The first in a series of David Bowie box sets passes over his fascinating false starts of the 60s and begins with his eponymous second album, later retitled Space Oddity. The rest of Five Years consists of everything Bowie released during the trailblazing Mick Ronson era. It’s wonderful: from the proto-glam The Man Who Sold the World to the underrated covers album PinUps, via the classic Hunky Dory, the breakthrough Ziggy Stardust and “Ziggy goes to America” Aladdin Sane. There are also two enthralling live albums that bookend the Ziggy period: Live Santa Monica 72, long considered a must-have Bowie bootleg; and Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture Soundtrack, in which Bowie tells a shocked Hammersmith Odeon (not least a dumbfounded Spiders from Mars) it’s “the last show we’ll ever do”. In the absence of a comprehensive collection of unreleased Bowie material like Dylan’s Bootleg Series or the Beatles’ Anthologies, we have two discs of quasi-rarities, including Holy Holy, a flop single from 1971 that has never been released since.
