The Width Of A Circle

Parlophone will issue what they are calling a ‘companion piece’ to Metrobolist, last year’s Tony Visconti remix of David Bowie‘s 1970 album The Man Who Sold The World. The new collection is a two-CD set called The Width of a Circle and features a combination of -era bonus tracks, BBC live recordings and new mixes, all from 1970.
The first CD features 14 tracks performed by David Bowie and (a.k.a. The Hype) for John Peel’s The Sunday Show in February 1970 (the label are claiming that six of these are unreleased) while the second disc is very much an ‘odds and sods’ collection of material. It includes some bonus material first heard on CD back in 1989/1990 when Rykodisc began their Bowie reissue campaign.
Such tracks include 1970 single A-side ‘Holy Holy’, the single mix of ‘The Prettiest Star’ (although it’s included here in unreleased alternate mix form – “created for promotion in the US market”), both mono and stereo mixes of ‘London Bye Ta-Ta’ and the A and B-side mixes of ‘Memory of A Free Festival’.
In addition, this CD offers five tracks from a play (“The Looking Glass Murders aka Pierrot in Turquoise”) and five 2020 stereo mixes of some of the non-album material remixed by Tony Visconti. Four of those five are also available on a special 10-inch single (also called The Width of a Circle).
All this activity is to mark the 50th anniversary of the UK release of The Man Who Sold The World and to top it off, Parlophone are also putting out a picture disc of the standard album using artwork from RCA’s 1972 reissue. A picture disc with alternative artwork was previously issued for 2016’s Record Store Day.