David Bowie 45: Brilliant Adventure

Despite being already tapped for a different collection, another song title became an apt moniker for a comprehensive Bowie box set, this one covering the wide-ranging, occasionally frustrating ‘90s. Brilliant Adventure could conceivably be subtitled The Virgin Years, as that was the label that released most of this material in the first place.

Black Tie White Noise only slightly improves in this context, while The Buddha Of Suburbia (in its revised artwork) provides a smoother transition to Outside—for which the packaging included more legible lyrics, thankfully—and Earthling. The slight regression of ‘hours…’ is lifted by his 2000 BBC radio performance. (Oddly, 2018’s Glastonbury 2000, which was recorded two days before, is not included in this set, nor were these part of Brilliant Live Adventures. For that matter, the VH1 Storytellers album is left out too.) Originally included as a bonus in Bowie At The Beeb, it is here expanded to two CDs, with the addition of five songs. “All The Young Dudes”, “Starman”, and “‘Heroes’” were nice encores, but “The London Boys” and “I Dig Everything” hint at a project in progress.

The big draw of the box is that project, the first official release of the legendarily shelved Toy album. As sequenced here, it provides another peak before the three discs’ worth of oddities that make up Re:Call 5. These consist predominantly of single edits and remixes, along with the handfuls of B-sides (read: outtakes) from Outside and ‘hours…’, plus “Real Cool World” and other soundtrack contributions. Many of these had been included on various expanded versions of these albums, but several tracks are not collected from those. That said, we do get such oddities as “Don’t Let Me Down & Down” in Indonesian and “Seven Years In Tibet” in Mandarin, plus the exquisite rarity “Planet Of Dreams”, sung with Gail Ann Dorsey. The set closes with a cover of “Pictures Of Lily”, as requested by Pete Townshend for a Who tribute album, that’s just awful.

While the albums covered by Brilliant Adventure aren’t on par with his earlier masterpieces, there are enough bright spots that always made Bowie worth hearing, and therefore watching. He may not have been consistent, but his work ethic was as steady as ever. (The book inside the set includes new liner notes designed to illuminate from key collaborators of the period: Nile Rodgers, Erdil Kizilcay, Brian Eno, Reeves Gabrels, and Mark Plati.)

David Bowie Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) (2021)—3