David Bowie's third album The Man Who Sold the World opened with the blistering "The Width of a Circle," an eight-minute blast of rock adrenaline culminating in the narrator's illicit encounter with a supernatural being in the burning pits of Hell. Bowie had quickly come a long way from the music hall theatricality of his first eponymous LP and the psychedelic folk-rock of his second. The 1970 LP welcomed guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey, the first appearance on a Bowie album
Venerated BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel once called Bridget St. John “the best lady singer-songwriter in the country.” So when Peel formed Dandelion Records in 1969, the label’s first signing was St. John; in fact, Peel once commented that “the main reason why we started the label [was] ‘cos nobody else was going to record her stuff.” Cherry Red Records has just reissued all three of St. John’s moody, evocative Dandelion albums (individually released in 2005 on CD) recorded between 1969 and 1972,