David Bowie - "China Girl"

Thank you Aaron for the investigative work.   Although I am disappointed that my preferred version turns out to be the "improper edit", at the the same time I have a new respect for what I considered to be "that other version." And if I still want to enjoy the "improper" version, at least I know where to find it :)

Fast forward to 2015.

I just bought the 2014 2-CD Columbia/Legacy David Bowie
comp "Nothing has changed". "China Girl" is marked as
the single version, and has the guitar part at 3:53,
followed by a strange edit at exactly 3:54. It matches
my EMI America 45.

I just noticed tonight in the LP version in the final fading seconds you can hear bleed through of the upcoming track "Let's Dance" for a second or two before China Girl is completely gone.

I believe my versions would have been made from the master tape at the time of the release in 1983 (Discogs shows it coming out on CD in Europe & Japan in '83 and the USA in '84), so I assume the bleedthrough has always been there rather than being the result of years of storage.

Does anybody know if the LP version has appeared (without fading early) in digital form without that bleedthrough? (If it was there on the original release, I think they'd have to go back to the individual tracks and mix it back down, perhaps.)

I'd love to know if anybody has the original 1983 CD release and could bring up the volume on the tail end of China Girl to see if the bleedthrough exists there.

RichM921 wrote: Thank you Aaron for the investigative work.   Although I am disappointed that my preferred version turns out to be the "improper edit", at the the same time I have a new respect for what I considered to be "that other version." And if I still want to enjoy the "improper" version, at least I know where to find it :)

So is this the version you preferred? I swore this was
how I recalled the radio single as well. And the other
links posted in this thread are dead.

Is This
the Original Edit?

It appears that when Ryko inherited the David Bowie catalog, they never received tapes of the proper 45 edits from EMI, so they made their own. They made some minor errors on just about all of the tracks, with an edit here and there that was a beat or two too early or too late. All of the Ryko recreations flowed well, and you'd likely never realize that there were errors unless you did an A/B comparison with the true 45. Which I did.

The true 45 has one edit, at 3:55. On the downbeat after the words "she says" at 3:28, begin counting with "1". The true 45 edit falls on beat number 55, which is on a snare.

The Ryko edit falls at 3:57, exactly 8 beats after the true 45 edit. Using the same numbering scheme as above, the Ryko 45 edit falls on beat number 63, which is also on a snare.

The Ryko edit first appeared on Ryko's Changesbowie (1990). Editing errors notwithstanding, Changesbowie is really a superb overview of David Bowie's career to that point. This CD was a staple in my radio/mobile DJ library for years. The same analog transfer is used on:

• Ryko's 2-CD The Singles 1969-1993 (1993) - digitally identical
• EMI Holland's 2-CD The Singles Collection (1993) - digitally exactly 0.3 dB quieter
• Time-Life's Sounds Of The Eighties Vol. 3 1983 (1994)
• Sony Germany's 2-CD Pop And Wave Vol. 8 (1999)

I suspect that a Time-Life 2-CD collection called Love Rocks also used the Ryko edit, but can't confirm.

The true 45 edit first appeared on CD on Virgin/EMI's Best Of Bowie (2002). It seems to have a small amount of added noise reduction, because the high end sounds a little bit odd on the fade. As a practical matter, the noise reduction is not a big deal for this track. It sounds fine here, with a great dynamic range, sturdy EQ, and seemingly low-generation source tapes. Any discs released after 2002 that used the 45 version used the proper 45 edit.

Edited by crapfromthepast