Parlophone has released The Shel Talmy Recordings, a new compilation of David Bowie's mid-60s recordings made under his original name, Davie Jones — and the Guardian's review delivers a blunt verdict: these previously unheard 60s tunes are "actually pretty flimsy."

The compilation documents the years before fame, when Bowie wanted to be a participant in British pop rather than merely a witness. The reviewer, writing in the Guardian, frames the release against a revealing elision in Bowie's own account of his history.

In 1973, Bowie released Pin Ups, a collection of mid-60s covers — a period when, as the review puts it, "the previous driving forces of British pop, Merseybeat and the blues revival started giving way to something noticeably weirder, noisier and more expansive." In a promotional interview accompanying the album, Bowie described seeing the Pretty Things, the Who, the Creation and the nascent Pink Floyd "with dear old Syd" in immaculate mod idiom: "up the Windmill or the Elephant, get blocked, bust over to Richmond."

He tactfully omitted one thing. As the Guardian notes, he was never just "an amphetamine-fuelled fan" — he had wanted to be a participant, and had recorded a handful of mid-60s singles inspired by those idols.

That omission, the review argues, exposes the strained relationship Bowie had with his pre-fame material. For most of his career, he simply tried to ignore it. The material refused to go away: his former labels kept re-releasing it, usually in sleeves designed to fool buyers into thinking it was current product.

Then, in his 50s, Bowie appeared to reconsider. He revisited his 60s oeuvre on Toy, a 2001 album that his then-label EMI rejected. The reviewer calls that rejection "a baffling decision" — if one accepts what the review describes as "the posthumous rewriting of Bowie's history that insists his Glastonbury performance in 2000 utterly reinvigorated his career and made him as revered as he was in his peak years."

The core critical judgment of the new compilation is that the young Bowie could not distinguish himself from the era's other bands. On these mid-60s recordings, the review concludes, he "ends up hedging his bets" — a charge rarely levelled at the artist who would later build a career on decisive reinvention.

The release adds another chapter to the long afterlife of Bowie's apprentice work, a catalogue its creator disowned but which labels have circulated, repackaged and now anthologised for more than half a century. For listeners weighing the posthumous Bowie canon, the Guardian's assessment sets expectations low: these are period artifacts, not lost masterpieces.