David Myhr - Soundshine

A great gig with GREAT GIG singing David Bowie

Posted: January 8th, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: post | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off on A great gig with GREAT GIG singing David Bowie

(“Breaking news” update Monday, Jan 11, 2016:)

Only hours ago the world received the unbelievably sad news that David Bowie has left us. Only the last couple of days I have given him more thought than in quite a while (see post below). I was once again reminded how much his music has meant to me. Obviously, therefore, it’s a very surreal sensation that suddenly the celebration of his 69th birthday and the release of his new album,  suddenly only three days later now turns into grief.

I remember covering “The Prettiest Star” together with The Merrymakers back in 1997 (a rare, somewhat “underproduced”, B-side which has it’s world premiere on-line here today). It was that song that first caught my interest for Bowie when my brother Niklas was playing his records in my child-hood home at loud volume. Such a brilliant melody. But there’s many other songs that are competing about the other spots on my Bowie top 5 (which is always topped by the unbeatable “Life on Mars”). Among them are “Changes”, “Oh You Pretty Things”, “Ziggy Stardust”  (which I’ve sung hundreds of times in cover gigs) and “Starman” (see video of my interpretation below).  Power Pop Movie producer Justin Fielding chose a few words from that song for his Facebook status update on this sad day which I think describe the new situation very well:

There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds

R.I.P. David Bowie.

(Original post, Friday Jan 8, 2016:)

I was a huge David Bowie fan when I was younger. I still am. In fact he’s among my top 5 musical heroes of all time (if all members of the Beatles – including their solo careers –  count as one). But like many others I kind of got stuck into his first half of the seventies period which is absolutely fabulous. Again, like many others, I have had “Life on Mars” as my favorite song of all time since I was a kid. So it’s no surprise that I was absolutely delighted when I was invited to be part of the show “The Golden Years of David Bowie” back in my former hometown Piteå. The people behind these huge tribute shows call themselves GREAT GIG which is a constellation of great musicians from Piteå who were my local rock’n’roll heroes (and still are) growing up.

Since that November day in 2008 I’ve been kind of waiting for a proper documentation of the show, but I think both audio and video got lost among too many of Peter Eliasson’s hard drives. So in order to celebrate David Bowie’s 69th birthday today I thought I’d share whatever little glimpses I have from that show. The sound is taken directly from the mixer which means the levels and balance of the instruments are far from perfect. So please be forgiving in your judgement. Anyway, it’s a great memory for me! Thanks GREAT GIG for having me as your guest!

Ensemble: Dust Radio (Mikael Thurfjell, Gunnar Sundström, Peter Eliasson, Folke Wiklund, Mats Lundberg).

Guests: David Myhr, Stefan Tjerngren, Francis Goossens, Anna Wedin, Maria Juuso, Jonna Löfgren.

If you ever get the chance, I can highly recommend the Great Gig productions. Since then, they have made tribute shows to Queen, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, and more.
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