Bowie - The '70s

Warning: If you're a casual Bowie fan, you should turn and run now. Go get yourself a copy of the Best Of and be done with it.

Starting in 1989, EMI (Rykodisc in the US) began a campaign of reissuing Bowie's catalog. All his albums were remastered with bonus tracks and there was an odds 'n sods box set collection, Sound & Vision. This was basically the first big Remaster campaign, which since has become quite common. Some people still swear by these 1990-1992 versions of the albums as being the definitive versions.

In 1999, his catalog went to Virgin, who began their own remaster campaign, issuing all the albums, newly remastered, but sans bonus tracks.

In 2007-2009 his albums were released on SHM-CD in Japan. In 2013, many of his albums were mastered for HD digital. And recently, posthumous box sets have been released with yet new remasters.

Does it all really matter? Don't they basically sound the same? Well, not really. I'm not a collector (good luck finding all 200+ versions of Ziggy Stardust), but I am a bit of an audiophile and after being a fan for so long, I've just acquired different versions of the same albums over time.

So, you have choices... although, I don't think you can go wrong with the EMI/Rykodisc versions from '90-'92.

As to the music itself, maybe no one has gone through so many different styles and incarnations, alter egos and sounds in one single decade than Bowie in the 1970s.

David Bowie - The '60s

Who knew this fresh-faced young lad would become the greatest British pop musician of all time? [according to BBC voters]  I have an embarrassingly large collection, which I will try to group by decade. So, stay tuned...

Lou Reed

"I'll take Manhattan in a garbage bag with Latin written on it that says "it's hard to give a shit these days." - Lou Reed

Flesh For Lulu

Despite having "I Go Crazy" play seemingly throughout the entire movie "Some Kind of Wonderful" - it seems most of Flesh For Lulu's catalog has gone out of print. There were talks of a reunion, but sadly, singer Nick Marsh passed away in June 2015.

Wild - Wild 1

This strange concoction could only have come from the '80s. Part leather biker rock, part goth rock, part sub-industrial drum machines... this studio project from Todd Barrone and John Wildblood only produced one album - "Wild 1" - but it's a good listen for fans of Billy Idol, The Cult, Circus of Power, Zodiac Mindwarp...

Ministry

Ministry... the undisputed godfathers of Industrial Rock. What more can be said about Uncle Al?

Pere Ubu

Post-punk... from Cleveland, Ohio. The early stuff is essential. From there, it gets spotty... from shear avant garde weirdness of "Song of the Bailing Man" to pure pop satisfaction of 1989's "Cloudland."

Eurythmics

Eurythmics had a pretty good run, all the way through the '80s before Annie Lennox went off to a successful solo career and Dave Stewart became songwriter/producer/impressario.

Hunters & Collectors

Sometimes bands are unduly held to impossible standards and deemed failures by the industry when they don't live up to them. Hunters And Collectors never had the international success of fellow Aussies INXS and Midnight Oil. Despite that, they have the most-played song in OZ history (Throw Your Arms Around Me) and are used as the theme song to Australian Rules Football (Holy Grail). Not bad for a band whose first couple releases were noisy, moody post-punk that no one thought would ever be Top 40 material.

Billy Idol

One of the few albums I actually had on cassette, I practically wore this one out.