David Bowie: David Bowie (Deluxe Edition)

Before he was a gay alien sex demagogue, David Bowie peddled gnomes, Edwardiana and Kenneth Williams impersonations. But there's no need to run, says Alexis Petridis

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david bowie
Gnome sweet gnome ... David Bowie.

No artist's musical past has come back to haunt them quite like David Bowie's. There he was in 1973, the world's most cutting-edge pop star: half the country certain he's rock's saviour, the other half terrified, seemingly convinced he actually is some kind of gay alien sex demagogue on Earth to corrupt youth. He has achieved this via stunning records and provocations: telling the press he's homosexual, pretending to fellate his guitarist on stage, suddenly announcing his retirement. It has all been brilliantly planned and executed, which makes the reappearance of music he made years before devising Ziggy Stardust all the more agonising. Worse, the song his old label has rereleased and seen rise to No 6 in the charts is The Laughing Gnome, a 1967 novelty that has also been covered by crooner Ronnie Hilton. The Laughing Gnome fitted perfectly with Hilton's oeuvre – his big hit being that one about a mouse living in a windmill in old Amsterdam – which obviously makes it profoundly unsuitable material for a terrifying gay alien sex demagogue to be caught singing in public.

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Perhaps understandably, Bowie long evinced a strained relationship with his 60s work, first ignoring it, then rerecording some of it in 2002, for the unreleased album Toy. Its reputation was further damaged by his former manager Kenneth Pitt's book The Pitt Report, notable both for a diverting interlude in which Bowie inadvertently sees Pitt's penis and pretends to measure it while bellowing "ye gods!" and its demented premise that Bowie's 60s work was unequivocally the artistic highlight of his career. The other bit – when he became the most important artist since the Beatles and somehow made four of the greatest albums ever while so maddened by cocaine he allegedly stored his own urine in the fridge in case a wizard stole it – was merely the unasked-for, complimentary After Eight following the creative smorgasbord that was When I'm Five and Ching-a-Ling. It's so insanely wrong-headed that it reflects badly on the music; anything requiring that much special pleading must be rubbish.

Fans' usual reaction to the eponymous debut album and singles contained on this deluxe edition is to note the themes that would inform his later work, then discreetly file them away: She's Got Medals touches on sexual ambiguity; Uncle Arthur on mental illness; Maid of Bond Street on fame. We Are Hungry Men, meanwhile, features an unexpected impersonation of Kenneth Williams alongside the first flowering of the obsession with dystopias and messianic dictators that would come to an unhappy head with some addled praise for Hitler in interviews circa the piss-in-the-fridge years. Alas, his later dalliances with Nietzschean ubermensch theory passed without further recourse to his Williams impersonation: perhaps if he'd interspersed his remarks about how a fascist leader would be good for Britain with a few cries of "Ooh matron!" and "Stop messin' ABOUT!", it would have leavened the atmosphere a bit.

In fact Bowie spent the 60s doing exactly what he did for the rest of his career: trying on musical styles, from then-voguish mock Edwardiana to big orchestrated ballads. The difference was that not all of them fit. He couldn't do Kinks-inspired satire, not least because the music he set it to reeked of cosy light entertainment: Join the Gang's hippy-mocking seems hopelessly square, like something Dick Emery would have sung while wearing a kaftan. Ching-a-Ling suggests trying out Incredible String Band acid-folk whimsy was the most catastrophic career decision he made until he opted to go dancing in the street with Mick Jagger: "I wish I played the doo-dah horn" indeed.

And yet Bowie's 60s work deserves better than the dustbin of history. Let Me Sleep Beside You and In the Heat of the Morning prove he was already a lavishly gifted songwriter. Furthermore, he was already able to do things others could not. Caught up in the 60s' heady whirl, most pop stars were disinclined to write about the era's darker side. With his nose pressed against the pane of the Swinging London party, Bowie could offer a more clear-headed view of the times, hence The London Boys, a remarkable monochrome drama of poverty, amphetamine psychosis and intimations of homosexuality, set in grimy bedsits and Wardour Street cafes.

But you listen even to David Bowie's highlights knowing that their failure was imperative. Had anything here succeeded commercially, it would have been a disaster, not merely for Bowie, but rock in general: he would have become only briefly famous for his ballads, novelty songs or, worst of all, his doo-dah horn. As it was, necessity proved the mother of the greatest reinvention pop has ever seen.

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