2021 Remaster

Toy was recorded following David Bowie's triumphant Glastonbury 2000 performance. Bowie entered the studio with his band, Mark Plati, Sterling Campbell, Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Mike Garson, Holly Palmer and Emm Gryner, to record new interpretations of songs he'd first recorded from 1964-1971. David planned to record the album ‘old school' with the band playing live, choose the best takes and then release it as soon as humanly possible in a remarkably prescient manner. Unfortunately, in 2001 the concept of the ‘surprise drop' album release and the technology to support it were still quite a few years off, making it impossible to release Toy, as the album was now named, out to fans as instantly as David wanted. In the interim, David did what he did best; he moved on to something new, which began with a handful of new songs from the same sessions and ultimately became the album Heathen, released in 2002 and now acknowledged as one of his finest moments.

The seeds of Toy were first sown in 1999 during the making of an episode of VH-1 Storytellers. David wanted to perform something from his pre-Space Oddity career, so he reached back to 1966 and dusted off "Can't Help Thinking About Me" for the first time in thirty years. The song remained in the setlist for the short promotional tour for the Hours... album, and in early 2000 David and Plati compiled a list of some of Bowie's earliest songs to re-record. Toy finishes with a new song from which the album takes its title, "Toy (Your Turn To Drive)" was constructed from a jam at the end of one of the live takes of "I Dig Everything." The track is based around rearranged sections of Sterling Campbell's drums, Gail Ann Dorsey's bass and sections of Mike Garson's piano were looped along with a guitar line of Earl Slick's that was sampled, time stretched and used as a repeating figure. Lastly, some of Holly and Emm's backing vocals from the body of "Dig Everything" were cut up and reassembled. Plati notes, "As it was culled from ‘I Dig Everything' it makes sense to bookend the album with this track - it's also a fitting postscript to the Toy era."