On the heels of 1997's Earthling tour, Bowie's guitarist Reeves Gabrels was hopeful that the band might record "a follow-up Earthling-type album, much in the same way that Aladdin Sane followed Ziggy, an extrapolation of the previous album. The music had evolved, the band was playing great and the window of opportunity time-wise was there." Bowie, however, wished instead to compile a live album from the many recordings made during the Earthling tour, and it was on this project that he embarked in the early weeks of 1998. In addition to mixing the live recordings with Gabrels and Mark Plati, he reconvened the band to cut two new studio tracks: the elusive drum N bass composition "Fun", and a cover of Bob Dylan's "Tryin' To Get To Heaven".

 

The album was originally intended to receive a full commercial release but, as Gabrels later explained, "Unfortunately Virgin refused to put it out after it was submitted in late winter 1998. Aside from the obvious, the bad news was that in the amount of time spent by David, Mark Plati and myself compiling and editing, we could have written and recorded the follow-up Earthling album that I'd hoped we'd do." Instead, Bowie and Gabrels moved on to begin work on 'hours...'.

 

Various tracks from the cancelled release were subsequently offered to BowieNet members in downloadable form, before a revised version of the album finally materialised as a limited-edition double CD on September 13th 2000, when free copies were distributed exclusively to BowieNet subscribers. With no discernible catalogue number, and its artwork and liner notes executed by BowieNet members, liveandwell.com is something of an oddity; but despite the unusual circumstances of its release, it is undoubtedly an "official" album.

 

Although the sleeve notes claim that "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" hails from the 1997 Phoenix Festival, the version on the album is, in fact, the one recorded at the same event a year earlier, on July 18th 1996. The remainder of Disc One is culled from three dates on the 1997 tour: "I'm Afraid Of Americans" and the last three tracks hail from the GQ Awards in New York on October 15th; "Hallo Spaceboy" and "The Voyeur" are from Rio on November 2nd, and the remaining three tracks are from Amsterdam on June 10th (the gig from which the live "Pallas Athena" and "V-2 Schneider" had already been released).

 

liveandwell.com is a beautifully mixed and hugely impressive memento of David's mid-1990s live experience and is well worth hunting down. It's only a pity that there wasn't room for some of the Earthling tour's rarer delights, such as "O, Superman" and "V-2 Schneider". The bonus disc features some of David's favourite mixes of the Earthling singles, plus the otherwise unavailable "Dillinja Mix" of "Fun". The studio version of Bob Dylan's "Tryin' To Get To Heaven" was not included, and after a one-off airing on Spanish radio, it quietly faded into obscurity.