Album review: Comprehensive boxset chronicles David Bowie's comeback — including a 'missing' album

David Bowie: new boxset chronicles the Thin White Duke's career renaissance

• David Bowie
• Brilliant Adventure (1992 – 2001)
• ★★★★☆

The 1970s will forever be Bowie’s decade. But a case can be made, too, for Bowie into the 1990s and beyond, as underscored by a gargantuan new boxset — the vinyl edition will set you back €430 — that collects his output from 1993’s Black Tie White Noise up to Toy, the never-released LP he recorded in 2001.

This was a Bowie determined to restore the reputation he had squandered with a stream of dreadful — or, at least, dreadfully produced — LPs following the commercial zenith of Let’s Dance in 1983. 

That Bowie-naissance began with Black Tie White Noise, which contained one of his most devastating ever singles: 'Jump They Say' (reputedly a rumination by the suicide of his elder half-brother Terry). 

Six months later, the shapeshifting moved up a gear with the Buddha of Suburbia, the Brit pop-influenced soundtrack to the BBC adaptation of the Hanif Kureishi novel.

The 'Brilliant Adventure' 18-LP boxset in its splendour

Having been hideously unfashionable for more than a decade Bowie was suddenly being name-checked by a new generation of artists such as Placebo and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. The love flowed both ways, as demonstrated by the Nine Inch Nails-esque industrial rumble of 1995’s 1.0 Outside, which contained the great lost Bowie single, 'I Have Not Been To Oxford Town'. 

This period also saw him collaborate with the Pet Shop Boys, who sprinkled stardust all over 'Hallo Spaceboy' (their 1996 remix is gathered here).

Drum and bass was meanwhile the influence in 1997 when he put out Earthling. He was pilloried at the time but Earthling stands up, its best moments — 'I’m Afraid of Americans', especially — deserving their place in the Bowie order of merit.

Bowie aficionados who haven’t previously had the pleasure will elsewhere be intrigued by Toy. Never officially released, the album has been available as a bootleg since 2011. 

It is a suite of old Bowie songs re-recorded by his late 1990s touring band (including Gail Ann Dorsey on bass and Dubliner Gerry Leonard on guitar). 

The tracks, often twee in their original framings, are punched up into sharp-elbowed rockers, ensuring that Bowie would close that phase of his career as he had begun it: kicking, screaming and determined not to go quietly into the night.