A Divine Symmetry

In 1971, radio host John Peel introduced the 24-year-old musician featured on a broadcast of Pick of the Pops as “a young man who writes good songs and makes good records, but never seems to get the recognition he deserves.” In his early career, the artist born David Robert Jones didn’t seem like he was headed toward stardom. His first instrument at age 13 was not guitar or piano, but saxophone. He hopped from small band to small band in high school, rebranding as Davy Jones and then, to avoid confusion with the Monkees singer, as David Bowie. In 1967 he released a self-titled album of music-hall-style rock on a small label, but they rejected some of his singles and the partnership collapsed. He stayed at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland, joined a mime troupe, and dabbled in experimental performance art. He landed at Mercury thanks to some lucky connections, and remained relatively off-radar until five days before the Apollo 11 launch in 1969, when his cosmic single “Space Oddity” briefly catapulted him into mainstream consciousness. But the following year his third album, the eclectic and single-less The Man Who Sold the World, found most of its success in his town of Beckenham, England.

Talented but creatively disarranged, Bowie found himself at a crossroads. “In the early ’70s, it really started to all come together for me as to what it was that I liked doing,” he reflected in 2014. “What I enjoyed was being able to hybridize different kinds of music…. I didn’t really see the point in trying to be that purist about it.” With this revived perspective, along with a transformative trip to the United States in 1971 where he rubbed elbows with creative muses like Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, Bowie became “more cynical” about the boundaries of the artistic world and more inventive about his place in it. When he returned home to England, back to his newborn son and a piano gifted by a neighbor, the young artist pieced together what would become his fourth record, the first he ever co-produced and his first after signing with RCA: Hunky Dory. In his words, it was “the album where I said ‘Yes, I understand what I’ve got to do now.’”

Divine Symmetry, subtitled An Alternative Journey Through Hunky Dory, is the latest box set to explore Bowie’s oeuvre. The 4xCD collection surveys the year leading up to the album’s release; it includes previously unreleased tracks, demos, live recordings, and studio sessions from the era, as well as updated mixes. The music is accompanied by a 100-page book featuring facsimiles of primary documents, insights from insiders like co-producer Ken Scott, and liner notes by Tris Penna; there’s also a separate booklet in Bowie’s own hand that gives an intimate look at his process through sloppy footnotes, scrapped chords, and fashion doodles. It’s a look into his mind during the most consequential transition of his career, a retrospective peek at him rehearsing the character of himself.