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David Bowie’s ‘lost’ 2001 album Toy to be released

By | Published on Thursday 30 September 2021

David Bowie

Warner’s Parlophone label has announced that it will put out David Bowie’s unreleased album ‘Toy’, initially as part of a wider boxset in November and then as a standalone release next year.

Originally intended as the follow-up to 1999’s ‘Hours’, the album is a mixture of new songs and re-recorded versions of some of Bowie’s older work. A dispute with his then label Virgin over the album resulted in it being shelved, and also prompted his move back to Sony Music – him signing with Columbia in 2002.

Although it eventually leaked in 2011, ‘Toy’ has never been commercially available. The album will initially feature as part of the fifth ‘Era’ boxset, ‘David Bowie 5: Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001)’, which is set to hit shelves in November. It will then be put out as a standalone release (complete with its own deluxe boxset) on 7 Jan – the day before Bowie’s birthday.

The album’s producer Mark Plati says: “‘Toy’ is like a moment in time captured in an amber of joy, fire and energy. It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music”.

“David revisited and re-examined his work from decades prior through prisms of experience and fresh perspective”, he adds. “A parallel not lost on me as I now revisit it 20 years later. From time to time, he used to say, ‘Mark, this is our album’ – I think because he knew I was so deeply in the trenches with him on that journey. I’m happy to finally be able to say it now belongs to all of us”.

The announcement of these two new Bowie releases follows Warner Music’s recent deal to bring the musician’s later Sony-released albums under its control. That will come into force in 2023, at which point we can presumably expect further retrospective boxsets. Once that happens, Warner will control pretty much all of Bowie’s recorded output from 1968 to 2016.

Alongside the announcement that ‘Toy’ will finally be seeing the light of day, Parlophone has released a track from it, one of the re-records, ‘You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving’. The original version of the song was released in 1965, by one of Bowie’s pre-Bowie projects, Davy Jones And The Lower Third:



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