BBC 6 MUSIC INTERVIEWS: DAVID BOWIE LOVING THE ALIEN BOXSET WITH REEVES GABRELS AND MARIO MCNULTY

Hi there - BOWIE BOXSET NEWS.

The 12th October will see the release of the latest in the series of career spanning David Bowie box sets. So far the first three have covered from 1969 through to 1982.
 
The next is called 'LOVING THE ALIEN' and reflects 1983 - 1988.
 
The eleven CD, fifteen-piece vinyl set which includes newly remastered versions of Bowie's most successful period - starting off with 'LET'S DANCE' which propelled him into a commercially mainstream stadium-filling stratosphere, then it's follow up  'TONIGHT', 'NEVER LET ME DOWN, the live album 'GLASS SPIDER (Live Montreal '87)' and the previously unreleased 'SERIOUS MOONLIGHT' live album.
 
Now the accepted wisdom is that while 'LET'S DANCE' was all killer, and 'TONIGHT' has its moments (Loving The Alien) but 'NEVER LET ME DOWN' wasn't Bowie's finest moment, and admittedly the 80's production hasn't aged that well.
 
So this set includes a complete re-versioning of the album.
 
Early this year engineer Mario McNulty - who had remixed the album's track Time Will Crawl back in 2008 with Bowie - he got in the studio with drummer Sterling Campbell, bassist Tim Lefebvre (who played on Blackstar) and guitarists Reeves Gabrels and David Torn to record a new version of the album with Bowie's original vocals.
 
Reeves Gabrels was David's guitarist from 1988 through to 1999. He was also in Bowie's heavy alt rock group Tin Machine and plays in The Cure. I spoke to him for BBC 6 Music about the project...

In 2008 David called Mario McNulty in New York and said he wanted to redo Time Will Crawl.
 
Mario first met David in 2001, he had just moved to New York to start an internship at The Looking Glass Studios and met Bowie as an intern, later becoming studio assistant and working for Philip Glass and then becoming friends with Tony Visconti and Bowie. He was asked to engineer the Reality album.
 
I spoke to him for BBC 6 Music about work on the first 2008 remix of Time Will Crawl forming the basis for a re-working of the whole album which had been something Bowie had wanted to do…