David Bowie was a true chameleon of rock music. Over the decades, he was able to seamlessly blend wildly different genres and images into a brilliant multimedia career, and he was also prone to basking in the sun on a hot rock.
But even geniuses sometimes get hung up on an idea too, and for whatever reason, Bowie just couldn’t stop coming up with ideas for new concept albums that he later realized were just the plot of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ He repeatedly claimed in interviews that he had never read Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s book or seen any of the film adaptations, but who’s to say? These abandoned albums seem awfully familiar…
‘The Blonde Child Who Owned a Factory’
In 1970, Bowie was coming to the close of his “unsuccessful hippie” phase and moving on to “leveraging wearing a dress for popularity.” Little remains of his planned album, ‘The Blonde Child Who Owned a Factory’ and early demos (which reportedly included songs titled “All the Slugworths Sing” and “Grandpa, Where Has Your Dance Gone”) were destroyed once the enraged singer read the back of a copy of the novel dropped by Tony Visconti in a haze of studio brandy. Engineer Gerald Chevin would later describe the sessions as “pretty obviously just the book.”
‘Charlie Galaxy and the Neverending Hard Candy’
Bowie hit a cultural nerve in 1972 with ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ and was reportedly under extreme pressure from RCA to create a sequel to the concept album. ‘Charlie Galaxy’ (as the album is known to fans) apparently followed the adventures of a boy whose quest to find a quasi-mystical jawbreaker led him to heroin abuse and a lot of makeup and is universally agreed to be “bad.’ As a kind of apology, RCA President Anthony L. Conrad gave Gene Wilder the master tapes to the near-complete album, but the ‘Willy Wonka’ actor said he didn’t want them.
‘Diamond Loompas’
‘Diamond Loompas’ was scrapped, Bowie would later tell ‘Blender’ in a 1999 interview, because his worsening drug habits made it impossible for him to articulate his post-apocalyptic visions of a group of gross children being slowly murdered by midgets and also, Road Dahl’s attorneys had gotten wise to him. He also revealed that his proposed cover art would have depicted him as half-man, half-Oompa Loompa, but with a fully exposed dog penis.
‘Wonkatacularia’
To his dying day, Bowie claimed that the title of ‘Wonkatacularia’ was coincidental. Yeah, fucking right, David.
‘Chocolate River, Dead Kid’
By the 1990s, Bowie’s critical rep had hit the skids and, after several failed attempts to record candy-themed follow-ups to the blockbuster ‘Let’s Dance,’ he finally emerged with a somber, jazz- and electronica-influenced album titled “Chocolate River, Dead Kid.” The plot of the album has been called “oblique at best” and “stupid,” but appears to focus on the dying thoughts of a German pre-teen musing on greed, post-Nazi politics, and why there would be a river made of chocolate in a factory. The album was never released for unknown reasons, but probably because it sucked.
‘Tim Burton, Make A Worse Version’
Discovered in the late singer’s archives in 2018, ‘Tim Burton, Make a Worse Version’ confounds many Bowie scholars. The spoken-word album is said to consist of the singer sleepwalking and reading from a copy of ‘Charlie,’ while occasionally wondering if filmmaker Tim Burton will ever make an unnecessarily morbid version of the story starring Johnny Depp and chanting in a “hellish tongue not of this Earth.” The album was recorded in 1977 and is currently in possession of the Vatican.