Bowie’s “I Want Your Love” (1965)

”I Want Your Love” is the first previously unreleased Bowie song that will be part of the 1965 Shel Talmy Recordings, set to be released next month. Talmy was a producer who recently passed away, known more his work with the Who and the Kinks than Bowie. The Bowie recordings are from 1965, when Bowie was 18, well before Bowie was famous and making the music that is better remembered today.

I missed that “I Want Your Love” was released ahead of the album until I came across an article about the second advance release of a song called “Today,” which I featured in one of my recent news summary posts. That one was released with a video, largely consisting of photos of Bowie in the 60s, whereas this one is just an audio recording.

You can hear for yourself how it sounds. I’m not expecting much from the Shel Talmy Recordings. If “I Want Your Love” and “Today” are representative, neither is offensive. They also aren’t especially memorable. Later in the 60s, but still before “Space Oddity,” Bowie’s voice becomes more recognizable but the songs themselves … well, I was going to write that the songs themselves become worse, but it’s more accurate to say that I like them less. I like them less than the handful of mid-60s Bowie songs I’ve heard already and which these two seem to be at home with (though “Today” seems to be a few steps closer to the type of folkish songs that appear on the album commonly known as Space Oddity than this one). I like the guitar and drum work here. Denis Taylor is credited with the electric guitar, Graham Rivens with the bass and Phil Lancaster is on drums. Bowie, at the time was still performing as Davie Jones and the band was called Davie Jones and the Lower Third. Bowie did not write the song— the composition is credited to Johnnie Dee and Jack Tar.

“I Want Your Love” is not going to supplant “Heroes” or “Life on Mars” in our collective memory. It is an interesting curiosity, which is what I’m expecting the full Talmy album to be when it is finally released.