Hi Folks
.....I am a collector of anything on/with/from David Bowie. Singles, albums, bootlegs, photographs, books and most important in my collection: tapes. Tapes of Bowie concerts, interviews, TV appearances, etc. Tapes is what I am concerned with most, to be exact: concert tapes. That's why I thought it a good idea to write a book about those concert tapes. However, the idea was not my own, I had it from D. Fletcher, who came out with a book about Bowie, he was the first to review the Bowie tapes and catalogue them.

.....I very much enjoyed compiling this book; I did it for the lot of it, but also because I wished to provide other collectors items, while supplementing and extending Fletcher's list.

.....The majority of these concert tapes have been recorded from the auditorium, by people carrying a small portable recorder, some from radio or TV and a very small number even by RCA!

.....My object is to state for each tape which songs it contains, what Bowie says from time to time, its duration and, last but not least, its quality. Generally, the original tapes are resonable good quality, but since lots of people will want to copy them, they will accumulate more and more noise and thus deterioate. If you copy a recording once, you will hear no differance, apart from a slight (increase in) surface noise, but by the time you have done this some fifty times, the noise will have accumulated to such an extend that the tape will no longer make good listening.

.....The reason why the sound is often so dull, is that most people, in order to get rid of irritating surface noise, use the Dolby noise suppressor system. This does diminish the noise but, on the other hand, the sound gets somewhat duller: the high tones are lost!

.....Now this book mentions tapes, but, mind you, not all of them by far! It only contains the tapes the existence of which I am certain of. I am convinced that there is a recording of each single concert, for among all those thousand of people who got to a concert there is sure to be (at least) one clever enough to smuggle a recorder into the concert hall.

.....You will probably wonder whether these tapes are mono or stereo. Well, that is hard to tell, since concert tapes are usually recorded form the auditorium. In nine out of ten cases they will have been recorded by a small portable tape recorder, mono therefore, but it is also possible that a professional stereo tape deck has been used. So, with audience tapes it's very hard to tell, but recordings made by radio, TV or RCA are always stereo.

.....My personal collection contains copies of all the tapes labelled (X).

.....I do hope you will write to me and, above all, that you will enjoy the results of a great deal of hard work and research!

Pimm Jal de la Parra, 11th July 1981

LINER NOTES SECOND EDITION
published july 1985, second printing feb. 1986.
Cover painting by Karina Keuchenius.
Second printing was published By Titan Distributors Ltd. PO Box 250, London E3 4TR, England

DAVID BOWIE: THE CONCERT TAPES is the first book on David Bowie concert tapes: the unauthorised recordings of concerts made by fans to keep as a lasting memory of the event. Hundreds of these tapes circulate among a vast international network of Bowie-freaks.

This book catalogues some 400 concert tapes. The 18-year-old author Pimm Jal de la Parra, who is a collector of concert tapes himself, gives elaborate descriptions of all of them, going into so many details that the book produces an almost microscopic picture of Bowie's concerts. The numbers played, the words Bowie speaks - it is all there. The book is full of funny anecdotes and other kinds of information on the concerts, from Bowie's earliest days as Davy Jones to the Serious Moonlight Tour.

In Addition, it covers hundreds of video tapes and bootlegs, as well as detailed schedules of all the tours Bowie has made from 1966 onward, including such particulars as seating capacities of concert halls.

DAVID BOWIE: THE CONCERT TAPES is illustrated with a lively variety of some 330 photographs, drawings, reproductions of concert-tickets and other trivia; the vast majority of the photographs used, most which relate to concerts discussed here, have never been published before. The book is a well-head of information and historic fact.

DAVID BOWIE: THE CONCERT TAPES is not only an indispensable reference book for collectors, but also a 'must' for anyone who is interested in the performer David Bowie.