berne Convention, to which India is a signatory since 1928.
- 3Under India's Copyright Act, 1957, copyright in a sound recording subsists for 60 years from the year following publication under Section 26, distinct from the 60-years-after-death term for literary and musical works under Section 22. Posthumous releases like this compilation typically require clearance from the producer or label, plus consent from the artist's estate, and analogous disputes have arisen in India over unreleased recordings of artists like Lata Mangeshkar and R.D. Burman.
- 4The 1965 recordings predate Bowie's commercial breakthrough by roughly seven years, since 'Space Oddity' was released in 1969 and Ziggy Stardust arrived in 1972, illustrating how a nearly decade-long gap separated early obscurity from global stardom. Bowie went on to sell over 140 million records worldwide across a five-decade career, making this analysis of his formative years a rare window into the economics of how music catalogues appreciate in cultural and commercial value over time.