David Bowie's favourite records for Vanity Fair

It is the dullest question you can put to a musician: what are your favourite records. Bowie answered it in writing, in Vanity Fair, in November 2003.

He opens by saying there is no rational way to make a list like this. He owns roughly two and a half thousand LPs, he has no time to work through them, so he gives himself a method.

Pull one out blind. If it is too obvious, “Sgt. Pepper, Nirvana”, put it back and keep going until something more interesting turns up. Then: “O.K., no rules then. I’ll just make ‘em up as I go along.”

A record made to show that stereo worked

In 1960 Philips put out “Electronic Music” by the Electrosoniks, which is to say the Dutchmen Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan. It was one of those albums labels pressed to show off the new thing, stereo.

Bowie rates the pair alongside Ennio Morricone as sonic explorers, “but far loopier”. Then he quotes the sleeve notes, which read today like a joke somebody forgot to finish: “chimpanzees are painting, gorillas are writing”.

Listen while you read

The instruments that did not exist yet

Harry Partch’s “Delusion of the Fury” is on the list with a note that is almost only a question.

Partch, Bowie writes, was a madman of sorts and for a while a hobo, and he set about inventing and building dozens of extraordinary instruments. He names three: the Bloboy, the Eucal Blossom, the Spoils of War.

And then he asks: “How do you tune a Spoils of War?, I wonder.”

That is the point where the list stops being a list of records and becomes a portrait of a listener. He did not pick an agreed masterpiece. He picked a man who had built his own orchestra from nothing.

Bought for the sleeve, kept for the sound

He bought Glenn Branca’s “The Ascension” in Zurich, on impulse. He says why without dressing it up: the cover got him, Robert Longo’s artwork, which he calls the best sleeve art of the eighties.

Then he played it and found something else in there. What sounds at first like dissonance, he writes, is soon heard as a play on the overtones of massed guitars: close to the drone of Tibetan monks, only much, much louder.

In Branca’s band, he adds, was Lee Ranaldo, who went on to found Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore.

The record he gave away and could not replace

Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Forces of Victory” is from 1979. Bowie calls it a Carib-British contribution to the history of rap, and one of the most important reggae records ever made, even though it is spoken word over a band rather than singing.

He gave his original copy to Mos Def, in whom he saw a line back to Johnson, believing he already had it on CD. He did not. As he writes the piece he is still hunting for another one.

We played it straight after the three above, and the odd thing is that it holds: four records that sit on no shelf together, and in a row they get along.

What the list says about the man who made it

The same list has the coverless test pressing of “The Velvet Underground & Nico” that Andy Warhol handed to a former manager of his with the line “you like weird stuff, see what you think of this”. Bowie still has it, Warhol’s sticker and all.

There is “Music for 18 Musicians” by Steve Reich, seen live in downtown New York in the late seventies, when he had just come off a tour dressed exactly like the performers: white shirt, black trousers.

And there is a record of Chinese music bought at a woodblock print fair in Berlin, with titles like “Delivering Public-Grain to the State”.

No chronology, no genre, no reason: he says so himself at the top. It is the only list of favourite records that worries about throwing out the right ones.