THE BOWIE VOL.3 YEARS FROM
POP STAR TO ALT ROCKER The definitive story story of Bowie’s most controv contr oversi ersial al and and diverse era
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THE LIFE, THE MUSI MUSIC, C, THE LEGEND VOL.3 OF 4
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WELCOME hen we consider David Bowie’s superlative musical legacy, there can be no doubt that the outpourings of wonderful creativity far outweigh the occasional missteps and divisive decisions that are part and parcel of such an experimental and chameleonic artist. And yet it can’t be denied that such moments do exist within the Bowie canon. With this in mind, I approached this third volume of The Bowie Years with Years with a certain degree of trepidation. From the shameless hit-seeking pop of Let’s Dance to to the strippeddown alt-rock of Tin Machine, the period between 1981 and 1993 contains some the most divisive and oft-dismissed (albeit for very different reasons) material David Bowie ever recorded. Even the most devoted of Bowieheads often struggle to find too many positive things to say about some of the creative decisions he made in this period, so how were we going to craft a 130-odd page magazine that celebrated the era without disingenuously glossing over things, or being unduly harsh about a musician who has impacted all of our lives s o significantly? The answer, of course, is that David Bowie remained David Bowie. Even when – by his own admission – he was struggling through a creative drought, or straining under the demands of his record label and the expectations of his fans, his genius never left him. And when the stars aligned, he still produced some truly amazing and timeless music – you just need to dig a little deeper to find it sometimes. For starters, Bowie biographer Paul Trynka joins us again to give his learned take on the wonderful Baal EP EP – explaining why heading back to Berlin helped Bowie recapture some of that avant-garde magic, unburdened by the need for radio-friendly hits. Furthermore, at the other end of our period, editor at large Andy Price makes an impassioned argument that the once-deleted The Buddha Of Suburbia deserves Suburbia deserves reappraisal as one of Bowie’s finest works of this, or any, period. The great joy of producing From Pop Star To Alt Rocker has has been drawing attention to under-the-radar under-the-radar gems such as these – to remind ourselves that, even when many critics and fans had given up on him, David Bowie was still a powerful, vital creative force. Enjoy the iss ue…
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Josh Gardner
Editor
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CONTENTS PASSION PROJECT
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BOWIE & QUEEN
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How a chance meeting in a Swiss studio led to a mercurial collaboration and a hit sing le NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE
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With Nile Rodgers on board, Bowie embarked on a synergic pop LP and a globetrotting tour THE PRODUCER: NILE RODGERS
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ALBUM FOCUS: TIN MACHINE
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Guitarist Reeves Gabrels and Iggy Pop’s rhythm section helped Bowie shift towards a more primal live-band approach ALBUM FOCUS: TIN MACHINE II
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By the time of their second album in 1991, Tin Machine’s days were numbered
Let’s Dance thrust the Chic hitmaker’s funk sensibilities into the spotlight
BEGINNER’S LUCK: KEVIN ARMSTRONG
ALBUM FOCUS: LET’S DANCE
His guitar playing on Absolute Beginners led led to a decade of Bowie collaboration for Kevin Armstrong, including playing Live Aid
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Bowie’s hit-packed bid for mainstream Bowie’s success soundtracked the summer of 1983 TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT
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1984’s rushed follow-up 1984’s follow- up to Let’s Dance was was a commercial, but not critical, success ALBUM FOCUS: TONIGHT
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Far from a fan favourite, Tonight still still has moments of intrigue and some decent songs 1984-1987: SCREEN IDOL
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Bowie’s film acting and movie soundtracks Bowie’s saw him forge a successful second career I’LL RUN WITH YOU: CARMINE ROJAS
FADE OUT
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1987’s Never Let Me Down was critically panned, and the supporting tour was more spiders from vase than spiders from Mars ALBUM FOCUS: NEVER LET ME DOWN
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Around the turn of the 90s, Bowie returned to the limelight with roles in films, high-profile gigs, a new love and a creative new album ALBUM FOCUS: BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE
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Nile Rodgers’ return as producer helped to rekindle Bowie’s creative and musical muse 116
In 1993, Bowie soundtracked a four-part TV drama based on Hanif Kureishi’ Kureishi’ss novel – and the results remain underrated to this day THE INSPIRATIONAL DAVID BOWIE
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Andy Price surveys the influence Bowie had on the stars who followed in his footsteps 1981-1993: THE ALTERNA ALTERNATIVE TIVE TOP 20
This 1987 album saw Bowie working hard to rediscover his muse, with a rockier sound
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1989-1993: RENAISSANCE MAN
ALBUM FOCUS: THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA
Carmine Rojas’ basslines underpinned Bowie’s 80s success. Andy Price speaks to the man who toured the world with Bowie – twice
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His next move confounded almost everyone – but Tin Machine was a tonic for its frontman
The story of Bowie’s 1982 appearance in a BBC production of Brecht’s Baal and and the accompanying soundtrack EP
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Some deeper cuts that deserve to be revisited NEXT ISSUE
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Get ready for From Outsider To Blackstar
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PASSION PROJECT IN 1982, BOWIE APPEARED I N A BBC PRODUCTION OF THE BE RTOLT BRECH T PLAY, PLAY, BAAL; AND ITS SOUNDTRACK EP WAS A FASCINATING FASCINATING BRIDGE BETWEE N HIS EXPERIMENTAL LATE-70S PHASE AND HIS 1980S DIRECTION. PAUL TRYNKA HEADS BACK TO BERLIN…
erfectly judged, minimal and edgy, with some of the most luscious singing of his career, Baal is is certainly the best Bowie work most people have never heard, and a beautiful coda to his Berlin years, recorded at breakneck speed in the famed Meistersaal: Studio 2, the ballroom at Hansa Studios by the Berlin Wall. The recording project was spawned from one of the most intellectual, high-falutin’ episodes of Bowie’s career – a TV broadcast of the 1926 Brecht play, play, Lebenslauf Des Mannes Baal , masterminded by leading Brecht expert and translator John Willett, producer and Oxford don Louis Marks, and legendary Scum director, Alan Clarke. Casting Bowie as the eponymous, hobo hero was John Willett’s idea. It was an inspired suggestion, says Marks: “We didn’t have any doubts.” In the event, Bowie dominated the production – Willett in particular concluded
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that the artist probably had a deeper and more intellectual understanding of Germany and Brecht than anyone they knew. Yet the casting of Bowie, near the peak of his fame, caused problems, too. His name was eventually elevated over the playwright he loved, with the production hence billed as ‘David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal ’. ’. Meanwhile, the BBC’s network rival ITV harnessed their own star power, scheduling Laurence Olivier in a John Mortimer play directly against this rather obscure German work. Even those involved, such as legendary theatre director Jonathan Kent, who played Ekart opposite Bowie, had their doubts. “It was an interesting experiment, to condense the play to a TV film,” he recalled. “I don’t know if in the end it really worked.” Still debated by scholars, the TV production would enter the archives as a curio, which lent Bowie some arty cachet. Yet it would also inspire a more enduring element of his legacy.
BOWIE HAD A DEEP AND INTELLECTU IN TELLECTUAL AL UNDERSTANDING OF GERMANY AND BRECHT. BRECHT. YET THE CASTING OF THE STAR, NEAR THE PEAK OF HIS FAME, CAUSED PROBLEMS, TOO
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The mechanism to deliver the Baal EP EP was one of the little artistic communities that Bowie was such an expert at constructing. In this case, one cornerstone was John Willett, who by now had recruited Bowie to his salon of creative theatre types. A second would be Dominic Muldowney, Muldowney, a talented young composer and guitarist who worked with Pinter and others, and had also become fast friends with Willett: “I’d been bitten by the [Brecht] bug, and John and I were always looking for new projects. And ultimately, ultimately, David and I really clicked… he was really excited.” Muldowney and Bowie worked closely together on the music for the play; Muldowney would usually supply one cassette of music each night, which Bowie would learn for the next day. Then, around the time that the BBC production wrapped, Bowie asked the young composer, composer, in his usual charming way, way, for
Tony Visconti in London in 1972
“a big favour”. He wanted to release a final record for RCA (almost certainly a contract-filler), in conjunction with him and Willett, and planned a Brecht record that would be “another level up” from their work on the play. A few weeks later, long-time Bowie producer Tony Visconti met up with Muldowney Muldowney,, plus veteran Bowie engineer Eduard Meyer, at Tonstudio 2, the beautiful wood-floored room where they’d recorded “ Heroes”. HIRED GUNS
The backbone of the recording was a small s mall group of mostly classically trained session musicians, assembled by drummer and studio fixer Sherry Bertram: “They could play classical, schlager [German pop], march music, different dances like a tango, they could reproduce anything, and of course play from scores,” says s ays Eduard Meyer. Muldowney was especially taken by the musician who played the bandoneon, a huge German accordion: “I think he went back to the 1930s as a musician, so he really knew that music, and did one of the numbers in just one squeeze. Unbelievable.” Tony Visconti, says Meyer, was especially overjoyed to be back in the studio for what would be his last Hansa recording with Bowie. “After “ After a break of a couple of years, he was very keen on doing some work again at Hansa and playing around with the acoustics.” Bowie arrived a little later, intending 8 T H E
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The interior of the Meistersaal (formerly Studio 2) in Hansa Studios, with its luxurious wood ceilings and parquet floors, pictured in 2013
Eduard Meyer, David Bowie’s former sound engineer,, sits in engineer Hansa Studio 1 in 2016 T H E
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Bowie and Tracey Childs in the BBC production of Baal
to overdub his vocals once the backing tracks were down, in one day of intensive work. Meyer describes it as “a very German session”, with the band quickly mastering the arrangements while Eduard and staff experimented with mic placements. Muldowney, Muldowney, experienced with classical recording, found this a new world: “Visconti was absolutely brilliant. There was a string quartet going, and when he heard it coming in [to the control room] he was sitting at the desk, grouping the sound… and suddenly, these four strings sounded like four tanks. He was a genius, he played the desk like you play a piano.” Then Bowie walked into Studio 2 to add vocals. Muldowney had already been impressed by the ease with which he could master a song – “far quicker than any classical musician I’ve ever worked with” – but when it came to recording The Drowned Girl , with its languid Kurt Weill melody, it was the subtlety, rather than the speed, which floored him. “It was the most extraordinary thing. When he sings the line about n o l a v A
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MULDOWNEY WAS IMPRESSED BY THE EASE WITH WHICH BOWIE COULD MASTER A SONG FAR QUICKER THAN ANY CLASSICAL MUSICIAN HE’D EVER WORKED WITH
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WHEN BOWIE SINGS THE WORD ‘SMOKE’ IT’S IT’S GOT SMOKE ALL AROUND IT, IT’S CLOUDY, AND THEN THERE’S THE ‘K’ OF ‘SMOKE’ – AND YOU CAN SEE AGAIN…
The BBC Television Centre in White City, west London, 1980, where Alan Clarke filmed his adaptation of Brecht’s play
the drowned girl making her slow descent, he is right down in the bass baritone. And halfway through, he jumps up an octave. When he sings the word ‘smoke’ it’s got smoke all around it, it’s cloudy, and then there’s the ‘k’ of ‘smoke’ – and you can see again. It’s an absolute tutorial in how to paint a text. The only other person I know can do that is Frank Sinatra.” HIDDEN GEM
Even today, today, that song stands out as extraordinary extraordinary.. It would also prove to be a fitting coda to the singer’s immortal Berlin period. Although he’d visit Hansa one 12
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last time for a re-recording of Time Will Crawl , this would be his last work with Visconti for two decades. David marked the significance of this farewell with a grandstanding final evening. Visconti, exhausted, went to bed; so Bowie enlisted Muldowney for a final tour of his old night-haunts. First came a club in Kreuzberg, where the clients were draped over dentists’ chairs. Next up was the Dschungel, a favourite haunt when he and Iggy lived in Schöneberg. He danced with an androgynous young Ziggy-type, flirtatiously sharing a cigarette. In the small hours they ended up at an ornate bar, almost
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HOPEFULLY, THE HOPEFULLY, T HE RECENT VINYL RE-RELEASE OF BAAL WILL SEE IT MORE WIDELY HAILED AS ONE OF THE OVERLOOKED HIGHLIGHTS OF BOWIE’S CAREER, AND HIS ULTIMATE FAREWELL TO BERLIN
Above: US soldiers patrol the Berlin Wall, in the Kreuzberg district – one of Bowie’s favoured haunts during his time in the city Right: Bowie in New York City, pictured in 1982
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certainly Romy Haag’s, where David and Muldowney chatted to the beautiful girls who were boys. HIDDEN GEM
A modest hit, reaching No. 29 in the UK charts when released in February 1982, the Baal EP EP was especially prized by Brecht scholars; John Willett denoted it an outstanding success. Bowie’s first visit to East Berlin, accompanied by his friends Iggy Pop plus British Foreign Office staff, had been for a meal in the Brecht Theatre. Now he’d repaid some of his debt to the city, sharing one of its cultural titans with the world.
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The EP has recently been re-released in limitededition vinyl format, so perhaps this new exposure will see Baal finally finally more widely hailed as one of the overlooked highlights of Bowie’s career, and his ultimate farewell to Berlin. That said, there would be one more goodbye, of sorts. For in the New York run of Lazarus, the musical that mapped his own disappearing act, the Bowie/Newton character reflects nostalgically on his time in the city. As he sings “sitting in the Dschungel”, grainy footage shows us the club where last he danced at night, after his day with Brecht – the man who marked the beginning and the end of his fabulous, tantalising, time in Berlin. ●
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QUEEN A CHANCE MEETING IN A SWISS STUDIO MAY HAVE PRODUCED A FINE SONG IN THE END, BUT THE EGOS OF T WO OF ROCK’S MOST FLAMBOYANT FIGURES IN ONE ROOM MEANT THE RECORDING PROCESS OF U N D E R P R E S S U R E LIVED LIVED UP TO I TS TITLE. MARK LINDORES EXPLORES ONE OF BOWIE’S MOST SUCCESSFUL COLLABORA COLLABORATIONS… TIONS… FEEL THE PRESSURE fter blazing a trail of debauchery and self-destruction through London, New “It all happened through Dave Richards, the engineer at the studio,” Bowie later told BBC Radio 1. “I was in York, Los Angeles and Berlin during the 70s, the new decade found Bowie in Montreux, doing some other work there, and Queen were recording there, and David knew that I was in a much more subdued state. Leading a solitary existence in Switzerland, he was focusing on town and he phoned me up and asked me if I’d like to come down to see what was happening. So I went sobriety and stability as he prioritised his role as a father. Wracked with feelings of guilt over the unstable down, and these things happen, you know? Suddenly, you’re writing someth something ing together together,, and itit was totall totallyy environment that his son had experienced in his spontaneous, it certainly wasn’t planned. It turbulent previous decades, David was was rather peculiar!” now his son’s sole custodian and was The sessions had begun as a intent on providing him with a life laid-back jam session, playing of care and stability stability.. each other’s tracks as well as While tax issues might have WHEN THE BACKING played a part in his motives various rock classics before deciding to write something for settling in Switzerland, TRACK WAS DONE, DAVID Bowie later told a journalist original. Beginning with SAID: ‘LET’S EACH OF US GO IN the unmistakable bassline that his main reason for THE VOCAL BOOTH AND SING moving there was actually (the origin of which has been credited, by various because “people leave me HOW WE THINK THE MELODY MELODY alone here”. conflicting sources, to either SHOULD GO AND COMPILE Bowie or John Deacon, Away from temptations of reverting back to his old suggesting how collaborative A VOCAL OUT OF THAT’ the process really was), the lifestyle, the only concession to rock ’n’ roll and music song was an amalgamation of ideas from all parties. production was the nearby Mountain Studios – one of the most “We felt our way through a backing track all together as an advanced recording studio facilities in Europe – which, at the time, was owned by ensemble,” Brian May recalls. “And then David brought up an unusual idea for creating the rock behemoths Queen. Though Bowie had crossed paths with Freddie vocal. He was kind of famous for writing lyrics by collecting different bits of paper with quotes on them. Mercury on a few occasions previously, the pair had never really planned to work together. This changed And we did a corresponding thing as regards writing when, with Queen in town working on their Hot Space the top line for the song. When the backing track was album in 1981, an impromptu jam session yielded done, David said: ‘Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should Under Pressure .
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Freddie Mercury on stage at Groenoordhallen in Leiden, The Netherlands, in 1980 T H E
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Queen posing for a shot in 1981, the year their Bowie collaboration, Under Pressure,
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go – just off the tops of our heads – and we’ll compile a vocal out of that’. And that’s what we did.” Producer Reinhold Mack recalled how a rivalry emerged between David and Freddie when laying down vocals, with David at one point sneakily listening at the door to Freddie’s contribution so that he could try and outdo him when it was his turn. “It was hard, because you had four very precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us,” May recalled. “David took over the song lyrically. Looking back, it’s a great song, but it should have been mixed differently. Freddie and David had a fierce battle over that. It’s a significant song because of David and its lyrical content.” ONE AND DONE
Though the 24-hour session resulted in a highlight of both artists’ discographies, the subsequent relationship between Bowie and Queen was lukewarm at best. Despite the single topping the
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chart, neither appeared in the video and they never performed it together live. The union also ended on a sour note when Queen were readying their Hot Space album (on which Under Pressure appeared) appeared) and Bowie called at the 11th hour to insist his backing vocals be removed from Cool Cat – – another track on the album he had contributed to, resulting in a major disruption to the album’s release. Despite the success of Under Pressure , Bowie was underwhelmed by the finished product and never performed the track live (a hoped-for performance at Live Aid failed to materialise, despite Bowie following Queen on the running order) until the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992, where he performed it with Annie Lennox and the surviving members DAVID TOOK OVER of Queen. The emotionally charged THE SONG LYRICALLY… performance proved IT’S A GREAT SONG, a moving tribute to BUT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN Freddie – laying to rest once and for all MIXED DIFFERENTLY. FREDDIE any rivalry that had AND DAVID HAD A FIERCE been born of the BATTLE OVER THAT song’s inception. ●
Above: Bowie, Mercury and friends gathered on stage during the Live Aid concert of 1985; though a proposed Bowie and Mercury duet failed to happen
Right: Annie Lennox and David Bowie perform at Under Pressure at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert For AIDS Awareness in 1992 T H E
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NO SMO MOK KE WITHOUT FIRE AFTER A FEW YEARS OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT, A BLEACHED-BLONDE BOWIE RETURNED WITH L E T ' S D A N C E , AND ACHIEVED GREATER GLOBAL FAME THAN EVER BEFORE. ANDY PRICE CHARTS THE MOMENT DAVID BOWIE ASCENDED TO SUPERSTARDOM…
t’s a commonly held critical view that David Bowie’s work was a hugely influential force in shaping the musical landscape of the 1970s. From the epochal Ziggy Stardust era, to his fearless adoption of Philly soul and his trailblazing experimentation in Berlin during the later half of the decade: Bowie had demonstrated a fearlessness towards musicmaking that almost single-handedly dictated the musical and social trends of the decade – and left many of his contemporaries floundering. With 1980’ 1980’ss Scary Monsters, he tied a neat ribbon over his 70s canon by thematically and musically revisiting key facets of his past while also looking ahead to the future. Ever surprising, his next move was perhaps the most unpredictable of them all. For a multitude of reasons (chiefly, perhaps, his high-profile signing to EMI Records for an estimated $17.5 million), David Bowie decided that the next stage of his career required some bona-fide hits. Despite being an artist of overwhelming significance, Bowie had only really accumulated a small cluster
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of successful singles. As the 80s dawned and status was seemingly measured more and more against chart placements, Bowie realised that he’d have to reposition himself in the landscape of pop music yet again. Clearly feeling that his go-to producer Tony Visconti wasn’t perhaps the best choice to help him achieve this vision, Bowie sought out Chic’s Nile Rodgers to produce an uptempo, funky and an d accessible album. “We met at his Manhattan apartment, where he showed me a picture of Little Richard in a red Cadillac,” Rodgers told Pitchfork magazine magazine in 2016. “He said: ‘I want my album to sound like this’. He just had to show me a picture, and I completely understood. He wanted something that felt like the future but was rooted in rock ‘n’ roll, something soulful, black, and R&B, but morphed and evergreen. And that’s what Let’s Dance is.” is.” Visconti was hurt by Bowie’s rejection and – despite helping David with some of the sound for the UK dates of his later Serious Moonlight Tour – became estranged from Bowie until the late 90s.
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Guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan and drummer Omar Hakim would prove key contributors to Bowie’s new sound on Let’s Dance
Bowie on stage with Carmine Rojas (left) and Carlos Alomar (right) on the Serious Moonlight Tour
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Bowie spent time developing ideas for the record before bringing them to New York’s Power Station Studios. Along for the ride was a young Stevie Ray Vaughan – the startling, fiery blues guitarist whom Bowie had seen perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Bowie was astonished by the Texan’s skill, and thought he’d be a valuable asset to utilise in the production of his biggest pop statement to date. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t very familiar with David’s music when he asked me to play on the sessions,” Stevie Ray later said in an interview with Guitar World , but his virtuosic
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solos became a standout aspect of Let’s Dance ’s ’s sound, particularly on the title track. His work on the record helped him to further develop his own career as a world-class guitarist, before his untimely death in 1990. Also joining Bowie’s entourage at this point were the rock-solid duo of Omar Hakim on drums and Carmine Rojas providing the impactful bass. Carmine (who we interview on p62) remembered that the recording of Let’s Dance was was an incredibly fun experience. “Being creative with David was great,” Carmine tells us. “For the song Ricochet , which is a great song, he wanted
seriously “funking the song up”, the stage was set to like a Polynesian kind of sound to it. As a Puerto Rican coming from Brooklyn, I was a little bit perplexed by it deliver Bowie the commercial success he craved: “It was the first indication of what we could do together at first. There were no smartphones then, we couldn’t just Google it to figure out exactly what he meant. So as I took his ‘folk song’ and arranged it into something that the entire world would soon be dancing to and we had to really get into the feel of the track and kind of make our own version of it.” seemingly has not stopped dancing to for the last 35 years!” Nile said. said. “It becam becamee the bluepri blueprint nt not only for for Indeed, Rojas has nothing but positive memories of Let’s Dance the working with David on his biggest-ever record and the song, but for the entire album as well.” Recording at the Power tour. “Let’s Dance for for me was a great experience,” he explains. Station with Rodgers did indeed yield Bowie Bowie the the commercia commerciall “It was all pretty free, really, in terms of what we could do. Very success he’d been hoping for. The three-pronged chart assault little cues in the studio to tell us what we couldn’t do; we were of the record’s singles: the LET’S DANC E WAS infectious, uptempo Modern encouraged to play.” Love , a gorgeous, reworked A GREAT EXPERIENCE. PUT ON YOUR version of Iggy Pop’s China Girl IT WAS ALL PRETTY RED SHOES and of course, the ubiquitous FREE, REALLY, IN TERMS (and highly danceable) title The title track of the album – which of course, would become track became the biggest-selling OF WHAT WE COULD a global smash hit – was of Bowie’s career, with the DO… WE WERE conceived as a slightly different bank-balance boon undoubtedly beast to how it ended up, bringing smiles to the faces of his ENCOURAGED TO PLAY originally being arranged as a new friends at EMI. Yet despite smaller-scale track with a folkier his success, the superficial leaning. Rodgers recalled in an nature of many of the record’s interview with Billboard that that after lyrics, the obvious commercial T H E
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Nile Rodgers had built a reputation as a hitmaker during his time with Chic, and brought his funky magic to Bowie on Let’s Dance
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David sporting his infamous long hair in 1965
I THINK THE MUSIC I’M WRITING IS PROBABLY GOING TO REACH A NEWER AUDIENCE FOR ME, BUT IF I’M GOING TO REACH A NEW AUDIENCE THEN I’M GOING TO TRY AND REACH THEM WITH SOMETHING TO SAY
Bowie’s smartsuited look for Let’s Dance
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sheen of the music and Bowie’s more outgoing, affable personality in interviews and television appearances left many of the more avant-garde members of his fanbase cold. Bowie himself was, at the time, satisfied with his re-defined status as a pop supremo: “I think the music I’m writing at the moment is probably going to reach a newer audience for me, but if I’m going to reach a new audience then I’m going to try and reach them with something to say, which is on a very obvious and simplistic level.” Bowie’s new look and attitude was unveiled at an infamous press conference at Claridges on 17 March. For many devotees, it was a strange and uncanny thing to behold. Gone was any semblance of androgyny, the angular, emaciated look of the mid 70s or the brooding intensity of his personas from later in the decade. Instead, what we had was a peculiarly plastic version of David Bowie: accessible, conversational and resplendent with a sharp suit, suntanned skin and bleached blonde hair. He somehow seemed to embody the decade’s excesses. In the view of David Buckley, in his excellent Bowie biography, Strange Fascination, Bowie “ looked looked weird – like a Bowie clone. The new corporate skin made Bowie look businesslike
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and harsh. For the first time, he looked aristocratic, a member of the jet set. It was a difficult image for his fans to even like, let alone want to copy.“. His new – definitively ‘straight’ – persona alienated devotees, particularly those who felt kinship or admiration for the LGBT impact of his work. He told Rolling Stone ’s ’s Kurt Loder that: “The biggest mistake I ever made,” he said one night after a couple of cans of lager, “was telling that Melody Maker writer writer that I was bisexual. Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting…” It was an admission that many felt was a betrayal of the queer nature of much of his art. Let’s Dance -era -era Bowie openly laughed at Ziggy, too, saying (in the same interview): “I was so fed up with him… But I dragged it out last year and had a look, and I thought: ‘This is a funny film! This boy used to dress like that for a living? My God, this is funny! Incredible! Wait till my son sees this!’.” As shocking as Bowie’s new attitudes were, Buckley noted that the 1983 version of Bowie seemed to have manifested from a desire to “allow himself to enter into someone else’s vision of what a sensible, mature David Bowie should look like. Behind the suntan and smiles he looked as frozen and plastic as ever before. The new mask of ‘normality’ was the most extreme artifice of his career.” TURN THE HOLY PICTURES…
Despite Bowie’s huge shift in attitude in the early 1980s, the resulting record did the job it set out to do, and became a global smash hit. Yet critical divisions do vary quite dramatically to this day. This critical duel began almost as soon as the record was released. Some critics, such as Jay Cocks in Time magazine, magazine, found the record an utter delight, saying the record was “unabashedly commercial, melodically alliterative and lyrically smart at the same time”, while on the other side of the fence, Dave Henderson of Sounds Magazine said: said: “Bowie could have put a bit more effort into this miserable, ramshackle affair. The voice is fine, but it’s lazy, emotionless and twee. Bearing that in mind, it’s absolutely dynamic compared to the tedium of the arrangements and the terribly predictable
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Guitarist Earl Slick came on board to replace Stevie Ray Vaughan on the Serious Moonlight Tour
playing. Don’t be surprised if Mark Knopfler plays on the next LP.” In the view of Starman Starman biographer biographer (and The Bowie Years contributor) Years contributor) Paul Trynka, Let’s Dance achieved achieved Bowie’s objective: ultimately making Let’s Dance a a successful project, though not one we should so readily compare with the rest of his oeuvre. “The clichéd response is to say that Let’s Dance isn’t isn’t a great album. I’d say the jury’s still out, but the fact remains that it’s a great ‘80s’ album. It’s exciting and vital, despite the filler tracks. It’s unfair to compare it to something like Low – – it’s like comparing Harry Potter with Franz Kafka!” Despite the deliberately watered-down version of Bowie we found on the record, his David Mallettdirected videos continued to push boundaries, with the title track’s Australian-set video in particular highlighting the hypocrisy of global capitalism on indigenous Australians, and containing some fascinating imagery – though the cheesy, slow-mo shots of Bowie miming to the Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar solo date the video tremendously. The release of Let’s Dance dovetailed nicely with the advent of MTV, and Bowie’s new globally accessible, beach-blonde persona was a perfect fit for the video age, with his promos in heavy rotation. The channel served as many a young soon-tobe-fan’s introduction to the world of Bowie. Though debate often rages regarding the record’s merits, today Bowie’s Let’s Dance era era is generally regarded as a fun, positive time – though it heralded a gradual decline in artistic quality that Bowie didn’t really combat until the early part of the following decade. Nile Rodgers recalled in an interview with Pitchfork that, that, despite the project’s commercial sheen, making the record was an innovative experience: “I looked at it like an art project: the conflict of David Bowie making a commercial record is in itself an arty, cool thing, like, ‘Wow, that’s fun’. Hence my riff on China Girl , which I thought I was going to get fired 26 T H E
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over because it’s so corny. But he heard it and went, ‘That’s amazing!’. I was like: ‘Do you really mean it?’. And he’s like: ‘That’s genius’. You have to see that this is a very special man. This is not your average artist.” THE POWER TO CHARM
The resulting world tour of the album – dubbed the Serious Moonlight Tour – was Bowie’s first in five years and was an audacious, grand affair that saw him not only performing his recent material, but a selection of his classic tracks (including some Berlin-era material) sheened-up and sounding not out of place in a set that included such uncomplicated exuberance as Modern Love . The staggering undertaking saw 98 shows performed over four continents and played to around 2.5 million fans. Despite taking a break from the recording of Let’s Dance , the ever-enthused Carlos Alomar returned to take up core rhythm-guitar duties on the tour, and while initial plans were for Stevie Ray Vaughan to join the live band on lead guitar, circumstances dictated that Bowie stalwart Earl Slick took up the mantle, with the bass supplied by the increasingly integral Carmine Rojas. Carmine told us that: “It was a really sad thing really, it was working okay at first, though there were a lot of older songs that Stevie couldn’t get his head around. If you look at David’s catalogue, there’s some crazy stuff, musically. They weren’t really like your typical blues arrangements or anything like that.” Other accounts underline Vaughan’s annoyance with the level of choreography required, but the truth of the matter appears to be that Vaughan was replaced due to issues with his management. On the eve of the tour, SRV’s manager attempted to do a lastminute renegotiation of his fee, without the guitarist’s knowledge. Instead, Bowie’s promoter called their bluff and made the decision to replace Stevie Ray with Slick. The tour began in Brussels in May 1983 and ran right through to December, taking in the UK
1 9 8 2 – 1 9 8 3
LET’S DANCE IS IS EXCITING AND VITAL… IT’S UNFAIR TO COMPARE IT TO SOMETHING LIKE LOW LIKE LOW – IT’S LIKE COMP COMPARING ARING HARRY POTTER WITH WITH FRANZ KAFKA!
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The stage sets used on the Serious Moonlight Tour were striking, such as this ‘circular waterfall’ device
(including the Hammersmith Apollo) the USA, Europe and Asia. Bowie made sure he was in peak physical fitness to endure the tour’s stresses. Cutting out drugs completely (and demanding that no one else on the crew indulged either), Bowie’s early morning routine of shadow boxing and aerobics guaranteed that he was athletic enough to physically push himself each night to perform to thousands of people. Watching the Serious Moonlight Tour film, one can see that Bowie is at the top of his game as a live performer. Despite the upset of Vaughan’s absence, Carlos Alomar recollects that: “The concept for Serious Moonlight was really a big family, and I think it worked really, really well. There was a sense of an international community onstage, because the album had really hit the mark – it was a very happy time for him.” Rojas agrees that: “The tour was a happy time for everyone; when we played the stadiums, it was mind-boggling. It was my first time doing so many, and David’s first time, too. You can’t describe what it feels like playing in front of 100,000 people. If I had a time machine, I’d gladly do it again.”
Similar to The Spiders From Mars outfits in their sense of otherworldly character (or perhaps more aptly Bowie’s earlier, wackier comic-book band, The Hype), each member of the Serious Moonlight band had their own distinct outfit – Carlos was (in Bowie’s words) “a prince”, while Carmine wore a sailor’s cap; Earl Slick was the incongruous denim-clad rocker, while the sax players were dressed as a Cossack, a mountaineer and a big-game hunter. At the centre of it all was an increasingly dynamic besuited Bowie, who delivered incredible vocal performances night after night. As Nicholas Pegg notes in The Complete David Bowie : “More than any previous Bowie tour, the set list was unashamedly a Greatest Hits package, aimed at acquainting the new mass audience with Bowie’s back catalogue.” With only four tracks from Let’s Dance included, the sense that he was touring a new album was slight. On a show in Toronto, Earl Slick stepped aside as – out of the shadows – Bowie’s former on- and off-stage musical partner Mick Ronson returned to perform The Jean Genie . Ronson recalled in David Bowie: The Star Zone Interviews that: “I was playing Slick’s guitar, I had heard Slick play solos all 28 T H E
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THE CONCEPT FOR SERIOUS MOONLIGHT WA WAS S REALLY A BIG FAMILY. THERE WAS A SENSE SENS E OF AN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY ONST ONSTAGE AGE
night, so I decided not to play solos and I just went out and thrashed the guitar. I really thrashed the guitar, I was waving the guitar above my head and all sorts of things. It was funny afterwards because David said: ‘You should have seen Slick’s face…’ meaning he looked petrified. I had his prize guitar and I was swinging it around my head and Slick’s going ‘Waaaa… watch my guitar’, you know. I was banging into it and it was going round my head. Poor Slick. I mean, I didn’t know it was his special guitar, I just thought it was a guitar, a lump of wood with six strings!” Reflecting on the tour, Carmine tells us that: “We were out for like a year, or something like that. And I do think it took its toll, definitely. For David, I think it was a lot to control. Performing to that volume of people who were there to see you individually must have been really mind-boggling. If he didn’t have a good team of sergeants and generals, I think it could have fallen apart. Thankfully, he did!” Regardless of Bowie’s new status as a mainstream figure, and the apparent beginnings of a creative slump that would unfortunately come to dictate the
shape of his work as the decade progressed, the Serious Moonlight Tour was an undeniable success that helped to spread Bowie’s stardom around the world. Over a decade later, once Bowie had returned to the fringes – though in a state of heady creative nourishment on the heels of his recent work with Brian Eno on 1995’s 1: Outside – – he reflected in the pages of Interview magazine magazine that: “I went mainstream in a major way with the song Let’s Dance . I pandered to that in my next few albums, and what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did Let’s Dance .” .” In the there and then, Bowie was buoyed by his new worldwide fame, and sought to capitalise on his status with Let’s Dance ’s ’s hastily assembled followup. However, for the Bowie fans who’d found solace in Ziggy Stardust, innovation and promise in the Berlin trilogy, and an overt sense of awareness and belonging with Scary Monsters, his 1980s catalogue would increasingly detach itself from those worlds, and continue to chart a course directly for the ears of the general record-buying public. ● T H E
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Bowie performing on the Serious Moonlight Tour in LA in 1983
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NILE RODGERS AFTER DOMINATING THE 70S WITH THEIR INDIVIDUAL FUSIONS OF STYLE AND SUBST SUBSTANCE, ANCE, BOWIE AND NILE RODGERS DUG OUT THEIR DANCING SHOES AND FORMED A FUNKY ALLIANCE THA THATT IMPACTED BOTH T HEIR CAR EERS I N WA WAYS THEY COULD NE VER HAVE ENVISIONED. MARK LINDORES GETS HIS CHIC ON…
“I expected him to be ultra-flamboyant, but he was hile age may well dictate at which point Bowie entered our lives: just wearing a suit. I started talking to him because we had mutual friends; I knew Luther Vandross, Vandross, Carlos whether it was the glitter-festooned Starman languidly draping his arm Alomar and Dennis Davis, who had all been in his Young Americans band. Americans band. And we talked about music – around the shoulder of Mick Ronson on Top Of The Pops, Pops, the slick YSL-suited half man/half he had a great knowledge of R&B and he looked me in the eye and said: ‘Nile, I want you to make hits’.” alien hybrid in The Man Who Fell To Earth or Earth or Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth Labyrinth,, few of us could say our TOO FUNKY? introduction to Bowie was as memorable as that of It was a bold proclamation, given that Nile Rodgers. both were experiencing something “I was in a band called New York of a career lull at that point. Two City – this was way before Chic – years on from Scary Monsters and we were playing in Miami. (And Super Creeps), Creeps), Bowie’s I met this girl in a nightclub WHEN WE PLAYED HIM who invited me to spend only hits had been Under Pressure with with Queen and, the night with her on the OUR VERSION OF LET’S DANCE beach,” Nile recalls. “She even more bizarrely, I ASKED HIM: ‘DAVID, DID WE Little Drummer Boy with with was a photographer and MAKE IT TOO FUNKY?’ AND HE wanted to get naked under Bing Crosby. Rodgers, meanwhile, was also the stars. She brought her SAID: ‘NILE, IS THERE SUCH A favourite music with her considering a change of THING?!’’ AND RIGHT THEN, THING?! direction, pondering a and it was Ziggy Stardust… – it was amazing! I’d never move into more abstract I COULD TELL HE WAS genres – jazz and classical heard songs like that, music FEELING WHAT I WAS! like that before. That was a – following the ‘Disco Sucks’ backlash that had brought his great introduction to Bowie, naked on Miami Beach listening run of incredible success with Chic, Sister Sledge and Diana Ross to an to Suffragette City . After that, I started devouring all his albums and loved them. abrupt halt two years earlier earlier.. Rodgers, it seemed, had touched a nerve with He had amazing scope.” Almost a decade later, and Nile was actually Bowie during that initial conversation by referencing Young Americans. Americans. David had recently taken a rare introduced to Bowie in 1982 at the Continental, an after-hours club in New York. York. “I got there about holiday to the South Pacific, where he listened to a vast range of music to determine where his passion five or six in the morning with Billy Idol, and saw David sitting alone at the bar drinking orange juice lay and found himself drawn back to the R&B records he had loved growing up – Little Richard, James – he was almost unrecognisable,” Nile says.
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Brown, Buddy Guy, Albert King and Elmore James. “I asked myself: ‘Why have I chosen this music?’” he later said. “It was very non-uptight music, and it comes from a sense of pleasure and happiness. There is enthusiasm and optimism on those recordings.” That became the impetus for what would become Let’s Dance and, and, after talking with Nile, he cancelled plans to work with long-time producer Tony Visconti and enlisted Rodgers instead. Nile flew to Switzerland to begin work on the record at Bowie’s home and nearby Mountain Studios, with what would become the title track being the first thing they worked on. “I was lying in my bed at David’s house in Switzerland,” Nile recounts. “And he came into my bedroom and was so excited, he was like: ‘Man, I got this song! It’s a great idea!’. He played and sang this song for me, and I sat there looking at him, and I was puzzled, because he had told me we were going to do a hit album, and when he sang Let’s Dance , it sounded like a folk song. “So I listened, and it didn’t sound anything like a hit, and I thought: ‘Maybe he’s testing me to see if I’m some kind of sycophant’. I asked him if I could do an arrangement of it, because I come from dance music and if you’re gonna call a song that, it has to make people dance. “When we played him our version, he loved it. He was like: ‘You’re right! It works as a funky song!’. I asked him: ‘David, did we make it too funky?’ and he said: ‘Nile, is there such a thing?!’ and right then, I could tell he was feeling what I was feeling!”
Chic dissolved in 1983, the same year Let’s Dance, co-produced by Nile Rodgers, was released
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Bowie with Otis Blackwell and Nile Rodgers from Chic in New York City in 1983
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Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, co-founders of Chic, recording in New York in 1981
Hotshot Texan guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan supplied the blues licks that added an extra dimension to the album Let’s Dance album 34 T H E
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After recording more demos in Switzerland and rearranging preexisting tracks such as China Girl and and Cat People , work on the album was moved to New York’s Power Station studios, where Nile assembled a band of musicians, all of whom, with the exception of Stevie Ray Vaughan (who had been brought in on David’s request), request), were unknown to Bowie. “He really trusted me,” Nile says. “I’d never worked like that before. It was the easiest record I ever made. In 17 days, it was recorded, mixed and delivered. After we finished the last track, we never touched it again.” Upon release, Let’s Dance ’s ’s reviews focused on Rodgers’ input and there was a strong narrative of ‘how Bowie got his groove back’, leading Bowie to be seemingly reluctant to credit Nile’s contribution in interviews. “I think he was pissed off because the journalists kept mentioning me,” Nile says. “I’m guessing, because he never told me that – but I could just tell, because the lack of credit was serious.” Perhaps as a result of this, the pair didn’t work together again until 1993’s Black Tie White Noise , but Bowie later publicly acknowledged Nile’s contribution on Let’s Dance when when he presented him with an award in 2011. “It was the sweetest, nicest, coolest thing ever,” Nile says. “It was so loving. He was somewhat struggling to speak; you could tell he was ill. It had been reported that he’d had a heart attack, so he would’ve just been recovering. It was just him showing me lots of love. And it meant so much. After all, this was a man who put me back on the right path – he changed my life.” ●
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Lady Gaga and Rodgers perform a tribute to Bowie during the 58th Grammy Awards in LA in 2016
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David Bowie lead vocals, horn arrangements, production Nile Rodgers guitar, horn arrangements, production Stevie Ray Vaughan lead guitar Carmine Rojas bass guitar Bernard Edwards bass guitar Omar Hakim drums Tony Thompson drums Rob Sabino keyboards, piano Stan Harrison tenor saxophone; flute Robert Aaron tenor saxophone Steve Elson baritone saxophone, flute Mac Gollehon trumpet Sammy Figueroa percussion Frank Simms, George Simms, David Spinner backing vocals Bob Clearmountain engineering, mixing
LET’S DANCE DAVID BOWIE’S BLISTERING ARRAY OF SINGLES SOUNDTRACKED THE SUMMER OF 1983, WITH THE PARENT ALBUM BECOMING HIS BESTSELLING RECORD. ANDY PRICE WONDERS IF L E T ’ S D A N C E MAY ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST STEP ON A PATH TO DECLINE…
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hough originally conceived as a Tony Visconti-produced continuation of Scary Monsters…’ art-rock sound, Bowie’s signing to EMI for a reported $17.5 million surely contributed to his decision to utilise the production skills of pop-funk Midas, Nile Rodgers. Rodgers’ presence infused the resulting 1983 album, Let’s Dance, with a typically Chic-esque buoyancy and a bright summery sheen that made the mainstream popbuying public – and the EMI executives – weak at the knees. Bowie himself, unusually, played nothing instrumental on the record (despite conceiving many tracks acoustically, including the title track) and would later describe Let’s Dance as as a “real singer’s album”. His voice – now comfortably 36
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locked into a lower register baritone – was perfectly suited to the new funk-pop aesthetic. Musically,, the record straddles rock, funk Musically and disco, with a notable lack of any material too sonically (or lyrically) challenging. Until this point, an artful and innovative streak had ran through David Bowie’s work. Even the previous stab at chart success, Young Americans, had an ironic air of alien detachment which came across in the Americana-trouncing title track and the politically charged Somebody Up There Likes Me . Bowie’s outsider sensibility was never more striking than on his curtain-raising compositions. From the weary documentation of global catastrophe that opened Ziggy Stardust…; the lurching, mechanical arrival of the Thin White Duke on Station To Station’s
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TRACK BY TRACK SIDE ONE 1 MODERN LOVE Opening with a scratchy guitar, before the explosive propulsion of the beat comes in, Modern Love is is the very definition of upbeat, with call-and-response vocals that owe a debt to B owie’s beloved Little Richard. Despite being the jauntiest song Bowie had recorded in a long time, there’s an air of self-conscious admission, with the line: “It’s not really work, it’s just the power to charm,” perhaps alluding to Bowie’s new ambition of courting the Top 10 at the expense of his own art. Regardless of how you read it, Modern Love is, is, at heart, a bright and euphoric pop song that sets out his sonic stall for the rest of the decade.
2 CHINA GIRL It’s quite surprising that here, on an album that so consciously attempted to seduce the mainstream, that Bowie would choose to highlight his association with Iggy Pop, one of rock’s most nefarious and unhinged figures. China Girl – – a track that Bowie and Iggy wrote together in Berlin for 1977’s The Idiot , is reimagined here with a vibrant arrangement that’s among the record’s highlights, cannily laying (in many people’s minds) solo claim to a great song. Bowie’s vocal here is among his strongest ever committed to record, sounding coolly confident and comedically ‘sexy’, while the danceable rhythm and oriental riff stick in the mind. Despite being a great song, the track’s video really hasn’t aged well. Despite some compelling visual moments, including a mock execution, the heavy use of cultural cliché reaches its apex when Bowie stretches his eyes in a feat of David Brent-esque cringe.
3 LET’S DANCE Kicking off with a step-by-step, ascending vocal part that recalls The Beatles’ Twist And Shout before before launching into the utterly infectious – and aptly danceable – riff, Let’s Dance is is Bowie’s new familyand chart-friendly persona in excelcis. Originally brought into the studio by Bowie with a folky/acoustic arrangement, the magic of Nile Rodgers transformed the track into perhaps one of Bowie’s most famous, and certainly among his most widely popular. Bowie’s vocal is wonderfully dynamic as he soars, dips and rises over Rodger’s Chic-recalling funk rhythm, with a truly sublime bassline that works as a hook in its own right. Despite the impact of the single edit yielding an impressive transatlantic No. 1, The album cut is overlong and meandering, stretching out beyond the seven-minute mark. It doesn’t really matter, though, of course – for Bowie, now a major MTV star, the aim of the game was to get people out of their seats and onto the dancefloor.
4 WITHOUT YOU The record’s first non-single (if you’re listening in the UK at least), Without You is more subdued than the opening trio of hits while still being a glacially smooth, pleasant listen. Once again, though, there’s a certain vacuity to the lyric, but Bowie’s vocal is silky smooth and utterly listenable: casually and loosely lathered over the rigid arrangement that features a memorable, repetitive bass motif. The aural allusions to Roxy Music’s output of the same period (particularly the previous year’s Avalon) seem fairly deliberate. 38 T H E
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Bowie on the Serious Moonlight Tour (in support of Let’s Dance ) at Wembley Arena in 1983
title track; the quixotic shower of electronic noise that kickstarted Low and the squalling hysteria of It’s No Game – – David Bowie had an undeniable knack for welcoming his listeners to his records with often challenging statements. Modern Love , the track which launches Let’s Dance , was among the first tracks cut for the album and introduces the listener to a completely new incarnation of Bowie: the commercially minded hitmonger. On any other album, his opening, spoken-word lyric: “I know when to go out, and when to stay in. Get things done”, would read like the portentous beginnings of an insight into a deranged mind, however here, among the lightweight synths and bouncy upbeat chords, Bowie’s delivery sounds like an off-the-cuff mutter. To anyone still in any doubt, it soon became quite clear: David Bowie had made a record of uncomplicated populism. Though this record (and the majority of Bowie’s 80s material, for that matter) has something of a Marmite reputation with Bowie scholars, for what it is, the effervescent Modern Love undoubtedly undoubtedly works as an explosion of light and colour that really does feel, strangely, like a ‘grand finale’-type track, as opposed to an opener. Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into the mix… synths, sax and about 15 guitars collide. Perhaps, as several Bowie writers have theorised, the lyric could be read as apologetic, with such lines as: “There’s no sign of life” and the repeated use of the line “I never wave bye-bye”, it’s tempting to read the song
“Having the synth bass with the Fender bass [on the title track]… David threw in little elements like that and gave it that edge and excitement exci tement that I probably wouldn’t’t have thought of” wouldn N I
as the formerly serious artist making a sorrowful confession about his L E R O D G E R S new approach. This is almost overtly stated in the line: “It’s not really work, it’s just the power to charm”. Though the verse implies a certain knowing depth, the hollow (but still infectious) chorus claims that everything pales in comparison to the vague concept of ‘modern love’ – with the allusions to getting to ‘the church on time’ and ‘god and man’ clearly alluding to a traditionally heterosexual I’m Only Only Dancing Dancing this is not. marriage. John, I’m VISIONS VISIO NS OF SWASTIK ASTIKAS AS
In Rotterdam in 1983 on the Serious Moonlight Tour. The album’s commercial success led to high demand for tickets and expansion into larger venues
Elsewhere, the lush production of Bowie’s version of the Iggy Pop song that he co-wrote in 1977, China Girl , gives way to the album’s only real hint of menace, with the bridge’s lyrics containing such shockingly incongruous lyrics as: “Visions of swastikas in my head/ Plans for everyone” and: “You shouldn’t mess with me, I’ll ruin everything you are” – reminding the listener of the original, darker version of the song, and of Bowie’s chemically fuelled globetrotting with Iggy. The mix, however (complete with Nile’s parodic ‘oriental’-sounding riff), is densely packed. Carmine Rojas’ Under My Thumb -referencing -referencing bassline keeps the track’s momentum going, while Bowie’s absolutely incredible vocal performance has a large soundstage on which to shine.
The central piece of the album – the ubiquitous title track – remains a wonderful collision of world music, rock and funk which sounds as fresh today as it did in 1983. The dense arrangement was conceived by the last vestiges of David Bowie’s inventive spirit. Nile Rodgers remembers in David Buckley’s Strange Fascination: “Having the synth bass with the Fender bass, David threw in little elements like that and gave it that edge and excitement that I probably wouldn’t have thought of.” Despite being a curious jumble of ideas, the song is quite the most ‘danceable’ track Bowie ever produced, dominating the airwaves and giving Bowie his biggest commercial smash to date (aside from the frequently reissued Space Oddity), reaching No. 1 on both sides of the pond and figuring prominently in charts around the world. Bowie had actually achieved his goal of making his most startling transformation to date: from the husk of an edgy, avant-garde figure came a familyfriendly purveyor of disco fare. As Carmine Rojas tells us, there was another unsung hero behind the scenes who was responsible for the track’s impact. “Bob Clearmountain really should get a lot of credit for the record’s sound as well,” Rojas recalls. “Bob, as an engineer, really captured what we were doing live in the room. He gets very little credit historically, but take it from me, he was vital to that record.” Stevie Ray Vaughan, whose guitar playing dominates Let’s Dance , provides the most wonderful guitar part of the entire record, his blues-influenced riffery adding yet another facet to an already sonically kaleidoscopic track. T H E
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TRACK BY TRACK SIDE TWO 5 RICOCHET Perhaps the most interesting track on the record for Bowie scholars and devotees of his previous output, Ricochet was one of Bowie’s favourite compositions on Let’s Dance , featuring a lyric that explores the societal and cultural destitution wrought by 80s gung-ho capitalism (also a theme in the title track’s video). Ricochet contains contains a wealth of countermelodies, backing vocals, curious monologues and expressions that are heavily distorted and barely coherent – just out of reach of the ear. The insistent, knocking rhythms and pulsing bass parts add a slightly uneven air to the song. It stands as the track that (with a slightly more stripped-back arrangement) could have easily fitted on Bowie’s previous record.
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Bowie’s cover of Metro’s 1976 track is another lushly produced feat of serene magic from Nile Rodgers, with the spiky riff recalling China Girl and and the silky synth underbed providing a warm ocean of sound for Bowie to vocally sail. Despite the track’s sonic charms, though, many critics disparage Bowie’s approach to this song – replacing the originally homoerotic lyrics with tamer, more generic male/female fare (perhaps with the aim of making it more palatable for the masses). This also coincided with Bowie publicly claiming that his politically charged 1972 statement of “I’m gay and I always have been”, was in fact a “major miscalculation”. For many, this represented an act of cultural abandonment.
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PEOPLE (PUTTING OUT FIRE) Released as a single prior to the album, this reworked version of a truly magnificent song switches gear somewhat. While the original, Giorgio Moroder collaboration (wonderfully used in the soundtrack to Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) Basterds ) was a menacing, murky record of gradually rising Baal -recalling -recalling intensity, the Let’s Dance version version reimagines the song as a camp, gothic piece that sounds like it wouldn’t be out of place in a production of The Phantom Of The Opera. Opera . Regardless, the original melody, lyric and chord structure is thankfully retained, though Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar parts are totally incongruous here. For our money, though, the original single version is far and away the definitive version.
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Despite the debatable strengths of the previous seven tracks, any goodwill we might have left is sadly dissipated by the album’s finale. Shake It is really the point where Bowie’s immediate future – the sad relegation of songwriting craft and creative intention beneath boisterous, by-the-numbers production – is assured. The disposable Shake It is is often the track that Let’s Dance naysayers naysayers hold up in justification of their criticisms: it sounds like a half-arsed rehash of the title track, but with none of the ebullience and cool that made that track a huge hit. For the first time since the late 60s, Bowie pens a lyric that is flatly awful. Shake It marks marks the first definitive example of Bowie’s creative drought. 40 T H E
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Despite the song being clearly designed to dance to, underneath lurks a quirky, intriguing lyric, with the act of dancing being the only recourse in the fear that “tonight is all”. We’re not just dancing in joyous abandon here, Bowie suggests we’re dancing away the pain of something much more bleak. As Nicholas Pegg suggests in The Complete David Bowie , the song bears a thematic relationship with the bittersweet triumph of “Heroes” . The song’s deeper subtleties are underlined by the superb video, which become almost as omnipresent as the song itself, due to its heavy rotation on the fledgling MTV. As the newly bleached blonde Bowie casually strums away in an outback bar, a wonderful visual narrative underlines the plight of oppressed, over-worked and underpaid indigenous Australians, and also implied a withering criticism of corporate culture in general. Though the video is widely loved, even by those that spurn the majority of Bowie’s 80s excess, the on-the-nose thematic point of it seems a tad hypocritical, as EMI’s new golden boy embarked on his highly lucrative assault on the charts. After this opening salvo of expertly crafted hit-singlesin-waiting, the laid back stroll of Without You and You and the tensely rhythmic Ricochet, Ricochet, with with a social-commentarycharged lyric fleetingly hint back to the more cerebral aspects of his former work, while Bowie’s cover of Metro’s Criminal World is is a delightful listen, though takes some disappointing liberties with the original lyric. The version of Cat People (Putting Out Fire) found on Let’s Dance is is inferior to the gloomy original collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, but is still a strong song, particularly vocally, though does have the whiff of forced theatricality about it. The only real howler in our estimation is the dreary flotsam of Shake It , which, unfortunately, signposts some of the lazier songwriting and generic production values on the ill-fated follow up. Upon release, Let’s Dance was was greeted with equal parts acclaim and contempt. Surprisingly, the occasionally irascible Charles Shaar Murray was delighted. “It’s warm, strong, inspiring and useful. Let’s Dance is is irresistible,” he espoused in the NME . “You should be ashamed to say you don’t love it.” Meanwhile, Dave Henderson at Sounds Magazine decried the record as being a “miserable and ramshackle affair. Lazy, Lazy, emotionless and twee”. This critical polarity has never really gone away. DEBATE GOES ON
Evaluation of Let’s Dance switches switches quite dramatically from being perceived as the beginning of Bowie’s decline into mediocrity and creative impoverishment to being an immaculately well-produced and ultimately widely accessible pop record. Perhaps the truth of the matter lurks somewhere in between. While aficionados of the innovation-led Berlin Trilogy and the angular paranoia of Scary Monster s… s… often balk at the commercially motivated direction of this album, many see it as somewhat ahead of its time, particularly in the wake of the resurgence in popularity of Nile Rodgers’ funk rhythms in modern pop. Outside of the wider context of Bowie’s career and the ramifications that his new, commercial direction would have on it, we say that Let’s Dance remains remains a superb pop record, with the three singles in particular forever enshrined – for better or worse – as Bowie standards. ●
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While afici While aficionados onados of the innovation-led Berlin Trilogy and the angular paranoia of Scary Monsters… often balk at the commerc commercially ially motivated direction of this album, many see it as somewhat ahead of its time
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TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT THE FOLLOW-UP TO L E T ’ S D A N C E WAS A BIZARRE COMBINATION OF TINA TURNER, IGGY POP AND REGGAE, EXPOSING AN ARTIST LACKING DIRECTION. MARK LINDORES EXPLORES THE TROUBLED BIRTH OF ONE OF BOWIE’S MOST CHALLENGING RECORDS…
lthough 1984’s Tonight is regarded as one of Bowie’s most lacklustre and uninspired records, his initial vision for the album would have resulted in a very different body of work, had time constraints allowed it. While on the road on his mammoth Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983, playing to thousands of fans every night in sold-out stadiums, David was leaning towards the idea of adopting a more political stance next, in the form of a protest album. Despite having sold over 11 million copies of Let’s Dance , he had been annoyed by the press’ focus on Nile Rodgers’ contribution to the album (particularly in America). This was undoubtedly compounded by Bowie’s own feeling that he had, at times, felt like a guest performer on his own album. After completing his tour, a planned break failed to materialise and, subject to intense pressure from his record company to deliver a follow-up album, Bowie was ensconced
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in a Montreal recording studio within four months of his final Serious Moonlight show. “It was really badly thought out,” says co-producer Hugh Padgham. “He was probably coerced into the studio before he was ready, ready, or he thought he h e could do no wrong, going into the studio underprepared. To suddenly have a worldwide successful record and to be a big star [again] was probably on his mind more than anything else. That is probably epitomised by the fact that there were some great songs that he couldn’t be bothered to finish, because he just wanted the record out.” ROAD WORN
As sessions began in May 1984, it soon became obvious how unprepared he was. He’d previously stated that he couldn’t write while on the road and, having just jus t wrapped the biggest tour of his career, had only a handful of song ideas ready. ready. A planned live album of the Serious Moonlight Tour would have bought him some time, but the album was cancelled, and the label was keen
IT WAS REALLY BADLY THOUGHT OUT… HE WAS PROBABLY COERCED INTO THE STUDIO BEFORE HE WAS READY, OR HE THOUGHT HE COULD DO NO WRONG, GOING INTO THE STUDIO UNDERPREPARED
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The crowd wait expectantly at Feijenoord Stadion in Rotterdam, for a June 1983 date on the Serious Moonlight Tour
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Omar Hakim played on both Let’s Dance and Tonight
to capitalise on Bowie’s career resurgence. Despite the success of his previous album, the general consensus had been that Nile Rodgers’s work on Let’s Dance had had upstaged Bowie on his own record, and he vetoed the idea of having Rodgers onboard for his new album. Instead, David went into the studio with Hugh Padgham, who was best known for being bassist in disco group Heatwave and a musical collaborator of British soul sensation David Grant – Padgham had recently produced albums for The Police, XTC, Genesis
and Derek Bramble. Band-wise, Lenny Pickett’s Borneo Horns were retained from the live dates and there were some holdovers from the Let’s Dance sessions: sessions: Omar Hakim on drums, Carmine Rojas on bass, Sammy Figueroa on percussion, Carlos Alomar on guitar and Tina Turner guesting on the title track. Iggy Pop, Bowie’s partner in crime from his time in Berlin, emerged as the most constant presence on the album. As well as including three Iggy covers on the record, the pair wrote and recorded new songs that
Opposite: Carmine Rojas, Bowie and Carlos Alomar performing at Wembley on the Serious Moonlight Tour
Right: Saxophonist Lenny Pickett – seen here at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory in 1992 – was retained for Tonight from from the Serious Moonlight live dates
IGGY POP POP,, BOWIE’S PARTNER IN CRIME FROM HIS TIME IN BERLIN, EMERGED EMERGED AS THE MOST CONSTANT PRESENCE ON THE TONIGHT ALBUM. ALBUM. AS WELL AS INCLUDING THREE IGGY COVERS ON THE RECORD, THE PAIR WROTE AND RECORDED RECOR DED NEW SONGS
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Unusually, for the Tonight recording recording sessions, Bowie didn’t play any instruments on the album
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would not only make it onto Tonight , but also appear on Pop’s Blah-Blah-Blah album two years later. Early sessions for Tonight saw saw David and the band working on tracks with a strong reggae influence, though it soon became apparent that the album lacked direction. The Iggy Pop tracks were reimagined completely from the originals, particularly in the case of Tonight , which was reworked as a poppy-reggae duet with Tina Turner, with some of the more graphic lyrics about heroin addiction omitted (“I didn’t want to inflict that on her”, Bowie said). As well as the Iggy covers, however, Bowie ill-advisedly recorded his versions of The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows and Chuck Jackson’s I Keep Forgettin’ , resulting in a hybrid album of new tracks and covers.
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New Bowie originals, Blue Jean and Loving The Alien are among the standout songs on the album, and serve as a frustrating reminder of how Tonight could could have potentially been a much better album had its architect been given time to develop his songs further. Loving The Alien, with its lyric about the political unrest in the Middle East, obviously originated from the protest-album concept. Equally interesting, however, was Blue Jean, which David called an updated take on the “sexist rock ’n’ roll” of Eddie Cochrane’s Something Else . And for the first time since the Thin White Duke, it also saw him adopt the guise of a new character, that of Screaming Lord Byron. It was this character, portrayed by David in the epic, 20-minute-plus short
THE IGGY POP TRACKS WERE WERE REIMAGINED COMPLETELY FROM THE ORIGINALS, PARTICULARLY TONIGHT , WHICH WAS REWORKED AS A POPPY-REGGAE POPPY-REGGAE DUET WITH TINA TURNER, WITH SOME OF THE GRAPHIC LYRICS ABOUT HEROIN ADDICTION OMITTED
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Bowie unveils his new persona, Screaming Lord Byron, in the Grammy-winning Jazzin’ For Blue short film Jean short
Jazzin’ in’ For Blue Jea Jeann, that was essentially the film Jazz focus of the promotion of the album. By now an MTV mainstay, Bowie worked with director Julien Temple on the film in which he plays both rockstar and incompetent businessman Vic, who takes his girlfriend to a Lord Byron show to impress her, only to see her run off with her idol at the end.
The performance segment served as the Blue Jean video and received heavy rotation on MTV, going on to win the Best Music Video Grammy. Illustrating how powerful the medium of video had become, it not only made Blue Jean a hit, but also played a huge role in the success of Tonight , sending it briefly to No. 1 in the UK, despite its lukewarm critical reception. It wasn’t just the critics that didn’t embrace the record. Bowie himself appeared embarrassed by it, reluctantly agreeing only to a single interview to promote it. “There’s stuff on the album that I could really kick myself about,” he later said. “When I listen to those demos it’s like: ‘How did it turn out like that?’. You should hear Loving The Alien on demo. It’s wonderful on demo, I promise you! But on the album, it’s not as wonderful.” After Loving The Alien and the title track both flopped as singles, the Tonight era era was brought to an end and Bowie once again found himself contemplating his place in the current musical landscape, busying himself with film projects and one-off collaborations. Reflecting on the album’s failure, he said: “There’s a particular sound I’m after that I haven’t really got yet; I think I got quite close to it on Dancing With The Big Boys. I got very musical over the last couple of years – trying to write musically and develop things the way people used to write in the 50s. I stayed away from experimentation. Now, I think I should be a bit more adventurous. I’ll either crack it on the next album or retire…” ●
David Bowie performing at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1983 48 T H E
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I GOT VERY MUSICAL OVER OVE R THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS – TRYING TO WRITE MUSICALLY AND DEVELOP THINGS THE WAY PEOPLE USED TO WRITE IN THE 50S. I STAYED AWAY FROM EXPERIMENTATION. NOW, I THINK I SHOULD BE A BIT MORE ADVE ADVENTUROUS NTUROUS
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David Bowie vocals, production Derek Bramble guitar; guitar synthesiser; bass guitar; synthesiser; backing vocals, production Carlos Alomar guitars Omar Hakim drums Carmine Rojas bass guitar Guy St Onge marimba Sammy Figueroa percussion Tina Turner lead vocals on Tonight Iggy Pop, Robin Clark, George Simms, Curtis King backing vocals Stanley Harrison alto saxophone; tenor saxophone Lenny Pickett tenor saxophone; clarinet Steve Elson baritone saxophone
TONIGHT BOWIE RAISED HIS PROFILE BUT ALIENATED HIS FANS W I T H T O N I G H T – AN ALBUM THAT SITS AMONG HIS MOST CHALLENGING LISTENS. BUT IS I T REALLY AS BAD AS ALL THAT? WILL SALMON SPENDS AN EVENING WITH DAVID…
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onight is is a product of necessity. Let’s Dance had had done something remarkable the previous year, transforming David Bowie from the perennial pop outsider into a stadium-level star. After years striving for fame, he now found himself with a surfeit of it. The pressure was on to keep the momentum up – and that required a new product. That may sound a little cynical, but, well, that’s Tonight . Most will agree that it is Bowie’s weakest solo album and one that exists largely to fulfil a perceived commercial obligation. Even Bowie himself was writing it off as early as 1987. His apathy towards the project is apparent throughout. It’s a slight album – just nine tracks, with five of those covers. It’s tonally all over the place and Bowie doesn’t play a note on the 50 T H E
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record. That wasn’t a problem on Let’s Dance , but that album had something that Tonight sorely sorely lacks: Nile Rodgers. And yet, this being David Bowie, Tonight can’t help but be an interesting album. It fails in comparison to the rest of his discography, but it at least does so in a fascinating way. If Bowie was mostly disengaged from the process – and all the signs point to that being the case – it still has enough traces of his innate genius to make it worthwhile, and occasionally even excellent. FROM NEW YORK TO SHANTY TOWN
Following Let’s Dance , Bowie embarked on the epic Serious Moonlight Tour; 96 shows over 15 countries. He was fit, healthy and rocking a slick new look. It was a storming success, translating
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TRACK BY TRACK SIDE ONE his earlier material for his new mainstream audience, while Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence had had boosted his 1 LOVING THE ALIEN big-screen credibility. But with that came an expectation Tonight starts strong with this seven-minute “anti-religious” to keep the music coming, and that was a problem – epic. Bowie’s vocal is terrific – particularly on the chorus. Bowie claimed that he found it hard to write on tour. The outro doesn’t need to be as long as it is, but Alomar’s Let’s Dance Rather than take his time and release things at his guitar has thrust and swagger. The song was apparently own pace, he elected to bang out a follow-up album to a personal favourite of Bowie’s future wife, Iman. “keep my hand in, I suppose”, as he told NME ’s ’s Charles Shaar Murray. He justified the lack of actual David 2 DON’T LOOK DOWN Bowie songs by comparing Tonight to to his post-Aladdin Sane covers covers album, Pin Ups. Indeed, he had originally The first of the album’s three Iggy Pop covers (originally shortlisted The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows, which from Iggy’s 1979 album, New Values) Values) is a limp – if nicely arranged and produced – reggae reinterpretation. It’s a appears here, for the 1973 record. weird choice to follow Loving The Alien, Alien, and leaves you Despite this slightness, Bowie, Iggy Pop (who uncertain precisely what this album wants to be. co-wrote two of the new tracks and provided three of the covers), the musicians and producer Derek Bramble took their time in the studio, with sessions running to 3 GOD ONLY KNOWS five weeks – a comparative age for Bowie – with Before even hearing it, you probably think that covering Bramble reportedly insisting on take after take, much to the Beach Boys classic was ill-advised at best, but it the musicians’ annoyance. Carlos Alomar, whose guitar actually starts well enough, with a Scott Walker-ish vocal. is a high point of the album, dismissed the ex-Heatwave Don’t get your hopes up however, as the song grows more bassist as “a nice guy, but he didn’t know jack-shit bombastic it rapidly falls apart, transforming one of the about producing”. greatest songs of all time into insipid MOR lounge music. Engineering the record was Hugh Padgham – himself a highly qualified producer who took the less 4 TONIGHT prestigious role, despite some Iggy’s harrowing tale of a heroin overdose is misgivings. “It was too soon recontextualised as another naff attempt at reggae. to record it,” Padgham told “I went mainstream in a A guest vocal from Tina Turner is buried in the mix, Rolling Stone in in 2016, making you wonder why they bothered getting major way, and then also stating that Bowie her in to do it in the first place. I pandered to that in my next had unfinished songs up his sleeve that were better few albums, and what than the material chosen I found I had done was put for the album. Despite these criticisms, Padgham called a box around myself” the sessions fun and when D A V I D B O W I E Bramble departed halfway through – in circumsta circumstances nces which remain slightly mysterious – he took on the production duties himself. Below: Bowie’s relentless tour schedule left him little time to write the follow-up to
THEY ALWAYS LET YOU DOWN WHEN YOU NEED THEM
The album opens with the seven-minute Loving The Alien – a promising start that marries an angry lyric about organised religion to a slick mix of marimba, synthetic strings and Alomar’s swaggering rock guitar. It’s a song that Bowie would return to later in his career and, while not quite a “Heroes” or or a Station To Station, it’s a powerful statement of intent… It’s a statement, however, that the rest of the album then ignores in favour of ill-fated attempts at reggae (proving, at least, that there was a genre that our man wasn’t supernaturally good at), a saccharine Tina Turner collaboration and the aforementioned overcooked take on God Only Knows. All of that said, Tonight definitely definitely has its moments – and because it’s not one of the canonised classic LPs, they sometimes feel like hidden gems. Loving The Alien is great, but the album’s first single, Blue Jean, is better. Bowie dismissed the song later as a throwaway bit of “sexist rock ‘n’ roll”, but it’s the best song on the album by a considerable distance, having wit, energy and a terrific vocal that took it into the Top 10. Dancing With 52
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TRACK BY TRACK SIDE TWO 1 NEIGHBOURHOOD THREAT Another Iggy Pop joint, though a lesser song than Tonight . There’s fun to be had in Alomar’s biting guitar work and overall, it feels like something that would have made a solid B-side to a single; but it’s not deserving of its promotion to full album status.
2 BLUE JEAN
The Big Boys has a thundering pulse to close out the album and Tumble And Twirl , written about Iggy ‘n’ Dave’s holiday adventures sounds convincingly sunkissed, with a nice vocal hook. Tonight succeeded succeeded in its mission, cruising straight to No. 1 and eventually going platinum – and despite its later reputation, the contemporary reviews were largely positive. It’s also blessed with a fine, Gilbert and George-inspired cover – arguably Bowie’s last really attractive LP cover until 1: Outside . Its reign was shortlived, however. Tonight was was too slick and commercial for fans, but too safe for a rapidly evolving pop audience. For perhaps the first time, Bowie was starting to feel old hat. “I went mainstream in a major way,” Bowie told interviewer Ingrid Sischy in 1995, talking of the Let’s Dance era. era. “I pandered to that in my next few albums, and what I found I had done was put a box around myself.” It’s hard to disagree with that verdict, but don’t write Tonight off off completely. Bowie learned from his mistakes here, following it up with the superior (if flawed in other ways) Never Let Me Down, before abandoning the mainstream for rocky terrain with Tin Machine. It’s nobody’s favourite David Bowie album, but play it again with an open mind and you may just find yourself won over by its goofy charms. ●
Tina Turner would guest on Tonight ’s ’s title track – a heavily reworked cover of Iggy Pop’s tale of addiction
Now that’s more like it! Unfairly ignored by many Bowie fans since its release because of the album’s bad reputation, Blue Jean is Jean is a short and snappy single, with a swaggering vocal, a cute marimba riff and thunderous drums. It peaked at No. 6 in the UK and No. 8 in the States, thanks in no small part to its fantastic video, but now stands as one of Bowie’s finest songs from the period.
3 TUMBLE AND TWIRL This travelogue tune (inspired by Dave and Iggy’s adventures in Borneo) is a huge amount of fun. It’s undoubtedly dated in its production, but there’s a decent vocal hook and a lightness of touch that stands in contrast to much of the album.
4 I KEEP FORGETTIN’ Bowie’s cover of Chuck Jackson’s 60s R&B classic is the closest the album gets to achieving the ‘ Pin Ups 2.0’ feel that Bowie talked about. Our hero hams it up, transforming the original’s minimalist groove into a camp rockabilly number. Weird, but fun.
5 DANCING WITH THE BIG BOYS Hashed out in the studio while both Bowie and Pop drunkenly improvised lyrics, Dancing With The Big Boys is a solid closer that captures the spirited brio you’d expect from the pair, while pointing to better things. T H E
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SCREEN IDOL MARK LINDORES EXPLAINS HOW, WRACKED WITH SELF-DOUBT AND CREA CREATIVE TIVE BLOCK, BOWIE FOLLOWED HIS COMMERCIAL PEAK BY EMBRACING HOME LI FE, BEFORE EMERGING WITH FILM ROLES, SOUNDTRACKS AND A ROLE ON THE WORLD’S BIGGEST ST STAGE… AGE…
n the early 80s, David Bowie had enjoyed two of the biggest-selling albums of his career with Let’s Dance and Tonight. Yet by the midpoint of the decade, the success of those records had come at a pretty hefty price, leaving him in a creative lull that he was struggling to climb out of. The infamous iconoclast who had pioneered innovation in rockstar sound and vision was now questioning his relevance in an ever-changing musical landscape – and, nearing 40, was even wondering if it was time to take a final bow. “I really did look at the prospect of just working as an artist until something else generated my interest in music, or if it never came back, I would be just expressing myself in another form,” Bowie said.
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“After Let’s Dance , I suddenly had this huge audience that I’d never had before. I didn’t quite know what I was supposed to do. So I just stayed in Europe, up in the mountains most of the time, writing and working, just doing the things that I really like.” Bowie’s self-imposed exile hadn’t just been due to his own artistic crisis. He had been devastated by the death of his half-brother at the beginning of 1985 and, feeling guilty for the turbulent start in life that his son had, was intent on providing him with a stable upbringing. With his role as father his priority and, feeling creatively spent, he sought solace in his career in film – and took tentative steps back into music by writing and recording contributions to their soundtracks.
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Previous page: Bowie filming a scene in Absolute Beginners Above: The Pat Metheny Group in 1979 (l to r: Mark Egan, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Danny Gottlieb). The band backed Bowie on This Is Not America
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forthcoming musical adaptation of Colin McInnes’ The first film of this period to receive a sprinkling 1959 novel. Bowie not only agreed, but also of Bowie stardust would be the 1985 spy drama, suggested that he contributed to the soundtrack. . The film’s soundtrack The Falcon And The Snowman Absolute Beginners was set in the sleazy Soho was being written by jazz-fusion guitarist Pat jazz joints of the late 50s, and told the story of Metheny and the Pat Metheny Group keyboardist, pop culture’s birth, and the Notting Hill race riots. Lyle Mays. The pair were Despite Bowie’s appearance working on the soundtrack, as slimy ad exec Vendice but the film’s director and Partners being brief, it was Bowie fan, John Schlesinger, used as a main selling point suggested that David could of the film, somewhat stealing work on the film’s main theme. the limelight from the film’s fi lm’s BOWIE TURNED DOWN The result was This Is Not breakout star, Patsy Kensit. When it came to the America – a ballad sung by THE ROLE OF THE PLATINUMBowie and backed by the Pat Bowie began HAIRED ÜBERMENSCH, MAX soundtrack, Metheny Group – which would working on it in secret at ZORIN, IN JAMES BOND’S trouble the Top 20 in the UK, Abbey Road Studios in June and also reached No. 32 in 1985 OUTING, A VIEW TO A 1985. Producers Clive Langer the USA’s Billboard Hot Hot 100. and Alan Winstanley were KILL, AND INSTEAD AGREED With film providing a tasked with putting together TO APPEAR IN A MUSICAL, welcome diversion from an ensemble of musicians, thinking about his next album, including Thomas Dolby and ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS , Bowie threw himself into Kevin Armstrong, to work on DIRECTED BY HIS FRIEND, FRIEND , acting, though he was still the Bowie session (they were JULIEN JULIE N TEMPLE keen to keep his musical eye briefed that they were working in. Bowie turned down the with ‘Mister X’). After working role of the villain in James on Bowie’s three tracks – Bond’s 1985 outing, A View Volare , That’s Motivation To A Kill (the platinum-haired and Absolute Beginners – he Übermensch, Max Zorin, was asked the players if they’d be instead played by Christopher Walken), and instead interested in taking part in a “little job” with him. agreed to appear in a musical, Absolute Beginners, Upon agreement, they were told that they were to directed by his friend, Julien Temple. be his band for Live Aid. Temple and Bowie had worked together on the Grammy-winning short film Jazzin’ For Blue Jean DANCING SHOES in 1984, and during the production, Temple had As Bowie had been unable to appear on Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? hit pitched the idea of Bowie making a cameo in his hit charity single the MUSIC FOR PICTURES
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Bowie as Vendice Partners on the set of 1986 movie
Absolute Beginners
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The music and video for Jagger and Bowie’s rendition of Dancing In The Street took took just 13 hours to complete
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previous November (although, to make up for it, LIVE AND KICKING he recorded a message for the B-side and filmed As well as two screenings of the video during the an introduction of the video), he’d been one of the Live Aid broadcast, Bowie’s live set was one of the standouts of the day, despite the impossible task first to agree to perform at Live Aid, and wanted to create something memorable of following Queen’s showstealing performance. After to mark the occasion. Originally envisioned as an delivering a five-song set, David dropped his final song ambitious satellite link-up duet of Bob Marley’s One Love to make way for a haunting with Bowie at Wembley and AT LIVE AID, BOWIE DROPPED film depicting the horrors Mick Jagger in Philadelphia, of the Ethiopian famine HIS FINAL SONG TO MAKE soundtracked by The Cars’ technical limitations put paid WAY FOR A HAUNTING FILM Drive , which prompted the to that plan, and also one in biggest surge in donations which Jagger would perform DEPICTING THE HORRORS from a borrowed NASA of the night. OF THE ETHIOPIAN FAMINE Following the concert, while rocket. A simple duet was the SOUNDTRACKED BY THE eventual outcome. many acts took advantage of the boosted profiles and As Bowie rejoined his new CARS’ DRIVE , WHICH band to continue rehearsals, inflated record sales the PROMPTED THE BIGGEST concert had brought them, the musicians were shocked SURGE IN DONATIONS to discover Jagger in tow, and Bowie – sitting at the top of the UK singles chart for the were given a few short hours OF THE NIGHT to learn how to play Martha final time with Dancing In The Street – – disappeared once And The Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street . again to continue work on his next film. A mere four hours later, the duet was recorded and But the role in question turned out to be one of Bowie’s most beloved and the track was ferried to a soundstage at London’s Docklands, where the duo camped it up for the famous – that of Jerath the Goblin King in Labyrinth. Bowie was keen to produce a work that his son video. The whole track and video was completed in 13 hours. could enjoy, and the Jim Henson-directed, George
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Bowie’s fivesong Live Aid performance preceded a harrowing film depicting the famine
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Lucas-produced musical fantasy film certainly fit that bill. Once again combining music with his screen roles, David contributed six tracks to the film’s soundtrack. When Labyrinth went on international release in 1986, reviews were mixed – but the film captured the imagination of many kids at the time and thereafter,, achieving cult status predominantly thanks thereafter to Bowie’s scenery-chewing performance. For Bowie’s ardent acolytes, however, the mid-80s were a frustrating time, as they waited patiently for new material while being subjected to the likes of Magic Dance . Salvation arrived, however, in the form of Absolute Beginners. The film was released the same year as Labyrinth and received similarly lukewarm reviews, but its title track was a different matter.. Reaching No. 2 in the UK charts, Absolute matter Beginners is an underrated gem in the Bowie discography – it’s often overlooked due to it not belonging to an iconic parent album, as most of his other big hits did; but it served as a reminder that the genius of old still burned inside him. ● 60
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Absolute Beginners was was a breakthrough role for Bowie’s co-star, Patsy Kensit
Bowie with Jennifer Connelly in a scene from the cult 1986 movie, Labyrinth
ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS
IS AN UNDERRATED GEM IN THE BOWIE DISCOGRAPHY – IT’S OFTEN OVERLOOKED DUE TO IT NOT BELONGING TO AN ICONIC PARENT ALBUM, BUT IT SERVE SERVED D AS A REMINDER THAT THE GENIUS OF OLD STILL BURNED INSIDE HIM
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AT THE HEART OF BOWIE’S 80S OUTPUT WERE A SUCCESSION OF POWERFUL BASSLINES. CARMINE ROJAS IS THE MAN WHO SUPPLIED THEM, AND ACCOMPANIED DAVID ON TWO WORLD TOURS. ANDY PRICE TALKS TALKS TO CARMINE ABOUT HIS MEMORIES OF BOWIE…
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was able to change so much. It was interesting following lam rock was slowly trickling over to America and we were just starting to him as a fan during the 70s.” So meeting him must have been quite something, hear about David,” David Bowie’s former sideman Carmine Rojas remembers, not least the invitation to record some music – we ask Carmine how that happened… when asked how he first became aware of David Bowie. “We couldn’t tell if it was a guy or a “Well the first time meeting him would have been January Jan uary 1983,” 1983,” Carm Carmine ine beg begins. ins. “I was was called called fro from m girl or what was going on!” While Bowie was in his early 70s Ziggy-era pomp, the Brooklyn-born bassist Nile Rodgers’ office to do a session at the Power Station, I didn’t know who for. I’d done quite a had just started a career playing sessions few sessions there previously. So I showed and touring with artists based out of up Monday morning, and I walk in New York: “I’d been a professional and it’s all pretty quiet and empty. musician since 1972.” Carmine I remember trying to find the loved how British artists would right room, I walked in one put their own unique spin on I WAS SLIGHTLY BLOWN traditional blues and R&B room and I saw a guy who AWAY. I DIDN’T KNOW looked like like David Bowie. arrangements. “I was just WHETHER TO APPROACH HIM OR coming out of Hendrix and He was talking to Bob Clearmountain, the famous The Who and the Stones. SAY ANYTHING TO HIM, BECAUSE So I was absorbing all these mix engineer. So I quickly I JUST DIDN’T KNOW REALLY walked out and an assistant English bands and was a real fan of what they were engineer came up to me WHO HE WAS AS A PERSON. and was like: ‘Hey, you’re bringing back to us. I found it BUT DAVID WAS JUST VERY interesting how British groups Carmine, right?’ PLEASANT AND CALM” “He said: ‘You’re going to would interpret R&B and make it different.” be doing a session in this room’, and pointed back to the room I’d And speaking of different, there was David Bowie – who aside from just walked out of. I was like: ‘Are you sure, who’s the job for?’ He looked at me provoking a bit of gender confusion, was slowly but surely becoming more well known as a with a grin and then said: ‘Um… David Bowie’. So I immediately thought: ‘Oh shit, that was him!’ So unique artist in the US – Carmine couldn’t help but be a fan. “His songs were very interesting. I listened to Space anyway, I walked in and got introduced. It was very Oddity a a lot, I loved that arrangement. A few years later surreal, in my head I was thinking: ‘This can’t be’, at that I saw David live at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia. point, in the early 80s, the guy was untouchable. I didn’t think I’d ever get close to him that quick and that easy.” At that point, I’d loved all the different combinations of Ameri cans and all David Bowie, through Ziggy to Young Americans Carmine remembers being “slightly blown away. that kind of stuff. I was happy for him as an artist that he Despite being a fan, I didn’t know whether to
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approach him or say anything to him, because I just didn’t know at first really who he was as a person. But David was just very pleasant and very calm.” THIS IS NO ORDINARY
So, to the music itself then: we ask Carmine what the session was for? “On that record, we had Omar Hakim playing drums, so that first day it was me and him just working on one song – I think it was Modern Love . To be honest with you, I was called in for a one-day session and thought that was all I was there for. So I’m just hoping the song will make the cut and I’ll appear on a David Bowie record at some point in the future, but at that point, we didn’t really know if this was an album project or just a single. It was all a big secret.” Carmine tells us that, at the end of that magical, surreal day, after he got his stuff packed up, “I went to chat with Nile [Rodgers] who I’d know for a long time and said: ‘Hey, I’ll see you at the clubs’. Then David came in and said: ‘Oh, can you come back tomorrow?’ So I thought for a few seconds then said: ‘Sure!’ I looked at Nile and Nile was like: ‘Yeah, come back tomorrow.’ It was very surreal, to be in a room with those two titans in the first place was just bizarre. Anyway, I came back the next day and this just kept happening, every day of the week it would be: ‘Can you come back tomorrow?’ So I did most of the week until Thursday and thought the whole thing was working amazing. I really liked the songs and hoped they’d all get released. Then they said they didn’t need me on the Friday.” But that wasn’t the end of it… “Late-afternoon Friday, I get a phone call from the studio, asking me to come back! I thought maybe it’s to redo some of the bass parts that I’d laid down already. I didn’t know what was going on. I go in on the Friday and there’s a new song called Criminal World . It had already been recorded,
Carmine pictured in New York in 1984
but the bass that had been laid down on it didn’t feel right. So I made a point of saying: ‘Okay, I don’t want to hear what the previous bass player did, I’m just going to hear the track and find my own groove’. So I tried a kind of Chris Squire [founder member of Yes] or Paul McCartney-type sound. I tried a sound that I thought would fit with the vocal and the keyboards. They thought the bassline was so strong that they ended up remixing the track. It was really rare in those days that you were give givenn the chan chance ce to to be crea creative tive in a sess session. ion. Unless you were one of the ‘main cats’ you know?” “China Girl was was really great, too. The morning we recorded that I heard Under My Thumb by by The Rolling Stones. I really listened to Brian Jones playing vibraphone on that song. I thought, ‘huh, I’ve never paid attention to that before…’ I realised in the studio that the chord changes to that song were the same as China Girl . So we were playing and learning the song and I just kept thinking about Under My Thumb . So I tried to remember the vibes part. In my subconscious, it was still in there. I tried something that was supposed to be a homage, but actually sounded very different – and a great line, I think. But that was the inspiration in my head. So thanks, Brian, for the inspiration.” We press Carmine for further insights into Bowie’s Let’s Dance -era -era mindset: did he give much direction? “Oh, David lets you do your thing,” he recalls. “If he wanted you to do do somet something hing diff differen erent,t, or or to ‘twi ‘twist’ st’ it, he’d say something. David and Nile worked really well together. “David knew exactly what he wanted. He was a very kind, very gentle guy. He’d walk outside a lot and you’d hear him thinking, you know, he’d be singing or listing words. But he’d leave the room with the door open, so you coul could d hear hear what what was goin going g on. on. After After he’d bee beenn on his own, he’d come back into the room and address all the information that he’d just thought about.” Following the completion of recording, a few weeks passed and then, one day, “I think I heard it a month after we’d recorded with David”, Carmine says. “I was on tour and Let’s Dance came came on the radio. The first thing that hit me was sonically – the sound was incredible. It sounded just like we sounded live. I loved the Stevie Ray Vaughan solo, it was just so unique.” UNDER THE MOONLIGHT
But playing on Let’s Dance was was just the beginning. “I got the phone call several weeks later from Carlos Alomar. To many Puerto Rican and many Latin American musicians, Carlos was a bit of a hero and we looked up to him. We were very proud of him, so to us, it was a big deal to be connected with him. He asked if I’d be available to do the tour and I went: ‘Yeah, sure, do you want me to audition?’ and he said: ‘No, David and I have decided that you’re the bass player for the tour’. I was amazed. Carlos was and is like a big brother to me,” Carmine reflects. “To this day, the same relationship is still there. Before the tour I thought, ‘this is going to be a beautiful trip’. I knew with David as well, I was going to get an education! Going out and seeing art and culture and basically everything I’d ever want.” Despite being in good company, the tour wasn’t plain sailing. “At that time, David was restructuring himself and learning to deal with handling that many people,” Carmine remembers. “Sound-wise it was different. Less is more in those-size stadiums. You have to be really 64 T H E
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though he admits that “it’s hard to tell, because for me conscious of what sonically is going out there. And visually, too. He was really learning and picking stuff up. – it’s just David. I got to hang out with him on the tour and we’d spend a lot of time just out and about, going “I would see him looking around and trying to work stuff out at each venue. It didn’t seem to phase him to clubs and seeing bands together. I’d see him and visit him when our schedules allowed. through, he just would calmly say: ‘Okay, I’m going to do it this way’. He would really do his homework to “I remember conversation was always very wide with him, he was very knowledgeable, but he never made make sure those shows worked.” But Carmine didn’t think David emerged from the tour you fee feell like like an an idiot. idiot. You neve neverr felt felt dumb dumb,, becaus becausee he’d he’d make sure that you were part of the conversation. unscathed. “We were out for like a year or something like that, and I do think it took its toll, definitely. For “But the thing with the Tonight album album was that I’m not sure if he’d had much of an idea of quite what he David, I think it was a lot to control. Performing to that volume of people who were there to see you individually wanted it to be. I remember we had a great time as musicians in the studio. For me, the problem, I think, must have been really mind-boggling. If he didn’t have a good team of sergeants and generals, I think it could was with the two producers [Derek Bramble and Hugh Padgham]. Not that they’re bad producers, but I really have fallen apart; thankfully, he did!” wasn’t sure why they needed two people. I think that DANCING WITH THE BIG BOYS weakened it a little. I think communication was a Despite the intensity of the tour, before long Carmine problem. Especially compared to Let’s Dance , when communication was very easy. I think they were trying – now an integral part of Bowie’s band – was called back to the studio to work on Let’s Dance ’s ’s follow up: to get ahead of themselves.” “We went to record Tonight in in Canada. David said this Carmine remembers that: “After we recorded, was going to be quite a different album, but with the everything was all cool and David seemed actually same rhythm section of Omar and myself, and Carlos quite normal, as far as I could tell. There were probably was going to be there, too. But loads of other musicians a lot of things that I didn’t see. Because I wasn’t privy to came in and out to record on that album.” it. For me, though, I think the communication issues and For Carmine, David didn’t seem remarkably different the struggle between the producers were a detriment to during the making of Tonight than than he was previously, the record. That’s just my personal opinion.” T H E
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David Bowie and Carmine on stage at The Forum in Inglewood, California on the Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983
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Carmine (left), Bowie and Carlos Alomar (right) perform at the Rosemont Horizon theatre, Illinois, in 1983
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Following the muted response to Tonight , Bowie began a series of extra-curricular projects in film. Meanwhile Carmine had now progressed to being a competent musical director, headhunted by some of pop’s biggest names, including Julian Lennon and Rod Stewart. When the call came for Never Let Me Down, Rojas was in the middle of working with Lennon. “Never Let Me Down, to be honest, I wasn’t much involved with,” he admits. admits. “I was busy being the musical director for Julian Lennon in 1985 and 1986. He’d recorded in Switzerland with Erdal Kızılçay, a great Turkish writer and arranger, who he’d work with on numerous projects in the future. He’s an extremely talented guy, and a great hang! “So a lot of Never Let Me Down was done, but I don’t think they had a ‘single’ for radio. He was looking for singles. So David had this idea for a song called Day-In Day-Out . He was in New York recording overdubs at the Power Station, so I went in and recorded a bassline At that point, it was basically just keyboards. They just wanted some solid, grounded bass.” Carmine hadn’t seen David for a while, so was out of the loop with future plans, but he knew something was on the horizon. “I heard through word of mouth that the tour was going to happen and that David wanted me to be on it,” he recalls. “But at that point, I didn’t really know what was going on! Eventually, Carlos told me that the tour was indeed going ahead, and that Peter Frampton was going to be on it. I was amazed. I couldn’t put that one together. I didn’t realise that Peter’s father was their art teacher and that they’d gone to the same school. I didn’t know that history at all.
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So I was really excited about the tour. I did know that Frampton could rock his ass off – and he did!” The resulting Glass Spider Tour was famous for its mix of live theatrics, hefty musical arrangements and of course, the ubiquitous gigantic ‘glass spider’ that dominated the stage set – it was a colossal undertaking. “I thought it was great,” Carmine tells us. “But man, there was a lot going on – I kind of felt it would have suited Broadway better, because it incorporated drama, dance, music, visuals and all this choreography. It was a lot of work, that show. I liked that we did all kinds of different songs from different David eras, though. We played some real classic Bowie songs that I’m glad we got to pull out of the hat. Stuff like Time and and All The Madmen were great to stick my teeth into. When you listen to the live recording, the songs sound great. I think it really showed the calibre of David’s writing over the yearss as well year well,, and and his his arrang arrangeme ements. nts. We could could make the songs sound much bigger than they did on record. “I love the live recording of those shows. I just had a hard time visually, with all those guys flying around and all the dancers. I think that was too much for a stadium tour. Perfect for a theatre, though. A week in Broadway or a week in London and it would’ve worked better. Matching all of it together with the music was impressive actually. I think years from now people will look at it and think for that moment in time, that was quite something.” On the whole, though, he’s proud of the tour. “A lot has been said about the Glass Spider Tour. But we put a lot of work into it, and we really meant it at the time. We’re old-school and we protect the guy at the front. We want him to look and sound great. We really put a lot of work into it.”
personally, I have so many memories of doing live shows back in 1983 and man, the memories that brings up. The job of A Bowie Celebration is not to emulate David, but to get the spirit of the songs.” Carmine obviously reflects reflects very positivel positivelyy on his time with David, but of everything, it’s that first project that stands out. “I’ll always be most proud of Let’s Dance ,” ,” he affirms. “It was the first time I was able to be part of a track that mixed world music with rock and R&B. That was cool to me. Ricochet and Criminal World I I also really like as songs. Working on the Let’s Dance album made me realise that I could do a lot more as a musician. I was able to learn a lot more and do a lot more and David was just a pure artist. He educated THE NEXT DAY Bowie’s death in 2016 me on how to approach music creatively.” was a difficult one to THE JOB OF A BOWIE process for his friends, So does Carmine CELEBRATION IS NOT TO think that Bowie’s colleagues and his millions of fans. In legacy will endure? EMULATE DAVID, BUT TO GET “I sure hope so,” he the wake of David’s THE SPIRIT OF THE SONGS. passing, Carmine says. “I think people IT’S ALSO INTERE INTERESTING STING TO will enjoy working and several other Bowie alumni have their way through SEE HOW OTHER BOWIE his records. To start, come together to MUSICIANS APPRO APPROACH ACH celebrate his legacy you rea really lly have to go THE SONGS, SOMETIMES to the early stuff, to with the A Bowie Celebration tour. the foundation of David IT’S QUITE QUIT E DIFFE DIFFERENT RENT!! through to the last two “We’ve got Mike Garson, Earl Slick, Gerry albums – which were really great. Where Are We Now? Leonard, Gail Ann Dorsey and loads of Bowie’s former players Is absolutely fucking gorgeous, and amazing to play as a bass all coming together to pay tribute and play the songs live as he’d have player. It’s such a majestic piece of music. You can really feel the pain and sorrow from him wanted them to be played by his players. Guys from different periods of Bowie, too, which is great,” in that. I do think that a hundred years from now, people will still be dissecting and writing about David and his Carmine tells us. “Mike Garson though, he really is the grandad of all of us, having joined Bowie in the early influence. You have to put him up there with Mozart. He’s a special guy, he’s up there with the gods, for me.” 70s and played with him for decades. We’ve got some shows coming up in September 2018 and then Europe Carmine concludes by telling us that: “He was a true artist. It was such a gas to spend time with him onstage early next year. We all share stories and our friendships and offstage. Musically, you can’t categorise him at all. with David are all very distinct, because David had so He was so open-minded. He embraced the fact that we many eras and styles. live on a great planet with so much great music of all “It’s also interesting to see how other Bowie musicians kinds that he blended together. We players are just so approach the songs: sometimes, it’s quite different! grateful to be among the chosen to work with him.” ● When we do Station To Station, that’s the one for me After the massive tour came to a close, Carmine remained in touch with David. “It never really ended,” he recalls. “David went straight into Tin Machine and started working with those guys and went for a very different sound. In 1988, I got a job being the musical director for Rod Stewart and put a great band together that could handle all his material, including the acoustic stuff, which was something I wanted to do more of. So I worked with Rod from 1988 to 2003. In between, I’d do other things, a few sessions and tours and would still, on occasion, run into David in New York. I kept in touch with loads of the guys from the Glass Spider Tour, too, as we all lived in Los Angeles.”
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The A Bowie Celebration concerts have brought together Bowie alumni such as Mike Garson (far left), Earl Slick (far right) and Carmine (third from right)
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FADE OUT HOT ON THE HEELS OF THE TROUBLED NEVER LET ME D O W N , BOWIE STAGED A TOUR THAT MANY REGARDED AS THE BIGGEST FOLLY OF HIS ENTIRE CAREER. ANDY PRICE DOCUMENTS THE TAIL END OF BOWIE’S POP YEARS, IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLASS SPIDER…
hough newcomers to Bowie’s career may see the three-year gap between Tonight and and Never Let Me Down as evidence of an increasing lack of creative motivation, in actuality, Bowie had been tremendously tremendo usly busy during those intervening years. year s. His His colla collabora boratio tionn with with the the Pat Pat Methe Metheny ny Group on the dazzling This Is Not America was an exciting indication that Bowie was returning to more intriguing musical waters. This was quickly quashed, however, by the return of populist Bowie in his pomp, dueting (embarrassingly) with Mick Jagger for the benefit of Live Aid. As unwatchable as the video was, the single topped the charts in the UK. Bowie’s increasing investment in film work took up much of his time, too. With his role as Vendice Partners in Julien Temple’s big-screen version of Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners fitting his mid-80s boardroom chic perfectly. Though the film itself was a bit of a failure at the box office, Bowie’s incredible theme song to the movie reached No. 2 in the UK singles chart and
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remains one of his most superb songs of the decade: a soaring, cinematic ballad that finds Bowie demonstrating remarkable songwriting and vocal capability. His campy performance as Jareth, the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s much-loved children’s fantasy movie Labyrinth also found him seemingly having a whale of a time, not taking himself too seriously and utterly indulging himself in the role – despite increased eye-rolling and derision from some of his former fans and admirers. Looking closer at some of the songs composed for the soundtrack of that project – particularly the gothic Within You and the simply lovely As The World Falls Down – revealed vastly superior material than that found on his previous record. So indications were fairly strong, then, that his upcoming 17th full-length record would find his creative powers restored. Before Bowie began to write his next record, however, he was once again on hand to help write and produce Iggy Pop’s 1986 record Blah-Blah-Blah : a fine, if underrated and underloved, record. His work on the Iggy
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David Bowie collaborated with fusion guitarist Pat Metheny for This Is Not America
– an oft-overlooked gem of Bowie’s back catalogue
Bowie’s work with Mick Jagger and Tina Turner are among the leastloved parts of Bowie’s output in this period
record (which also featured former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones) was perhaps a major triggering factor in Bowie’s desire to pen material that returned to a more distinctly rock ’n’ roll flavour – and with more socially conscious lyrics. During the making of Blah-Blah-Blah, Bowie called in his musical acquaintance, the multiinstrumentalist Erdal Kızılçay. Kızılçay had recorded a few demos for Let’s Dance and and had been within Bowie’s orbit for a while. Kızılçay came in and helped to deliver the record in two weeks. Bowie was buoyed by Kızılçay’s speed, efficiency and talent and saw in him a new songwriting counterweight in the vein of Mick Ronson, Carlos Alomar and Brian Eno. “He can switch from violin to trumpet to French horn, vibes, percussion… whatever. His knowledge of rock music begins and ends with The Beatles, his background is really jazz,” Bowie said of Kızılçay. Speaking to superdeluxeedition.com, Kızılçay himself remembered: “David was very, very happy! I just did what I had to do. He asked me to arrange the strings, so I arranged the strings. I played them myself, I did this, that and the other. He used to call me ‘my invincible Turk’. Those were his words. He was telling everyone: ‘I’ve found this guy, and he can play everything’. You 70 T H E
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I HEARD THROUGH WORD OF MOUTH THA THAT T THE TOUR WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AND THAT DAVID WANTED ME TO BE ON IT. CARLOS TOLD ME THAT THA T PETER FRAMPTON WAS GOING TO BE ON IT. I SAID: ‘REALLY!?’ I WAS AMAZED
can read it in interviews at the time. With all this work David was very happy. He used to come to my place twice a week, and we would work together.” The two set to work writing the material for Bowie’s next record, composing a raft of songs of varying degrees of quality. The best material – Time Will Crawl , Zeroes, ’87 And Cry , to name a handful – underlined Bowies’ desire to document and comment on political tensions, his own critical stock and the social climate of his native UK, respectively. Despite this, a large quantity of the songs recorded were similarly mired by the lack of imagination that marked Tonight , even the addition of Bowie’s childhood friend Peter Frampton on lead guitar couldn’t salvage New York’s In Love or or Too Dizzy . “I think the demands of the record company started affecting things,” Carlos Alomar tells us of the period. “David’s attitude to new material during that period was softer and not as demanding as he’d been before. I think he wanted to be more prepared – spending less time jamming and coming up with things – so us musicians had to figure out how to accommodate that.” Alomar also told David Buckley, in Strange Fascination, that: “David was at a loss during that whole album. He just gave up, you can’t have a record company telling you,
‘look, this is no good, give us something like this. Work with that person, work with this person’. It’s bullshit.” He also revealed that: “The man didn’t want to go into the studio to record an album. When you let the political agenda of a record company infiltrate your mood, there’s no inspiration.”
Peter Frampton would join Bowie on the Glass Spider Tour, alongside his trusty sideman, Carlos Alomar
YOUR YOU R MASK MASK CAM CAME E OFF OFF
As the album was finalised at the Power Station studio in New York, bassist Carmine Rojas remembers how he became involved with the record: “A lot of Never Let Me Down was done, but I don’t think they really had a ‘single’-type track for radio play.” Rojas remembers: “He was looking for singles. So David had this idea for a song called Day-In Day-Out . He was in New York recording overdubs at the Power Station, so I went in and recorded a bassline; at that point, it was basically just keyboards. They just wanted some solid, grounded bass.” The album’s beautiful and affecting title track was written and recorded in one day during the last week of mixing. The simple, heartfelt song of dedication to his ever-reliable, lifelong personal assistant, Coco Schwab, would serve as the record’s strongest and most affecting moment. T H E
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Bowie and Carlos Alomar perform together on the Glass Spider Tour
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Heralded by a raucous, radio-friendly single – the aforementioned Day-In Day-Out – – Never Let Me Down was released in April 1987. The few glimmers of songwriting gold that the album contained aside, the record’s overwrought production was ultimately a real problem, as was the frankly hideous art design, with a cover that dated seemingly overnight. This clearly was not the grand return to form that devotees had been hoping for and, justifiably, the record was widely trounced by critics. Chris Roberts in Melody Maker said the record was “wilfully lacking grandeur, all too immaculate – processed ageing rock for Americans called Phil and Steve and Don in record company offices”. Rolling Stone dubbed dubbed it “the noisiest, sloppiest Bowie album ever”. Positive voices were in the minority, but those that did see the appeal of the record’s better moments were quietly optimistic for Bowie’s future. Billboard in in particular felt that the title track specifically “bodes well for Bowie’s creative spirit”. Despite a strong performance in the UK and Europe, the album sank without trace in the US, reaching a disappointing high of 34. This wasn’t great news for Bowie – recently turned 40, and still primarily focused on building on his commercial success. Sporting a rather extravagant quiff, Bowie was unbowed by the record’s reception, telling Words & Music : “I’ve made about 20 albums during my career, and so far this is my third-biggest seller. So I can’t be that disappointed, yet, it is is a letd letdown own that it hasn’ hasn’tt been been as as buoyant buoyant as itit
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should be.” He’d later revise his opinion, dubbing the record, on numerous occasions throughout his creatively rejuvenated 90s, as “my nadir”. Creatively floundering, Bowie instead continued his quest to be accepted as a family friendly, mainstream artist. This reached an appalling new low (or high, depending on your point of view) in 1987, when he starred alongside Tina Turner in a gaudy Pepsi advert – perhaps the most unabashedly corporate thing that Bowie had done to date. SHRINE OF REMAINS
“I heard through word of mouth that the tour was going to happen and that David wanted me to be on it,” Carmine remembers of the tour that would follow the album’s release. “But at that point, I didn’t really know what was going on. Then Carlos told me that the tour was indeed going ahead, and that Peter Frampton was going to be on it. I said: ‘Really!?’ I was amazed.” If the Serious Moonlight Tour had seen the Bowie roadshow at its peak in terms of its ambitious staging, then 1987’s Glass Spider Tour would turn up all the dials even further. It added more theatricality: there was a troupe of New Romantic-clad dancers and actors, (staged) audience interaction, Bowie on a harness, guest musicians and – towering above it all – a huge glass spider. It was fairly obvious that Bowie’s new stadium tour was set to be his most ostentatious ever. When it opened in Rotterdam on 30 May, it was instantly
clear that the Glass Spider Tour was going to be an recording of the tour, the songs sound great. I think it unforgettable experience. really showed the calibre of David’s writing over the With Alomar, Rojas, Peter Frampton and Erdal yearss as well year well,, and and his his arrang arrangeme ements. nts. We could could make Kızılçay at the core – the Glass Spider band the songs sound much bigger than they did on record.” were something to behold on stage, their virtuosic Carlos Alomar has mixed views. “It was an musicianship arguably yielded Bowie’s strongest live experimental time for live performing,” he told us a few band to date. However, being lumbered with the sub-par year yearss ago. ago. “W “We had had things things in our our ears ears and and addit additiona ionall Never Let Me Down material, Down material, and peculiar, Vegas-esque instrumentation. For me, it wasn’t a rock ’n’ roll tour – versions of Bowie classics such as The Jean Geni e, e, Fame that pleasurable aspect of it was going downhill. and Rebel Rebel – – as well as the over-the-top on-stage I could’ve been playing something fabulous and no antics of the vast numbers of people who made up the one would have heard it.” Glass Spider roadshow – meant Though the tour was that the band (and music itself) all increasingly damaging Bowie’s too frequently became relegated reputation, it was still possible to the shadows. for him to leave a long-standing Perhaps due to the increasing impact on his fans, and for his frustrations that he felt as a music to ripple into the collective IF THE SERIOUS commercial artist, Bowie began consciousness. Headlining incorporating more and more the final night of the three-day MOONLIGHT TOUR curios from his 70s canon into the Platz Der Republik Festival in HAD SEEN THE BOWIE sets. Deep cuts such as Sons Of Berlin – with the soon-to-beROADSHOW AT ITS The Silent Age , Big Brothe r and smashed wall still dividing the even the haunting masterpiece city – the volume of Bowie’s PEAK IN TERMS OF ITS All The Madmen resurfaced Madmen resurfaced in performance carried over to AMBITIOUS STAGING, weirdly fascinating, reworked the East side, where multitudes THEN 1987’S GLASS form. Rojas recalls having of his fans had gathered to immense fun tackling some of share in the experience with SPIDER TOUR WOULD these mysterious lost gems: “We their equally enraptured WestTURN UP ALL THE DIALS played some real classic Bowie side counterparts. Bowie’s songs that I’m glad we got to pull performance of “Heroes” that that EVEN FURTHER out of the hat,” he notes. “Stuff night is seen as an integral like Time and and All The Madmen part of the social history of the were great to stick my teeth wall. Unifying both sides briefly, into. When you listen to the live before border police scattered T H E
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The titular glass spider set that provided such a memorable and attention-grabbing backdrop to the Glass Spider Tour
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Above: The Glass Spider Tour featured more theatrical moments than any previous Bowie production
the throngs of people. Bowie himself later described the event as “one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. They’d backed up the stage to the wall itself so that the wall was acting as our backdrop. We kind of heard that a few of the East Berliners might actually get the chance to hear the thing, but we didn’t realise in what numbers they would”. The performance is still regarded as a seminal moment, particularly among Bowie’s numerous Berlin-based fans. FORGIVE AND FORGET
Opposite: The DVD Glass Spider DVD captures not only Bowie’s mid-80s wardrobe in all its glory, but also the sense of fun he was having onstage, too 74 T H E
Following this historical performance, the Glass Spider Tour lumbered on, and was widely panned by critics wherever it landed, continuing Never Let Me Down’s lowering of Bowie’s critical stock. The UK press, then in thrall to the DIY-aesthetic of smaller scale indie-rock were scathing, with Melody Maker bemoaning that “the paucity of ideas is quite incredible” – though later, a journalist at the same magazine said (as recounted in Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David Bowie ) that internally, there was “overwhelming peer-group pressure not to like it”. Regardless, the tour’s 86 shows across 15 countries became a big financial success for Bowie. A scant two yearss later year later,, in the pag pages es of of Q magazine, magazine, Bowie recalled the logistical challenges of the tour: “It was so big and so unwieldy and everybody had a problem all the time, every day, and I was under so much pressure. I just had to grit my teeth and get through it, which is not a great way of working.” What’s surprising, despite the general air of negativity surrounding the tour, is that the concert film shot at Sydney Entertainment Centre is remarkably entertaining: Bowie seems to be fully invested, coming across as a dynamically engaged performer that seems to be casting off the more arch style of the Serious Moonlight era and instead recalling some of the Ziggy-era’s audiencebaiting cheeky allure. The songs, too, while pretty horribly arranged, are performed with a confidence and exuberance that had been missing from many of Bowie’s shows for years.
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In the touching (semi-)fictional novel To Major Tom: The Bowie Letters by Dave Thompson, lifelong fan Gary Weightman pens a letter to Bowie following his Wembley performance, stating that, in his view: “The band was great, the setlist was amazing and the actual show looked like it ought to be fabulous. I really did enjoy the Never Let Me Down material… the new songs take on a life of their own once they’ve been played a few times… Never Let Me Down and the Glass Spider Tour are the sound of you rediscovering the passion that used to keep you going, and the continued grumbling of the discontented hordes is just that.” ●
IT WAS SO BIG AND SO UNWIELDY AND EVERYBODY HAD A PROBLEM EVERY DAY… I WAS UNDER SO MUCH PRESSURE. I JUST HAD TO GRIT MY TEETH AND GET THROUGH IT, WHICH IS NOT A GREAT WAY OF WORKING
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David Bowier vocals, guitar, synthesisers, harmonica, production Carlos Alomar guitar, guitar synthesiser, tambourine, backing vocals keyboards, Erdal Kızılçay keyboards, drums, bass guitar, trumpet, violins, backing vocals Peter Frampton lead guitar Philippe Saisse piano Carmine Rojas bass guitar Stan Harrison alto saxophone Steve Elson baritone saxophone Lenny Pickett tenor saxophone Earl Gardner flugelhorn trumpet Laurie Frink trumpet Errol ‘Crusher’ Bennett percussion Sid McGinnis lead guitar Mickey Rourke vocals Robin Clark, Lani Groves, Diva Gray, Gordon Grodie backing vocals David Richards producer
NEVER LET ME DOWN BOWIE FOLLOWED THE DISAPPOINTING T O N I G H T WITH A RECORD MANY CONSIDER TO BE HIS NADIR. DESPITE THIS, ARGUES ANDY PRICE, THE LP DOES OFFER GLIMPSES OF THE ONCE-INVENTIVE ARTIST WHO COULD STILL SURPRISE…
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hough Tonight had had been devoid of any real artistic sustenance for the Bowie hardcore (save the unexpectedly magnificent Loving The Alien, Alien, and the inoffensive charm of Blue Jean), Jean), 1987’s Never Let Me Down found Down found David Bowie authoring all-but-one of the record’s 11 compositions. This alone is cause for celebration, as it’s evidence that the distracted Bowie of the preceding album and at least half of Let’s Dance had been fought off once and for all. Bowie was clearly working as hard as he could to rediscover his muse. For that reason, then, his 1987 album is ripe for re-evaluation. Created mainly in his then-home of Switzerland, Bowie self-consciously attempted to move back in a rockier direction (later taking 76
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this to an extreme on 1989’s Tin Machine ), ), working alongside fresh collaborator and multiinstrumentalist Erdal Kızılçay and co-produced with David Richards. Despite the obvious rock ’n’ roll posturing Bowie adopts throughout much of the album’s runtime, not to mention an Americana-daubed vocal style, the final record cannot really be described as a successful realisation of his ambition to ‘rock out’. On the contrary, it’s by far the worst culprit of Bowie’s three EMI records when it comes to dross, heavy-handed 80s production. It hurts here most of all, because underneath it all, five or six decent Bowie tracks are clawing to get out. Material such as the infectious (and apocalyptic) Time Will Crawl , the sublime title track, the retrospective, self-aware Zeroes
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TRACK BY TRACK SIDE ONE 1 DAY-IN DAY-OUT Opening with an on-the-nose ‘protest’ song, chiefly concerned with the way society neglects those at the bottom of the pile (and setting up a theme that reappears throughout NLMD ), ), Day-in Day-Out could could have been a really great song, had it not been swamped by abysmal production decisions that sap the track of much of its merit. Even Bowie’s literary-referencing lyric can’t rescue it. The unusually bad (and controversial) video is notable for scenes of a leather-jacket clad Bowie laughably rollerskating through overt sketches of American social breakdown.
2 TIME WILL CRAWL This is more like it. Time Will Crawl – – the album’ album’ss second track and second single – is infinitely better than the first, from both a musical and production point of view. The theme of global destruction was clearly on Bowie’s mind as he penned his terrifying prophetic vignettes. They’re quite the best Bowie lyrics for seven years: they’re also remarkably dark, with allusions to death, sacrifice and apocalyptic horror. Though the production, and arrangement is a little weak, this remains a great listen, with a catchy and complementary series of melodies. The much-improved ‘MM Remix’ from 2008 was an indication that Bowie saw fit to salvage this great song from the sinking hulk of a critically savaged album.
3 BEAT OF YOUR DRUM A monstrous thing from a production and lyrical standpoint, Beat Of Your Drum is Drum is also among the album’s catchiest songs. Though the intro is promising and slow, before long, it evolves into a weak chorus, smothered by guitar, Let’s Dance -era-aping -era-aping sax and grating drums. The lyric is strange and regressive for Bowie, replete with heavy-handed rock ’n’ roll/sex innuendo: “I’d like to beat on your drum” – which, for once, makes Bowie seem utterly unlikeable. It distracts massively from the song’s strengths, which include its infectious riff.
4 NEVER LET ME DOWN The title track of the record is, surprisingly, a piece of tender beauty, beauty, confessional honesty and musical charm. It immediately evokes the arrangement of Bowie’s version of Wild Is The Wind , while the central harmonica part rekindles the feeling stirred by A New Career In A New Town.. Bowie sings a tender lyric to someone clearly Town important to him, later revealed to be his longtime personal assistant Coco Schwab, who looked after him when he “believed in nothing” and needed “soul revival”. It’s an affecting song that is undoubtedly the record’s strongest moment. It was later released as a single, though didn’t make much of a chart impact. It remains a favourite among Bowie fans.
5 ZEROES A great, energetic and infectious track, hampered (as with so much of Never Let Me Down) Down) by overwrought production. Zeroes Zeroes takes takes its cues from classic, British Invasion-era material and finds Bowie in a similarly reflective mood to the title track, with lyrics that imply an awareness of his currently low critical stock: “Don’t you know we’re back on trial again today?” he sings, seemingly in anticipation of the incoming volley of negative reviews. 78 T H E
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Bowie performing during the Glass Spider Tour in Minnesota (above), and in New Jersey (right), in 1987
and the majority of the daft (but fun) Glass Spider demonstrate that Bowie here was working with some great ideas. Too often, though, these ideas are swamped by naff-sounding synths, a faux-stadium-size echo, myriad, overly processed guitars (provided by the mighty Peter Frampton, though you wouldn’t know it) and a cacophonous drum sound. Only the title track remains – in the main – unscathed by the production, though for our money, Time Will Crawl is is the better song overall (see the 2008 ‘MM’ mix for proof). However, despite this smattering of occasional greatness, there are some tracks which, bad production or no, are among Bowie’s worst ever. We’re looking at you, Too Dizzy (a (a song that a wiser, future Bowie insisted was deleted from the reissue of the record), resplendent with its sexist, violent lyric. The middle-aged creepy-uncle innuendo of Beat Of Your Drum and Drum and the unexpected and totally bizarre appearance of Mickey Rourke, rapping through the middle section of Shining Star (Makin’ Star (Makin’ My Love): Love): it’s worse than it sounds. MULTIPLE PERSONAS
It’s hard to understand what Bowie was thinking at this point, but Carlos Alomar attempted to shed some light. “I think the demands of the record company started affecting things,” he told Classic Pop in in 2013. “David’s attitude to new material during that decade was softer and not as demanding as he’d been before. I think he wanted to be more prepared – spending less time jamming and coming up with things – so us musicians had to figure out how to accommodate that.” So, it’s not Low then, then, but on listening to the various guises that Bowie adopts throughout Never Let Me Down and Down and the destructive, often unusually competitive personas that struggle within this mixed bag of songs, we get the strongest sense on anything that Bowie had released through the 80s that he was actively fighting to reconnect with the songwriting spirit that had seemingly abandoned him. The beautiful title track (an afterthought in the studio, recorded near the end of production) discards these leather-jacket-clad, masquerade versions of David Bowie that pervade the rest of the album and surprisingly brings us back to the prostrate David Jones we last heard from on Word On A Wing and Wing and Always Crashing In The Same Car : self-critical, and desperate. Remembering back to those years when he was “falling to pieces”, he sings a heartfelt song, dedicated to his long-time assistant and close friend, Coco Schwab. Though despite this dedication, “I called your name” could be read as a paean to the art of songwriting itself, as Bowie had previously done, more overtly, on
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TRACK BY TRACK SIDE TWO 6 GLASS
SPIDER
Though many can’t get past the curious opening monologue (delivered in Bowie’s finest ‘theatrical’ voice, reminiscent of his recent performance as Jareth in Labyrinth Labyrinth). ). When this track gets going, it’s actually very, very, very good. An insecure bassline and tight rhythm provide the bedrock for a Diamond Dogs-sounding Dogs-sounding vocal that manages to dart between octaves and var y its volume wonderfully. Lyrically, Lyrically, the song is centred around a story of baby spiders being abandoned by their mother and quirkily explores the theme of mortality and dependency dependency.. It’s a bit embarrassing, but it’s totally fun.
7 SHINING
STAR (MAKIN’ MY LOVE) Among the weakest tracks Bowie ever recorded, Shining melodically, with a Star (Makin’ My Love) is Love) is dull thing melodically, breathy,, high-register vocal poured over a by-the-numbers, breathy lifeless arrangement. Just when we’re starting to get bored however, a truly painful rap – provided by actor Mickey Rourke, no less – comes in with a cascade of vaguely political-sounding references to Trotsky, Trotsky, Hitler and Sinn Fein. As much as we want to accentuate the positives as Bowie fans, there’s no defending dross of this magnitude.
8 NEW
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The ship really starts to go down now. New York’s In Love is Bowie’s attempt to paint the Big Apple as an attractive woman. His uninspired lyric, and his sub-par vocal delivery here, however, underline just how far he’d creatively plummeted. Unfortunately, Unfortunately, the uncharacteristic macho posturing was given further time in the sun with Tin Machine.
9 ’87
AND CRY
A late glimmer of hope here, ’87 here, ’87 And Cry is easily one of the strongest offerings on the album vocally and lyrically. Bowie later said the song was inspired by Thatcher Thatcher,, then nearing the final chapter of her Prime Ministerial reign; but the song’s lyric evolved to be concerned with energysapping people, and liars, in general. Though the lyric is fascinating and cries out for deeper analysis, the sonic impression of this track leaves a lot to be desired.
10 TOO
DIZZY
Rightly deleted by Bowie himself from the album’s later reissue, Too Dizzy is is often considered as Bowie’s weakest song. Its arrangement is generic and forgettable, the vocal is derivative of many of his middle-of-the middle-of-the-road -road contemporaries, while the lyric – a possessive, aggressive thing wherein Bowie basically asserts his dominance over the new man in his former lover’s life – is flatly awful. It’s also pretty misogynistic, and light years behind the sensitive, nuanced work of the brilliant artist that he once was.
11 BANG
BANG
Ending with yet another Iggy Pop cover, Bowie’s Bowie’s version of Bang Bang is Bang is actually not all that bad. Though it pales in comparison to the source. Despite the original’s air of understated cool, Iggy’s culturally paranoid lyrics tumble from Bowie’s faux-American drawl with a celebratory air, indicating a thorough misreading. Nevertheless, it’s at least more danceable than the Iggy version. 80 T H E
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The Glass Spider Tour of 1987 consisted of 86 shows, and was described as the “largest touring set ever” at the time
Sound And Vision. It’s the album’s only really successful moment. Perhaps that’s why Bowie chose it as the album’s title. Of the other nuggets of potential greatness, nothing on the record really works to support them. Underwhelming production aside, even the cover art is uninspired and generic, giving the record a bottom-of-the-bargain-bin aesthetic and dating the album far quicker than anything else in his canon. Upon release, the critics were vicious. The NME ’s ’s Gavin Martin found the album to be full of “feeble gestures and half-baked themes”, while Rolling Stone ’s ’s Steve Pond said that Never Let Me Down “doesn’t bode well for Bowie’s present or future”. That Bowie chose to do a world stadium tour in support of the record speaks volumes about how out of touch he was with the critical consensus, or indeed the will of his fanbase. Equally derided as the parent album, the resulting document of the Glass Spider Tour (released on two VHS tapes in the UK, now available on DVD) surprisingly contains a very enjoyable and joyous performance. Of course, the ostentatious staging is ludicrous – complete with a troupe of dancers, audience-plants and awful suits, it’s the giant totemic glass spider that dwarfs them all, in both physical scale and cringe factor. It may be a bit of a guilty pleasure, but we still love it. On reflection, Bowie (having resumed normal service with the artistically rich 1. Outside ) told Interview magazine in 1995 that the record was: “My nadir, it was such an awful album. Even if it’s a failure artistically, it doesn’t bother me in the same way that Never Let
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Me Down bothers me. I really shouldn’t have even bothered going to the studio to record it. In fact, when I play it, I wonder if I did, sometimes.” He’d continue to look back on the era unfavourably as his later career progressed. In a hilarious interview with Jonathan Jonat han Ross in 2002, Bowie rememb remembered ered that: that: “I’d look out at all these people and think, ‘What are they doing here’?” Bowie remembered. “Then I’d think, ‘What am I doing here!?’.” Despite its reputation, we can now evaluate Bowie’s entire career, and think of the album in the context of his return to greatness the following decade. This is the sound of Bowie hacking his way out of the dense foliage of insipid production, a weak visual aesthetic and creative drought. We concur with Nicholas Pegg’s fantastic summation of the record, captured in the great discussion in part four of the podcast series, David Bowie: Albumtoalbum, which concludes with: “It’s a more rewarding album to spend time with than even Let’s Dance …” …” Though we can’t deny that Never Let Me Down is still a poor record by David Bowie’s standards, and a go-to example of dated, typically ’80s’ production, we have to point out that – compared to the gradually downward direction in quality of the new material on Let’s Dance and and the woeful Tonight , Never Let Me Down is, at the very least, the first fully fledged album of mainly Bowie originals in seven years. And on its strongest material – Time Will Crawl , Zeroes and the title track – there are tantalising indications that Bowie’s creative demon was fighting to re-emerge. ●
“It was such an awful album… Never Let Me Down bothers me. I really shouldn’t have even bothered going to the studio to record it. In fact, when I play it, I wonder if I did, sometimes” D A V I D
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TAKE ME ANYWHERE BY THE L ATE 80S, BOWIE WAS CREATIVELY TIRED, A ND YEARNING TO MAKE MUSIC FOR HIMSELF AGAIN. SO HE TORE UP THE SCRIPT AND FORMED A ROCK BAND, LEADING TO ONE OF T HE MOST DIVISIVE MOMENTS I N HIS CAREER. WILL SALMON REVISITS THE TIN MACHINE…
avid Bowie had had enough. Enough of excess, with the bloated Glass Spider Tour having – for now – purged his desire for OTT showmanship; enough of mainstream success, too. Tonight and and Never Let Me Down Me Down had had alienated large swathes of his fandom – not to mention the press. Enough, even, of being in the public eye. Clearly, drastic action was required… His solution to this ennui remains the most controversial chapter of his musical career. To wit: grow a beard, form a band. Characters like Ziggy and the Thin White Duke were out; bloke-rock was in. The decision to form Tin Machine came partway through recording what was initially intended to be the next solo album. He’d already recruited a new guitarist – Reeves Gabrels, whose then wife, Sara, had
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introduced the pair in 1987. The two began work in Montreux with the cult producer Tim Palmer, Palmer, working on a number of songs including Heaven’ Heaven’ss In Here, Baby Universal and Baby Can Dance among among others. And then Bowie had an idea… “David came into the rehearsal studio one day and said that he didn’t think it was going to be a David Bowie album, but a band album,” said Gabrels in Dylan Jones’ David Bowie: A Life . For that, they needed a new rhythm section: enter the brothers Sales… Bowie had already met Tony and Hunt Sales on Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life Tour, Tour, and snapped them up for the nascent band – to Gabrels’ initial dismay. The Sales were not known for their diplomatic skills, leading to tensions in the studio. Even the band’s famous singer frequently found himself on the receiving end of their withering put-
DAVID CAME INTO THE REHEARSAL STUDIO ONE DAY AND SAID THAT HE DIDN’T THINK IT WAS GOING TO BE A DAVID BOWIE ALBUM, BUT A BAND ALBUM
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FROM A PERSONAL STANDPOINT, THE ALBUM WAS A CASE OF MISSION ACCOMPLISHED AND BOWIE REPORTEDLY ENJOYED THE PROCESS AND THE FOLLOWING, RAUCOUS TOUR
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downs. Still, they recorded some 35 songs in those sessions, largely with no overdubs. The self-titled first Tin Machine album was released on 22 May 1989 to a predictably confused reaction. Many reviews were initially positive, while it had the desired effect of shaking off the audience that just wanted to see Bowie sing China Girl over over and over again. From a personal standpoint, the album was a case of mission accomplished and Bowie reportedly enjoyed the process and the following, raucous tour. Still, the critical tide quickly began to turn.
WAITING W AITING FOR FOR THE GIFT GIFT OF…
Bowie had other things on his mind, aside from Tin Machine. By the late 80s, the rights to his Philips/ Mercury and RCA records had finally reverted to him and his then management company. Rykodisc eagerly snapped up the chance to reissue his back catalogue and, in 1989, released a lavish career-spanning – or at least Space Oddity to to Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) – boxset, Sound + Vision. After previously turning down suggestions that he embark on a ‘greatest hits’ tour, tour, Bowie used this as a chance to T H E
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The sight of a bearded Bowie wearing fairly ordinary clothes on stage was a shock for many longterm fans
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do just that – embarking on the biggest tour of his career,, almost immediately after coming off the road career with Tin Machine. Three things immediately caught the eye about the Sound+Vision Tour. Tour. Firstly, it was big – bigger even, in the sheer number of shows, than the Serious Moonlight and Glass Spider Tours. The setlist would be determined – at least in part, with a bit of fiddling from Camp Bowie – by an international phone poll. And, most shockingly, Bowie declared that it would be the final time he would ever play these songs (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). It was a genius move on Bowie’s part. Not only did it put the pressure on for fans to buy tickets or never hear their favourite songs live again, it sent out a smart – cocky, even – message about his artistic standing: David Bowie doesn’t need to fall back on his classics in future. Privately Privately,, it was a move designed to mask fear. He would later tell The Word : “I didn’t know if my songs were any good… I didn’t want to be intimidated by my own catalogue, so I thought I would really have to begin again.” The Sound+Vision shows managed to be both somehow grandiose – thanks to the input of designer Édouard Lock and his dance troupe, La La La Human Steps – and stripped back. The band was a tight fourpiece (Adrian Belew on guitar, Erdal Kızılçay on bass,
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Rick Fox on keys and Michael Hodges on drums), the lighting stark and imposing. It succeeded in feeling like both a step back from the bloat of Glass Spider Spider,, while reclaiming some of his 70s edge. COMING UP FOR AIR
Following the end of the Sound+Vision Tour, Tour, Bowie returned to the studio and put the finishing touches to Tin Machine II with with the rest of the band. Again, however,, he perhaps had other things on his mind… however Chief among these was an encounter that would change his life forever. Bowie was introduced to his future wife, supermodel Iman, by his hairdresser Teddy Antolin. In less happy news, however however,, it was around this time that Bowie and EMI finally parted ways. Although it was reportedly an amicable split, it was also known that the label were aggrieved by Bowie’s refusal to make another mega-hit along the lines of Let’s Dance . The severance was finally initiated by Bowie, allegedly because the label had refused to market another Tin Machine album. Still, it wasn’t long before the band found a new home. Tin Machine II was was released on Victory Music on 2 September 1991 to – mostly – poor reviews and middling chart performance, reaching 23 in the UK and a shocking 126 in the United States. It didn’t help that Rykodisc had reissued the Berlin records just a
PERSONAL PROBLEMS PERSONAL WITHIN THE BAND BECAME THE REASON FOR ITS DEMISE, D EMISE, IT’S NOT FOR ME TO TALK TALK ABOUT THEM, BUT IT BECAME PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR US TO CARRY ON. AND THAT WAS PRETTY SAD, REALLY
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few weeks earlier. If you were in the market for some David Bowie, few were likely to choose Tin Machine II over “Heroes” … Although Bowie remained committed to Tin Machine, talking up a potential third album at various points, it became increasingly clear to those around him that he had his eyes on another prize: a return to solo work. Tensions in the band continued to grow, with drug problems rumoured to be a factor, as well as the terrible sales of a live album, Oy Vey, Baby in in 1992. “Personal problems within the band became the reason for its demise,” Bowie told Uncut in in 1999. “It’s not for me to talk about them, but it became physically impossible for us to carry on. And that was pretty sad, really.” Today, Tin Machine is often considered as Bowie’s folly – a personal project designed to buy him some time while he rethought his solo career. But there’ss little doubt that, to the man himself, it was there’ an important step in rebuilding his confidence and keeping him in music. “I had made a lot of money: I thought, ‘well, I could just bugger off and do my Gauguin in Tahiti bit now’,” he said in 1999. “I look back on the Tin Machine years with great fondness. They charged me up. I can’t tell you how much.” So next time you see someone sneer about Bowie’s beard years, remind them that without these two albums albums we might not have Black Tie White Noise , Heathen or even Blackstar . ● 88 T H E
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I HAD MADE A LOT OF MONEY: I THOUGHT, ‘WELL, I COULD JUST BUGGER OFF NOW…’ I LOOK BACK ON THE TIN MACHINE YEARS WITH GREATT FONDNESS GREA FOND NESS.. THEY CHARGED ME UP. I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW MUCH
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David Bowie lead vocals, rhythm guitar, production Reeves Gabrels lead guitar, production Tony Sales Sal es bass guitar, backing vocals, production Hunt Sales drums, backing vocals, production Kevin Armstrong rhythm guitar, Hammond organ Tim Palmer production
TIN MACHINE ARE THE TWO TIN MACHINE RECORDS EVEN ‘BOWIE ALBUMS’? WELL, THEY WERE CERTAINLY A CREATIVE MOTIVATOR MOTIVA TOR THAT HELPED REJUVE NA NATE TE BOW IE FOR A NEW DECADE. ANDY PRICE DISMANTLES THE TIN MACHINE…
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in Machine’s reputation – as both a band and a record – is pretty dismal in the eyes of Bowie scribes, fans and the wider world of music criticism. It’s generally regarded as something of a joke, and not worthy of the name of the great man. As a consequence, it’s airbrushed out of the Bowie canon entirely, with the Tin Machine project existing in its own little bubble, forever neglected. But if we’re going to seriously chart the development and artistic tribulations of David Bowie, then the critically important Tin Machine records have to be reappraised. And what’s surprising – coming to the first offering after a heavy dose of his 80s output – is just how much of the record is actually fairly enjoyable, despite the obvious problems. 90
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The project grew out of Bowie’s increasing friendship with the sonically adventurous guitarist Reeves Gabrels, a newfound appreciation for the rickety, DIY sound of the Pixies and was driven by a desire to distance himself from the familyfriendly, mainstream pretensions of his solo work throughout the 80s. Tin Machine coalesced with the addition of former Lust For Life (Iggy (Iggy Pop’s second Bowie-produced record) rhythm section, brothers Hunt and Tony Sales. The album was assembled quickly, and it shows. Minimal overdubs and a loose, live-band aural aesthetic defines Tin Machine , while the material that Bowie had crafted for the project varied in quality quite dramatically. The likes of promising opener Heaven’s In Here , the incendiary mania of the title track and the
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TRACK BY TRACK SIDE ONE HEAVEN’S S IN HERE 1 HEAVEN’ The fairly orthodox blues-rock riff that cranks Tin Machine to life is about as un-Bowie as it’s possible to sound. Nevertheless, it’s it’s a fine opener from a musical point of view, and lingers longer in the memory than much of the material here. It also serves as a notice that the ostentatious production ethos of Never Let Me Down had Down had been thoroughly discarded for the Tin Machine project.
2 TIN MACHINE Building on the promise of the first track, we launch into the ramshackle, knockabout joy of the title track. Okay, so Bowie’s pseudo-punk vocal is daft, but the tirade of lyrics that include references to “Tories “Tories carving up my children’s future” and “goons with muddy hair” represent some of the most fascinating and effective lyrics that Bowie had penned for a decade. The band is on fire here, with Reeves Gabrels’ riff an incendiary, standout element of the mix.
3 PRISONER OF LOVE With a retro-sounding, classic-rock arrangement, Prisoner Of Love finds finds Tin Machine having a stab at a more conventional rock ’n’ roll sound. Bowie’s vocal is in fine form, though seemingly the lyric is chiefly concerned with persuading his girlfriend to avoid all the evils of the world – dated lines such as “it drives me to hide you” and “just stay square” imply a certain insecurity and possessiveness that do diminish the song, and Bowie himself. The lack of real dynamic movement stifles the track and it outstays its welcome. It was also a bizarre choice of single.
4 CRACK CITY Settle down children, now Mr Bowie is here to tell us all about why we shouldn’t do drugs. Crack City easily easily features one of Bowie’s worst-ever lyrics – an aggressively conservative, on-the-nose diatribe against the popularisation of drug use (and the people who promote it). Aside from the heavyhanded subject matter, the song’s song’s two-chord loop is one of Tin Machine’s more musically catchy offerings.
5 I CAN’T READ I Can’t Read finds finds Bowie dropping the pretence of rock ’n’ roll machismo and addressing his spent creative energy head-on. Suddenly, Suddenly, in the middle of this hoary experiment, the Bowie of old returns – though he’s not in the best of mental health, sat blankly watching a television, contemplating his creative drought. The chorus of “I can’t read shit anymore” (as has been noted by various Bowie critics over the years) sounds decidedly like ‘I can’t reach it anymore’, which would make more sense. The arrangement is good, too, with Gabrels’ feedback-heavy atmospherics adding to the fraught sense of mental anguish. Bowie would resurrect I Can’t Read later later in the 1990s.
6 UNDER THE GOD After clearing up the drug situation on Crack City , here Bowie – over a conventional heavy-rock arrangement, tackles the increasing popularisation of fascism and governmental neglect with typical Tin Machine-era subtlety: “Right-wing dicks in their boiler suits, picking out who to annihilate”. We’ll We’ll say no more. 92
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artistic anguish of the brilliant I Can’t Read deliver deliver on Tin Machine’s promise to give Bowie a timely kick up the backside. The rest of the material, though, it has to be said, generally falls flat – and at its very worst moments, is embarrassingly bad by Bowie’s standards. Blame isn’t entirely on David though (this is a band, after all) – all indications are that although the ideas behind disappointing tracks such as Baby Can Dance , Amazing and Amazing and Prisoner Of Love are are solid, the laboured attempts to make them into ‘big’ rock songs damages them massively. LUST-FUELLED LUST -FUELLED ROCKER
Elsewhere, the band are the least of Bowie’s problems. Take Crack City – – built around a serviceable-enough rhythm, but here, it’s Bowie’s patronising and crassly visceral anti-drugs lyric that is seared into our memory. The same can be said for Under The God and and Video Crime , concerned as they are with neo-fascism and the effect of violent movies respectively. Though obviously many of the sentiments come from a good place, the lyrics are penned in a hilariously exaggerated style.
Unbelievably, Mr Bowie is here to tell us why we shouldn’t do drugs. Crack ’s lyrics are a conservative, City ’s on-the-nose diatr diatribe ibe against the popularisation of drug use (and those who promote it)
TRACK BY TRACK SIDE TWO It’s almost as if David Bowie, this once vital, boundarypushing figure, had now become one of the squares he had railed against back in the lyric of 1971’s Oh! You Pretty Things. Though the record does offer a thankful release from the cheapened, stadium-sized production ethos of Never Let Me Down, the colossal, overpowering drums begin to grate pretty quickly into the record. Gabrels provides some quite expressive, interesting guitar work and is arguably the record’s artistic torchbearer, as Bowie’s lyrics all too frequently fall into the mire of rock ’n’ roll cliché: his Tin Machine persona generally coming across as a one-dimensional, macho, lust-fuelled rocker. In spite of its many problems, the handful of tracks we’ve mentioned imply that the exercise at least had some effect on Bowie’s creative juices; and there is the overwhelming sense that Bowie was having a great deal of fun by trying something very different. different. This is how the record should be approached today: as an important exercise in creative stimulation, with the unexpected bonus of a handful of enjoyable – and, in the case of I Can’t Read , excellent – tracks. ●
7 AMAZING We veer into new territory territor y for Tin Machine here: a big-sounding love ballad with one of Gabrels’ strongest, chunkiest riffs, which works melodically over a fine arrangement. Amazing proves that, once reined in, this Amazing proves unit could deliver some effective-sounding stuff.
8 WO WORK RKING ING CLAS CLASS S HER HERO O A bizarre, upbeat rock version of Lennon’s understated, venomous classic: Lennon’s weary vocal is replaced with an earnest delivery from Bowie. It’s not terrible, but it’s not a patch on the original. Tin Machine at Amsterdam’s Paradiso in 1989 (l-r: Reeves Gabrels, Tony Sales, Hunt Sales and Bowie)
9 BUS STOP An urgent, vigorous arrangement underlines Bowie’s most decidedly ‘English’ vocal in a long time. The album version of Bus Stop is is a short, but fairly effective piece. Despite the cockney-accented delivery, the lyric is more conservative and concerns a “young man at odds with the Bible” but who “don’t pretend faith never works”. We recommend the live version, where Bowie aptly reinterprets the song with a country arrangement and a Southern drawl that fits the lyric perfectly. perfectly.
10 PRETTY THING An annoyingly scattershot, machine-gunning rhythm launches this rather dreary piece to life. It doesn’t have much of a melody to speak of, and sounds wholly improvised by Bowie on the mic: its boastful sexual content is a far cry from the former Bowie glory hinted at in the song’s title. It’s best we gloss over this one.
11 VIDEO CRIME Kids, eh? If they’re not smoking crack or daubing themselves with swastikas, they’re indulging in violent, mind-corrupting video nasties. This was seemingly Bowie’s perception perception of much of what was wrong with American society in the late 80s.
12 R RUN UN Omitted from the vinyl release, this CD-only track was in fact co-written by Kevin Armstrong, Ar mstrong, the silent fifth member of Tin Machine. There’s little to say about Run Run,, however: Bowie delivers a fair vocal, but the melodic content, insipid arrangement and dull, overwrought dynamic leave it as an utterly forgettable, making-up-themaking-up-thenumbers piece.
13 SACRIFICE YOURSELF It’s hard to tell from the elusive lyric whether Bowie is singing about religious martyrdom or a fear of marriage – either way, it’s eternally skippable.
14 BABY CAN DANCE ’s final track is overlong and stuffed to the Tin Machine ’s brim with pointless musical excursion. Yet underneath, there’ss actually a rather interesting Bowie song, with the there’ chorus in particular being pretty memorable. T H E
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David Bowie lead vocals, guitar, piano, saxophone, production Reeves Gabrels lead guitar, backing vocals, organ, production Hunt Sales drums, percussion, backing and lead vocals, production Tony Sales bass, backing vocals, production Kevin Armstrong rhythm guitar, piano Tim Palmer production, percussion, additional piano Hugh Padgham production
TIN MACHINE II TIN MACHINE’S FINAL ALBUM WAS RELEASED TO AN EVEN MORE MUTED RECEPTION THAN THE FIRST FIRST,, DESPITE IT CON TAINING HINTS THAT BOWIE’S SPARK WAS WAS RETURNING. ANDY PRICE GOES BACK INTO THE MACHINE…
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y the the time time of of Tin Tin Machi Machine’ ne’ss second second LP’s release, David Bowie had already started to move on: yielding to fan demand and performing the Sound+Vision Tour of his greatest hits – sans his new band – much to the relief of his hordes of followers. The entire Tin Machine project was maligned then: even seemingly by Bowie himself, who kept his beloved ‘proper’ material for these sold out, solo performances. After the critical drubbing that met the first record, and a general feeling of disinterest from the record-buying public for the group, that Bowie would choose to make a second record with Tin Machine at all is an admirable indication that for him, the project was worthwhile. As he told Electronic Beats magazine in 1997: 94
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“I worked together with Tin Machine on a return to the embryonic fundamentals of rock music, simply in order to clear my head for a while. And in order to breathe life into my being as a musician again.” On their second LP, there’s increasing evidence that Bowie was approaching songwriting with a growing vigour. The assured opener Baby Universal and and fairly decent One Shot launch launch the album with aplomb, while the subtler textures of Amlapura and the surprisingly excellent finale Goodbye Mr. Ed are are proof that the Tin Machine project had unlocked some creative doors. After the just-look-away horror of his clumsy attempts to tackle drug use, facism and violent movies on the first record, that Bowie here pens such an articulate and sensitive piece
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TRACK BY TRACK on the abhorrence of child slavery on Shopping For Girls indicates Girls indicates a move towards artistic nuance over 1 BABY UNIVERSAL pronounced, aggressive statements. Frustratingly, on this Things are looking up: the superb Baby Universal launches song (and much of the rest of the album, for that matter) Tin Machine II to to life with a robotic, repetitive voice. A it’s ruined by the generally still over-loud, raucous band. distant, treated Bowie vocal gives way to a truly wonderful These songs and a smattering of positive hints aside, verse that is among the strongest Bowie material we’ve there’s unfortunately still a void of anything that we’d heard in a long time. Lyrically, Lyrically, Bowie seems weary wear y and resigned (“I’ve seen everything, anyway”), while the class as strong material, really, from the intensely characteristically detached Bowie line “Hello humans, can annoying buffoonery of A Big Hurt , the eye-rolling sex you feel feel me thinki thinking” ng” remind remindss us of his his former former alien alien-mes -messiah siah metaphor of You Belong In Rock ’N’ Roll , an abysmal guise, as well as prefiguring later developments. Musically, Musically, cover of Roxy Music’s If There Is Somethi Something ng and, and, most it’s got a much tighter arrangement than anything on the first gallingly, Hunt Sales’ toe-curling lead vocals on the record. Baby Universal would would be Tin Machine’s Machine’s final single, blues-rock pastiche Stateside and and the self-important, and a song that Bowie thought of favourably favourably,, resurrecting it confessional, Sorry . Tin Machine II ’s ’s weaknesses for live performances later in the 1990s. are as pronounced as its strengths, leaving it both simultaneously better and worse than its predecessor. Overall, though, Tin Machine II does does represent a 2 ONE SHOT more interesting listening experience than the first album, Another pretty decent effort here. Sounding reminiscent of with the tiresome ‘just press record and play’ aesthetic Tears For Fears’ Head Over Heels, Heels, the plodding bassline of the first supplanted by a wider sonic texture and and Bowie’s sultry breathy vocal recalling some of his much greater creative thought given to the mixes. Also, stronger 80s offerings. Though the lyric is pretty dark, with the tracks we’ve mentioned, there’s actually a implying that his former lover has been shot to death (“one shot put her away”), the song is quite an upbeat listen. handful of fairly strong songs, too. Bowie was starting Annoyingly,, Tin Machine’s instincts kick in and veer it off Annoyingly to get itchy feet with the oppressive, dominating volume into a squalling, torrid mess of noise, but overall, it remains of the band, as he told International Musician in Musician in 1991, fairly solid. The song became a single, and interestingly, interestingly, the “[In a band] you start to learn how to tell people to do video foregrounds Bowie heavily at the expense of the other things, and that becomes a system… and once you’ve members, performing the track tuxedo-clad and in a style got a system, you’re really fucked up. I needed to break reminiscent of his 80s-pop period. it! Fortuitously, the band has done that for me. My system has been broken.” Harshly reviewed by critics and met with widespread 3 YOU BELONG disinterest upon release (it failed to come close to Tin IN ROCK ’N’ ROLL Machine ’s ’s No. 3 UK chart placement, clawing its way With pulsing bass, washes of acoustic guitar, Gabrels’ to a peak of 23), Tin Machine II Machine II has subsequently been crystalline riffs and a subtle Bowie vocal, this song is re-evaluated as an important creative step for Bowie, immediately head and shoulders above the bulk of the leading to the freer creative approaches that he’d adopt previous record… and then, the embarrassing refrain of in the 1990s. “you belong in rock ’n’ roll” comes along and turns the song Interestingly, the album was (along with Bowie’s 1967 from being an understated art-rock strut into another heavy debut) not included in the extensive 1999 remastering handed, utterly boring ‘rock as sexual release’ metaphor. metaphor. It was a curious choice of single, but nevertheless managed to of his entire back catalogue, despite the fact that the first score a Tin Machine high of No. 33 in the UK chart. Tin Machine record record was… leaving it pretty hard to find until the advent of iTunes in the mid 2000s. Perhaps this contributed to its overly negative reputation. The record’s strongest moment comes with the 4 IF THERE IS SOMETHING resigned delivery and expressive imagery of Goodbye After the various qualities of the first three tracks, we’re Mr Ed at at the album’s finale. It’s a clear suddenly reminded that this is a Tin Machine record after indication that David Bowie had emerged all, with a lifeless version of a Roxy Music classic. Tin Machine’s revision is a showcase for the worst excesses thoroughly creatively refreshed by the of the band: namely, it’s a shambolic mess with some experience of being in a band. of Gabrels’ least inspired playing on record. Bowie In the wake of Tin Machine attempts to wrestle through the overbearing mix, but came Bowie’s return to stylistic “In a band, you start to learn drowns in the cacophony. form on Black Tie White how to tell people to do Noise , the wonderfully expressive (and underthings, and that becomes a loved) The Buddha Of 5 AMLAPURA system… I needed to break A new sound for Tin Machine, the acoustic Suburbia soundtrack Suburbia soundtrack and guitar-led Amlapura Amlapura finds finds Bowie singing – in a 1995’s brilliant Brian Eno it! Fortuitously, the band has deliberately flat vocal – a lyric dedicated to the collaboration 1: Outside . All done that for me. My system region of Bali of the same name: a place he had three provided tangible proof recently visited. Often the victim of an ‘eruption’ that the creative spark he’d has been broken” himself, Bowie evokes some of the horrors that the been searching for throughout volcanos wrought, including the chilling line “all the D A V I D B O W I E the late 80s had been truly dead children buried standing” as well as highlighting ignited. Following Tin Machine, the transcendent beauty of the “shining jewel”. It’s a fine Bowie seemed more aware than ever song all in all, but another indicator that Bowie was getting bored of the hefty Tin Machine sound. before of just who he was as an artist. ● Bowie on stage with Tin Machine at The Brixton Academy in November 1991
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6 BETTY WRONG Despite Sales’ overly invasive drums, Betty Wrong is Wrong is among the more conventional songs that Bowie wrote during the Tin Machine period. While the guitars are, in the main, turned down, he delivers an intriguing lyric that recalls more cerebral mid-70s fare, particularly par ticularly Station To Station. Station. With lines such as “I’ll be your light, when the shadows fall down the walls”, we’re reminded of the mystical lyrical power that still lurks within Bowie. It’s decent, decent, in spite of the rest of the band’s efforts…
7 YOU CAN’T TALK A bizarre track, containing one of Bowie’s quirkiest vocals since Lodger . You Can’t Talk is is a not-entirely unsuccessful return to an idiosyncratic arrangement style that he’d pursue further into the decade.
8 STATESIDE This turgid slice of blues-rock, written primarily by Hunt Sales and co-sung by him in a cod-Robert Plant vocal, is among Tin among Tin Machine II ’s ’s weakest moments. The lyric is heavily stuffed with Americana, while the arrangement is bland and pub rock-ish. Let’s move swiftly on…
9 SHOPPING FOR GIRLS Basically a poem set to music, the grim subject matter of the lyric concerns child slavery and exploitation. In lieu of Bowie’s heavy-handed diatribes on the first record, here, his sensitive lyric is immaculately crafted. It’s It’s a shame that musically it isn’t much of a ‘song’, with little in the way of melody melody.. A better arrangement could have made this one of Bowie’s B owie’s best of the era.
10 A BIG HURT A heavier offering that immediately brings to mind some of the horrors of the first album. A Big Hurt is is a squalling, noisy thing with some atrocious lyrics, including such howlers as “you’re a sex receiver”.
11 SORRY Another moment in the sun for Hunt Sales, here taking sole songwriting credit and lead-vocal duties, relegating Bowie to merely supplying the distant, ethereal backing vocal and a smattering of sax. The song is pretty empty and the lyric is basically an apology for wronging his lover. It’s It’s a nice-enough arrangement, but it doesn’t really feel like David had much to do with it.
12 GOODBYE MR. ED Here, at the end, David Bowie returns – emerging from his hard-rocker chrysalis with an elegant lyric and a sumptuous vocal. Even Tin Machine reign themselves in to complement this well-crafted piece. Bowie paints a Five Years-reminiscent Years-reminiscent portrait of a blighted society; however,, there’s a passivity to Bowie’s delivery, as he however repeatedly sings “someone sees it all”. The implication here seems to be that Bowie has reached some kind of grand epiphany about his relationship with the rest of the world – and perhaps his audience. Goodbye Mr. Ed is one of Bowie’s lost masterpieces. T H E
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KEVIN ARMSTRONG ENJOYED A 10-YEAR WORKING RELATIONSHIP WITH BOWIE, MAKING A VALUABLE CONTRIBUTION TO ONE OF HIS FINEST CUTS OF THE 80S, A B S O L U T E B E G I N N E R S . HE ALSO PERFORMED WITH HIM AT LIVE AID AND CO-WROTE THE TITLE TRACK FOR 1 : O U T S I D E , HELPING SET THE TONE FOR A BRAVE NEW ERA. HE TAKES RICHARD PURDEN BACK TO THAT UNIQUE TIME…
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t was while playfully lampooning himself in the Jazzin’ For Blue Jean Jean short that David Bowie discovered director Julian Temple was adapting Absolute Beginners for cinema. It was natural that Colin MacInnes’s 1959 cult novel featuring the post-war London – which had birthed David Jones, jazz clubs, race riots and mod, while absorbing new cultural influences and the advent of the teenager – would catch his attention. After being asked to provide the soundtrack, Bowie would also take on the memorable role of Ve Vendice ndice Partners. Guitarist Kevin Armstrong was drafted in for a recording session, which set in motion a significant working relationship. “We were doing demos for Absolute Beginners and had recorded That’s Motivation with Gil Evans’ big band, which was really the first time we worked together,” Kevin recalls. “That track was finished quickly and there was still an hour on the clock. At that time, David was also filming Labyrinth. He said: ‘I’ve got this hour and I don’t want to waste it. There’s another song for this film, it’s an
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Bowie performing at Live Aid in 1985 – Kevin was part of David’s band for the legendary gig
but it’s not finished’. I said: ‘Show me what you’ve got and we’ll try and knock it into something’. So I helped him structure the track to the point where we he could scribble down the lyrics and finish it. It was a lovely moment to be able to contribute a little bit to the formation of Absolute Beginners. It was demoed there and then and sounded really good, we all got quite excited at that point (Bowie even compared the session to “Heroes” ). ). That particular version has never been made public, but there is an early demo recorded at Abbey Road.” LAUGHTER TRACK
There was a spirited energy between the pair, which led Bowie to secure Armstrong’s services at various points over the next decade. “There was much 100 T H E
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laughter working with David, he was a very funny guy and there would be a lot of blokey humour. At the same time, there was that off-the-scale alien presence of a multi-faceted artist. There was just so much breadth and depth to what he did. He was a complex man, but he was also very fun company to be in.” When Bowie urged: “I need a girl to sing the high vocal, almost like a duet with me, but it’s got to sound like a girl who works in a shop”, Armstrong suggested his sister Janet, who was working in Dorothy Perkins. “David said: ‘Get her in’, without any hesitation – that was her moment to sing Absolute Beginners with him. She was also a fan, but the big thing about Bowie and me was that although I got to work with David on and off for 10 years, my brother was the huge fan in the family, family, to the point he would be straight down the
record shop in the morning every time Bowie put a record out. He was a year younger than me, but died in a motorcycle accident in 1979. He never got to see any of it, unfortunately.” While recording Absolute Beginners, Beginners, there was some exorcising of ghosts for both Armstrong and Bowie. The song was written in the aftermath of Bowie’s half-brother’s half-brother’s tragic suicide. Terry’s memory would undoubtedly be present as he absorbed the London they shared in childhood. When Rick Wakeman was invited to the studio to provide some “Rachmaninoff-style piano for old time’s sake”, it was a further example of the songwriter’ songwriter’ss ability to call upon the right player from his wide circle. In doing so, Wakeman would evoke the same touch of brilliance he brought to Life On Mars? . Its stirring, romantic chorus, laced with melancholy and strident bursts of saxophone made the song feel like more of an event than a pop single. Absolute Beginners would Beginners would earn its place as one of Bowie’s finest of the era.
DAVID EXPLAINED THAT HE’D BEEN ASKED TO DO THIS
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CHARITY EVENT BY BOB GELDOF FOR FAMINE RELIEF AND ASKED ME TO PUT A BAND TOGETHER… TO PERFORM GLOBALLY IN FRONT OF 1.9 BILLION PEOPLE IS NOT SOMETHING YOU GET TO DO TWICE!
Rick Wakeman returned to add his keyboard skills to Absolute Beginners
Before their first session, Armstrong was told only that he would he would be working with ‘Mr X’. That sense of intrigue continued throughout their time working together together.. “It was during those Absolute Beginners sessions Beginners sessions that David said to me: ‘There’s something else I want you to add some guitar to. Come and meet me at this address in Wardour Street tonight at 10 o’clock’. I turned up and sat down on this sofa with an aspidistra in the corner and in walks David with Mick Jagger. We started working out Dancing In The Street to to record with the band from the sessions. He said: ‘Don’t tell them Mick’s coming down, the track’s for charity and we’ll add it on at the end’. We did the song all day and of course, jaws dropped when Mick pitched up. After recording, we all got taxis and watched them film the famous, dreadful video.” The charity cut for Live Aid would provide Bowie with his fifth and final No. 1 UK single. The comical video provided some levity for a good cause, but the song was never likely to feature among the favourite tracks of even the most casual Bowie obser ver. Not long after, Armstrong was again given the call for a ‘little gig’, which turned out to be Live Aid. “It’s still such a historic event to have been part of, and remains the largest global concert there has ever been. At the first session, David explained that he’d been asked to do this charity event by Bob Geldof for famine relief and asked me to put a band together. To perform globally in front of 1.9 billion people with David Bowie is not something you get to do twice in a lifetime! “It was basically me and my mates who were his band. We were so off-the-scale with excitement that we played at 90 miles an hour. We really did race through it, because there was just so s o much adrenaline going around.” The following year he would contribute to Iggy Pop’s Blah-Blah-Blah Blah-Blah-Blah – – with Bowie co-writing, producing and singing backing vocals, it would provide Iggy with his biggest commercial seller. “There was a special symbiosis between the two of them,” Kevin recalls. “Because each had something T H E
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that the other wanted and when they worked together,, they complemente together complemented d each other really well.” Aside from another classic Bowie single of the era – Loving The Alien – for most, Blah-Blah-Blah eclipsed Bowie’s previous long-player, Tonight . BACK IN THE SADDLE
Armstrong was absent for 1987’s Never Let Me Down and aside from the singles, and particularly the often overlooked Time Will Crawl , it seemed that David Bowie’s days of creative plenty were behind him. Bowie wasn’t done by a long way way,, however,, and the way he chose to rejuvenate those however essential creative juices was pretty unconventional at the time – he decided to form a band, with him as the frontman. Tin Machine helped set up the essential shift that took place in his 90s 90 s output, and once again, he called on Kevin to back him up. The guitarist became Tin Machine’s unofficial fifth member,, playing on the first album, touring with the member band, and even securing a co-write on Run. Undoubtedly the humour and chemistry that had shaped those early sessions continued during the period. “David introduced me to Grace Jones at a ceremony [the 1st International Rock Awards] in New York. York. She was wearing this dress that was like mesh, it was six-inches-square with holes. I said she looked like a six-foot sandal, it was like I had Tourette’ ourette’s! s! But instead of being insulted, she was fascinated and she latched on to me, until David intervened and said: ‘Come with me son, she’ll eat you for breakfast!’” Bowie had one final surprise for the guitarist that would come out of the blue before another vital reinvention. While sound-checking with Tin Machine, Armstrong ran through Love Is Essential – – a song he had written in 1982 while a member of The Passions. “David asked me what I was playing. I told him it was an old song I had written and he asked me if he could have it. It ended up becoming a song called Now , which we played with Tin Machine and I forgot about it again. A couple of years later, later, I got a call from David. He said: ‘Do you remember that song, Now ? It’s the title track on my new record. Would you like to come and play on it?’” By the time Armstrong made his contribution, Bowie and Brian Eno were recording overdubs in London. Significantly he wouldn’t play on Outside (which the song had been renamed), but on another of the album’s highlights, Thru’ These Architects Eyes. “David called again and said: ‘The album is already formed, but come and play some stuff because you’ve written the title track – perhaps you’d like to play on a few other things and meet Brian?’” he remembers. “The working process around David was always quite relaxed – it wasn’t a big tortured thing where everyone worried about what they were doing around him; it was very experimental but very easy. You would be talking about fashion, politics and going to a restaurant. The process of creating music with him was like an extension of a social interaction. If there’s any real honed craft that went on, it was very ver y much under the radar. I always felt it was part of a very flowing process.” ● 102 T H E
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Kevin (far left) performs with Tin Machine at London’s Town And Country club in 1989
THE WORKING PROCE PROCESS SS AROUND DAVID WAS ALWAYS QUITE RELAXED – IT WASN’T A BIG TORTURED THING WHERE EVERYONE WORRIED ABOUT WHAT THEY WERE DOING AROUND HIM; IT WAS VERY EXPERIMENTAL BUT VERY EASY
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AS THE 80S BECAME THE 90S, BOWIE FINALLY SORTED OUT HIS LIFE, HIS ART AND HIS MUSIC. WILL SALMON LOOKS BACK AT THE PERIOD THAT RESTORED BOWIE’S REPUTATION REPUTA TION A ND SET H IM ON A NEW PATH… PATH…
he late 80s had not been kind to David Bowie, but things seemed to be turning a corner at last. The early 90s marked the beginning of a creative renaissance that would see him reclaim both his independence and his artistry. Everything that followed, from 1: Outside and and Earthling to The Next Day and and Blackstar became became a reality (or even a Reality) because of the drastic personal course-correction that began here.
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MACHINE BREAKDOWN
While the critics had begun – after initially mostly positive noises – to turn against Tin Machine, Bowie himself seemed to be genuinely enjoying his time in the band and the creative freedom it had bought him. Their hard-rock sound and uncompromising (if shambolic) shows had shaken off the audience who would casually buy Bowie records while also picking up the latest Phil Collins. That it had also alienated much of his core fanbase as well didn’t seem to bother him one iota. It was never going to last, of course. A singer as idiosyncratic and single-minded as David Bowie was unlikely to last too long in the ‘democracy’ of a rock band. As late as the end of 1993, he was still talking about a 104
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third Tin Machine record. Eventually, however, it became clear that the band was no more, partly through Bowie’s declining enthusiasm for the project and partly through – it later emerged – a band member’s issues with drugs, alluded to in David Buckley’s book, Strange Fascination and obliquely addressed by Bowie in 2000. “One of our members had a serious drugs problem… It got to a situation where it was just intolerable.” And so, plans for the great comeback began in earnest. Meanwhile, he renewed his acting career with roles in two films – though neither would find the commercial success of Labyrinth or the critical acclaim of The Man Who Fell To Earth . First he took a starring role in the selfconsciously quirky – and deeply forgettable – crime caper The Linguini Incident , alongside Rosanna Arquette. He played a bartender and Arquette’s romantic foil – though chemistry between the pair was in short supply. It was a weird fit; Bowie was not born to play everyman characters. As the New York Times quipped at the time: “When a film’s most down-to-earth actor is David Bowie, that film is clearly determined to stay off the beaten track.” And so it did – The Linguini Incident was a flop, and remains one of the more obscure entries in his filmography.
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Bowie performing with Tin Machine in Amsterdam in 1989 – his enthusiasm for the project fizzled out after their poorly received second LP
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More intriguing – if equally catastrophic at the box office – was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , David Lynch’s prequel/sequel to his cult-hit TV show. Twin Peaks’ stellar first season was a huge success, but the patchy second season alienated mainstream audiences, temporarily lost Lynch behind the scenes and was quickly axed. Lynch saw his big-screen version as a chance to take back control of his creation, making a darker, stranger film that dialled up the violence and making the subtextual themes – sexual abuse in particular – more overt. Filmed in September 1991, Bowie played Phillip Jeffries Jeff ries,, an FBI agent agent in a shar sharp p cream cream suit who had vanished on a case a few years previously. He appears from nowhere back in the FBI’s headquarters babbling manically, before disappearing once more. It’s a short scene – but a memorably freakish one. At the time, it seemed like a peculiar cameo in a film that was critically derided and a significant boxoffice flop. However, Fire Walk With Me has has had an impressive afterlife, undergoing a serious reappraisal in the intervening years. Today, it’s generally seen as one of Lynch’s best – and most harrowing – pictures, and many of the seemingly random threads were elaborated on when Twin Peaks returned to TV in 2017. Surprisingly, one of those threads was Phillip Jeffries – Lynch had approached Bowie about returning to the
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role, not knowing about his ill health. Bowie declined, but gave Lynch his blessing to incorporate the character however he saw fit: in typical Lynch fashion, Phillip Jeffries Jeff ries was reim reimagin agined ed as as a giga gigantic ntic stea steampun mpunkk kettl kettle, e, now voiced by Nathan Frizzell – an American man imitating a British man’s fake Southern accent… CH…CH…CH…
The 90s was a time of change for his personal life, too. In 1990, Bowie broke off his three-year engagement to dancer Melissa Hurley. He wasn’t single for long, however. In October that year, at a party held by his hairdresser Teddy Antolin, he met supermodel Iman – and fell head-over-heels for her. It was a relationship that would last the rest of his life. “I was naming the children the first night we met,” he later said. Iman, for her part, felt differently – at least at first. “I was not ready for a relationship. Definitely, I didn’t want to get into a relationship with somebody like him.” Still, after he clumsily asked her around “for tea” the following day, the pair began dating. After proposing to her (for a second time, the first having been rebuffed) in Paris along the bank of the River Seine, she agreed to marry him. The wedding took place in April 1992 in a private ceremony in Lausanne, Switzerland (the pair later held a second, more public event in Florence, Italy). The happy
event – and the violent scenes that Bowie witnessed shortly after when the couple decided to buy a house in LA and walked straight into the Rodney King riots – would provide a rich seam of inspiration for his next record, the first album to go out under the name David Bowie in six years. Indeed, some of the music began as pieces created by Bowie for the wedding itself. Before that, however, was what would become one of Bowie’s biggest TV appearances… Bowie had first met Freddie Mercury in the late 60s. At the time, Bowie was still toiling away as a semiobscure folk singer and Mercury was still going under his birth name, Farrokh Bulsara, while playing in various bands and selling clothes on a market stall. Both their lives had changed considerably when they united (with the rest of Mercury’s band, Queen) to record Under Pressure , their 1981 hit single. While there were strong rumours the pair fell out when Bowie requested his vocals be pulled from the Queen song Cool Cat – – recorded during the same brief session in Switzerland – they remained on good terms over the following followin g years. When Mercury passed away in 1991, Bowie was asked to perform as part of a memorial concert on 20 April the following year. The show was huge, with many of the biggest artists of the day – including U2, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Bob Geldof and more – performing to a crowd of 72,000. The estimated TV audience, meanwhile, was somewhere around a billion people. The money raised from the event was used to launch The Mercury Phoenix Trust – a charity dedicated to fighting AIDS. Bowie performed a three-song set with the members of Queen as his backing band: All The Young Dudes, Under Pressure – – with Annie Lennox of Eurythmics taking Mercury’s place in the vocal – and “Heroes”. There was an extra treat for long-term Bowie fans in the form of Mick Ronson, who joined him on stage to take guitar duties on All The Young Dudes and “Heroes” – – the first
time he had performed with Bowie since the end of The Spiders From Mars. What happened next, however, proved divisive. Bowie – apparently spontaneously – decided to drop to one knee and recite the Lord’s Prayer. For some it was a moving, heartfelt moment, but for others it was baffling and pompous. Bowie, for his part, was unphased by the reaction. “I decided to do it about five minutes before I went on stage,” he told Arena in 1993. “I had a friend called Craig who was dying of AIDS. He was just dropping into a coma that day. And just before I went on stage something just told me to say the Lord’s Prayer.” LIT BY THE GLARE OF AN LA FIRE
Meanwhile, the next David Bowie record was starting to take shape. His long-awaited solo return was to be a grand affair – and one that involved a number of collaborations. The most significant of these was the return of Nile Rodgers as producer, back for the first time since Let’s Dance after after the pair had reconnected at a Tin Machine show. Avant-garde trumpeter Lester Bowie joined the band and Mick Ronson – fresh from his performance at the Freddie Mercury tribute – came on board, as did Mike Garson, back for the first time since Young Americans Ameri cans. Chico O’Farrill – who had recorded with jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie – would handle the T H E
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David sporting his infamous long hair in 1965
Bowie performs at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert alongside Mott The Hoople’s Ian Hunter
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arrangements. A guest spot was afforded to the thenvogue-ish vocalist Al B Sure! for the title track. If Rodgers had expected a similar recording situation to Let’s Dance , he was in for a surprise. Where Bowie had more or less ceded control to Rodgers on Let’s Dance , with Black Tie… he was keen to dictate the direction of the album himself. The sessions were fruitful, but Rodgers later admitted that he’d found the situation difficult. He wanted to make an all-guns blazing hit, “Star Wars 2 ”, ”, in his words. Bowie, on the other hand, wanted to make a jazz-tinged record informed by his wedding, his half-brother’s suicide, political dissent in the United States and which included a previously abandoned Tin Machine song. “Maybe the licks I thought of stank… but I knew they couldn’t all suck!” he would ruefully say of Bowie’s habit of tossing out Rodgers’ riffs. Still, he did admit that Bowie himself seemed “a lot more relaxed this time… a lot more philosophical and just in a state of mind where his music was really, really making him happy”. Who would release the record, however, remained an open question. With his relationship with EMI over, Bowie was in need of a new label. He eventually signed to BMG during the sessions, and Savage Records in the USA, on the basis that they had guaranteed him complete freedom to do whatever he wished. In the UK, at least, the buzz around the record was genuinely strong. It was afforded an impressive press campaign and arrived in the opening years of the Britpop movement. Famously, Bowie and one of his many protégés, Brett Anderson of indie darlings Suede, interviewed each other for NME under the wonderful headline: “One day, son, all this could be yours”. It was a perfect match, positioning Suede as the inheritors of Bowie’s art-rock crown while also lending Bowie some elder-statesman credibility – a commodity that he’d been suffering a drought of for some time.
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Black Tie White Noise shot shot
to No. 1 in the UK album charts, while its lead single cracked the Top 40 – albeit only at No. 36. The album didn’t fare so well in the States, however. It peaked at 39 in the album charts and, when Savage went bust just a few weeks later, it temporarily fell out of print. Another factor standing in the way of Black Tie…’s success was Bowie’s decision to not tour the album – instead restricting promo to a videoshoot and a couple of US TV appearances. ART AR T DECAD DECADE E
Away from music, Bowie’s other great passion was art. He spoke many times throughout his life about his love of painting. While he had dabbled with collecting in the 60s – selling most of his pieces off when he was broke – and got into German Expressionist painters painters in the 70s, the 90s was when he began to take it seriously, all while building up a formidable (in size at least) collection of his own work. He met and befriended befriended artists of the moment – notably Damien Hirst, with whom he created one of the artist’s famous ‘spin’ paintings. He also began writing features for Modern Painters magazine – starting strong with a rare interview with Balthus – before joining its board of directors. Where many musicians who paint have only a passing interest in the medium beyond their own work, Bowie was learned. He regularly attended Modern Painters meetings and would sit enrapt, listening to academics who had spent their whole lives in the art world. His own work, meanwhile, grew in ambition and scale, demonstrating some genuine – albeit in his friend Tracey Emin’s view “naïve” – talent. It would continue to play a major part in the rest of Bowie’s life and he retained his collection. After Bowie’s death in 2016, around 350 pieces from the collection were sold at auction, with an estimated value of £13 million. In the end, the pieces raised a staggering £32.9 million.
I DECIDED TO DO IT ABOUT FIVE MINUTES BEFORE I WENT ON STAGE…SOMETHING JUST TOLD ME TO SAY THE LORD’S PRAYER
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Art would also inspire the story of his official follow-up to Black Tie White Noise , the cryptic, industrial-tinged to Black concept album 1: Outside . But before all that, he had another, far less knotty record to release… ELVIS IS ENGLISH AND CLIMBS THE HILLS
Bowie’s passion for painting and art collection really took off in the early 90s – he would build an impressive collection and become a very prolific painter in his own right
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Four months after Black Tie White Noise ’s ’s release, Bowie found himself at work on another new album. It didn’t receive a tenth of the fanfare of his ‘comeback’ – indeed, its initial release didn’t even feature his face on the cover. Still, it would prove to be an enduring fan favourite and further evidence of his renewed focus. Novelist Hanif Kureishi first met David Bowie in February that year, when he talked with him for Interview magazine. magazine. Both Bromley boys, they seemingly got on well and, after, Kureishi asked their mutual acquaintance Alan Yentob to set up dinner. His first novel, The Buddha Of Suburbia, Suburbia, had been optioned for TV and he hoped to persuade Bowie to let him use some of his music on the series. Bowie was more than enthusiastic. “What he actually wanted to do was write the soundtrack. So that was how we agreed to do it,” said Kureishi. Recorded over just six days and mixed in a fortnight, it was the fastest Bowie had worked since the 70s. Working on the album with him were Mike Garson, now fully back in Camp Bowie after Black Tie White Noise ; Erdal Kizilçay on keyboards, trumpet, bass and drums; and guest appearances from Lenny Kravitz (on the title track) and 3D Echo – the duo of Rob Clydesdale and Paul Davidson. Bowie’s unabashed enthusiasm for the project was clear. This was his first soundtrack and he was keen to
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get it right. In 2017 in The Guardian, Guardian, Kureishi recalled passing on his feedback with a degree of trepidation – this was David Bowie, after all, one of his heroes long before the pair had met. “I expressed fear that some of the music was either too fast or slow, I can’t remember which. He hurried back to his pad near Montreux in Switzerland and spent the night re-doing everything.” “I felt really happy making that album,” Bowie told Contactmusic.com in 2003. “Overall, it was just myself and Erdal Kizilçay… He had studied at the Istanbul Conservatory, and for his degree had to become proficient in every instrument in the orchestra. This led to a lot of testing on my part. I would produce an oboe from my jacket pocket: ‘Hey, Erdal, don’t you think oboe would be nice here?’. He would trot off to the mic and put down a beautiful solo…” The Buddha Of Suburbia is Suburbia is a terrific album – and not really a soundtrack at all, with only the title track, a pastiche of Bowie’s 70s work that sounds thrillingly contemporary actually being used on the TV show. In places, it recalls his Berlin records, with mordant instrumentals like The Mysteries, Mysteries, while Sex And The Church proved Church proved that he still held an interest in modern dance and electronic music. Unfortunately, its impact was negligible. It sold poorly and was more or less ignored by the media. “The album itself only got one review, a good one as it happens,” Bowie told Contactmusic.com in 2003. Nevertheless, he chose it in the same piece as his personal favourite of all his albums. While it lacks the weight of Black Tie… and Tie… and 1: Outside , it acts as an important bridge between the two projects. Bowie was back – and he was about to embark on some of his most fascinating work yet. ●
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RECORDED OVER JUST SIX DAYS AND MIXED IN A FORTNIGHT, THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA WAS THE FASTEST BOWIE HAD WORKED SINCE THE 70 70S S
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David Bowie vocals, guitar, saxophone, production Nile Rodgers production, guitar Poogie Bell, Sterling Campbell drums Barry Campbell, John Regan bass Richard Hilton, Dave Richards, Philippe Saisse, Richard Tee keyboards Michael Reisman harp, tubular bells, string arrangement Gerardo Velez percussion Al B Sure Sure!! vocals Reeves Gabrels lead guitar Mick Ronson lead guitar Wild T Springe Springerr lead guitar Mike Garson piano Lester Bowie trumpet
BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE THE RENAISSANCE ST STARTS ARTS HERE! BOWIE’S FIRST SOLO LP IN SIX YEARS WAS AN ALBUM OF UNIONS, REUNIONS AND POLITICAL TURMOIL… “BEST SINCE SCARY MONSTERS ? ” TOO RIG HT HT,, SAYS SAYS WIL L SALMON
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lack Tie White Noise came loaded with a weight of hype and expectation. The first David Bowie – rather than Tin Machine – LP in six years, it also marked the return of several important players from his history. Nile Rodgers returned to produce, sparking rumours that this would be a ‘proper’ Let’s Dance sequel. sequel. Back on piano was Mike Garson, appearing for the first time Amer icans – a reunion that would since Young Americans continue, on and off, all the way to Reality and and Bowie’s final tour. Most touchingly, the album saw Bowie and Mick Ronson record together for 112
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the first time since Pin Ups. The pair had already renewed their friendship and remained close until Ronson’s passing in April 1993 – just a few weeks after the album’s release. FEELING FREE
But there was another collaborator on the record – sort of. Bowie was introduced to supermodel Iman in 1990. They married two years later at a private ceremony in Switzerland. For a man who once said that he was “not at ease with the word ‘love’”, Black Tie White Noise sure sure does sound like a record made by someone deep
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TRACK BY TRACK 1 THE WEDDING A slight, but lovely instrumental that was the music played as the bridal party left Bowie and Iman’s (second) wedding ceremony. A sunny, optimistic piece that hints at both English and Arabic influences.
2 YOU’VE BEEN AROU AR OUND ND An ominous, restrained song that builds up layers of percussion, bass and effects, never quite erupting until a joyous horn solo nearly three minutes in, following Bowie’s B owie’s cheeky, cheeky, “Chch-ch changed…” Make no mistake: Bowie is back to his challenging best.
3 I FEEL FREE Bowie exhumes his cover of the 1966 Cream song – first played in a few Ziggy shows and originally considered for Pin Ups. Ups. Its reinterpretation here, with synth, distorted sax and funk guitar, works brilliantly. The presence of Mick Ronson is more than just fan service – he gets to let rip with some superb riffs in the song’s second half.
4 BLACK TIE WHIT WH ITE E NO NOIS ISE E Bowie’s contribution to the canon of racial harmony songs (see also Ebony And Ivory and and Black And White ) is a well-meaning and catchy collaboration with Al B Sure! that never quite rises above its on-the-nose lyric.
5 JUMP THEY SAY An upbeat song with a dark heart. Jump They Jump They Say is is haunted by the presence of Terry Burns. While not overtly about him, it’s impossible to hear the song and not think of Bowie’s half-brother, who committed suicide in 1985. It was a Top 10 hit, aided by an excellent video.
6 NITE FLIGHTS Bowie covers Scott Walker (who, with this song, seemed to be consciously looking to Bowie’s Berlin records), and produces arguably the better version, with an appropriately soaring vocal, a jagged synth line and groove to spare. 114
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in the throes of amore. If opening track The Wedding, Wedding, with its chiming bells, didn’t tip you off, then Miracle Goodnight’s Goodnigh t’s open-hearted ode to a “morning star” surely would – or the fact that the record was originally going to be titled ‘The Wedding Album’. This is a record by a happy man who sounds enthused about life and his art again. It’s not, however, the ‘Let’s ‘Let’s Dance 2’ 2’ that some predicted. Bowie and his new bride returned to America to find Los Angeles in a state of emergency. The LA riots – six days of chaos, sparked by the police’s brutal treatment of African-American taxi driver Rodney King – made for a tumultuous homecoming. “We arrived back on the day the riots started,” Bowie told Record Collector in 1993. “It was an extraordinary extraordinary feeling. I think the one thing that sprang to our minds was that it felt like a prison riot more than anything else. It felt as if innocent inmates of some vast prison were trying to break out – break free from their bonds.” Although he was undoubtedly removed from them, these apocalyptic scenes undoubtedly made an impact on Bowie. His work had been notably more politicised at least as far back as Lodger and and that only increased here, most notably on the title track, while Jum while Jump p They They Sa y addres addresses ses – albeit albeit crypt cryptical ically ly – Terry Burns, Burns, Bowi Bowie’ e’ss half-brother who committed suicide in 1985. It’s an album of sunlight and shadows. IT’S GONNA HAPPEN SOMEDAY
Despite a strong buzz at the time – it was pre-empted with rumours that this would be as bold a departure as Low and and “Heroes” had had been – Black Tie White Noise has never quite commanded the respect it deserves. Bowie didn’t perform it live: one of the first indications of his indifference towards touring that would grow in his later years. And although it was well-received and hit No. 1 in the album charts, Savage Records went bankrupt, making it a bizarrely hard-to-find hit record. To this day, it’s out of print on vinyl – though we can’t imagine that will remain true for much longer. Truthfully, Black Tie White Noise is is a good – rather than great – album. While it’s beautifully produced – thank you, Niles – it sounds dated in places. And, clocking in at close to an hour, it undoubtedly has its longueurs. Losing redundant covers I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday and and Don’t Let Me Down & Down would have done its tracklisting no harm – and would have made for a tighter, more impactful listen. Still, it does undoubtedly mark the moment at which Bowie got his mojo back. There’s a brace of songs here – Jump – Jump They Say , You’ve Been Around , Miracle Goodnight – – that are up there with the best of his work, “Despite a strong buzz at and the other two covers (Cream’s I Feel Free and and his the time – it was pre-empted extraordinary take on Scott with rumours that this would Walker’s Nite Flights) Flights) are superb. As D:Ream had be as bold a departure as sung just a few months and “Heroes” had had been Low Lo w and earlier, “things can only get better”. And with The – Black Tie White Noise has has Buddha Of Suburbia and Suburbia and never quite commanded the 1: Outside just just around the corner, they did… ● respect it deserves deser ves””
7 PALLAS ATHENA A terrific instrumental that feels like both a throwback to Low and and an attempt to engage the 90s dance scene. Indeed, many producers of the time, including Leftfield and Meat Beat Manifesto, remixed the track, leading to an unlikely club hit.
8 MIRACLE GOODNIGHT Nile Rodgers finally gets his chance to shine on this cheerfully throwaway single, which has never quite had the success it deserves. There’s a touch of Prince about its plinky-plonky plasticity and quietly brilliant chorus. It’s also one of the most nakedly romantic songs that Bowie would ever write.
9 DON’T LET ME DOWN & DOWN A cover of T’ Beyby by by Mauritanian model and musician Tahra, recorded as a gift for Iman. Bowie’s baffling decision to sing the opening half in a cod-Jamaican accent rather sinks it, sadly. sad ly.
10 LOOKING FOR LESTER It’s Bowie vs Bowie, as David and namesake Lester duel on sax and trumpet. Mike Garson gamely tinkles along on a lovely instrumental that you susp suspect ect exi exists sts pure purely ly to amuse amuse the two Bowies.
11 I KNOW IT’S GONNA HAPPEN SOMEDAY Bowie covers Morrissey in a weird, OTT manner. As with Nite Flights, Flights, there’s a degree of the snake eating its own tail here – the original track was something of a Bowie pastiche. Entertaining enough, but it probably should have just been a B-side.
12 THE WEDDIN WEDD ING G SO SONG NG The opening theme is reprised with added vocals. An understated coda to an album that marked a creative rebirth for Bowie, and a lovely restatement of its romantic themes. T H E
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David Bowie vocals, keyboards, synths, guitar, alto and baritone saxophones, keyboard percussion, production keyboards, Erdal Kızılçay keyboards, trumpet, bass, guitar, drums, percussion 3D Echo drums, bass, guitar Mike Garson piano Lenny Kravitz guitar David Richards programming, engineering, mixing, production
THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA THIS UNDERRATED SOUNDTRACK SAW BOWIE RECAPTURING THE CREATIVE SPIRIT BEHIND HIS MORE EXPERIMENTAL WORK. ANDY PRICE HIGHLIGHTS A COLLECTION OF T H E A R T I S T ’ S S T R O N G E S T M AT AT E R I A L I N A L O N G T I M E …
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eading Hanif Kurseshi’s The Buddha Of Suburbia, Suburbia, replete with references to the pop culture of the early 1970s (including to David’s native Bromley), there’ss little doubt David Bowie was there’ the perfect choice to provide the soundtrack to the BBC’s adaptation of the book. What’s not immediately apparent to anyone just discovering Bowie’s catalogue, however however,, is what a significant moment this record represented. Though deleted shortly after release, and glossed over during many critical round-ups of Bowie’s albums since, The Buddha 116 T H E
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Of Suburbia absolutely Suburbia absolutely is a David Bowie studio album through and through, and was subsequently reissued as such – which is why we’re featuring it so prominently here. Without the pressure of a record company, or the desire to make an album that catered for populist tastes, Bowie began working with new musical muse (and multi-instrumentalist) Erdal Kızılçay in Montreux, and together the pair were able to quietly craft some remarkable music. Though Bowie’s songwriting here is markedly improved from anything we’d heard in at least a decade, the album really
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TRACK BY TRACK 1 THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA The wonderful title track is among Bowie’s finest compositions of the 1990s, it marks the return of the inward-looking, self-critical songwriter with big ideas not heard from since such records such as Hunky Dory . Bowie was – pointedly – making an artistic statement here: that he’d realigned himself with that figure (underlined by the direct musical and lyrical quoting of Space Oddity and and All The Madmen respectively). Madmen respectively). It’s a yearning, wistful song with a sublime lyric that brilliantly documents both the travails of Karim (Buddha ( Buddha’s ’s protagonist) and Bowie’s own suburban beginnings.
C HURCH 2 SEX AND THE CHURCH The pulsing, electronic rhythms that define this track are a direct precursor to many of the more dance music-inspired tracks that would eventually populate later Bowie records. Here, though, the beats, electronic stabs of synth and sultry bass become mesmerising rather than pulse-raising. Bowie’s vocoded monologue sounds distant and oppressive, while the subject matter tackles the semi-spiritual power and importance of sex. It’s quite the most experimental thing Bowie had recorded since Side Two of “ Heroes” .
is defined by its textured and rich instrumentals – and its spirit of inventiveness – even pushing the previously set boundaries defined by Listening to The Buddha Of Low and and “Heroes” . The first of these is jazzy Suburbia, it becomes clear Mike Garson vehicle, that Bowie has somehow South Horizon, which is quickly followed reconnected with the same up by The Mysteries outsider spirit spirit that he – with its glistening picture of the great so consciously sought expanse beyond to shed through the suburbia – and capped off by the ominous hum ‘having it all’ 80s of Ian Fish, U.K. Heir . All three are laden with fascinating instrumentation and sonic treatment, and reveals a Bowie who had cast off the memory of his chart-focused pop persona, or the ramshackle chaos of Tin Machine. Instead, he had rediscovered the inner artist for whom sound was a rich, colourful palette to be used however he pleased. BOWIE IS… OUTSIDER
3 SOUTH HORIZON Re-enter Mike Garson – a man whose off-kilter piano flourishes really became a central element in Bowie’s early career. In this painterly piece, Garson’s upfront playing reminds listeners of his distinctive style, while Erdal Kızılçay’s distant trumpet part repeats in the background. At once, we’re reminded of and the David Bowie that sought out Aladdin Sane and the unconventional. It was Bowie’s favourite track on Buddha… – Buddha… – perhaps that’s because it was as far from his recent material as it was possible to be.
4 THE MYSTERIES This gorgeous, memorable – but subtle – piece, which features reversed piano/guitar sprinkled over a pulsing organic synth bed, is both evocative and soothing. It’s perhaps most reminiscent of the serenity of Moss Garden from Garden from “Heroes” . It’s one of the strongest pieces of music on the record, and seems like an integral summation of the instrumentals that pepper the soundtrack. It has a strange, hazy sense of nostalgia, a yearning for the great beyond (be that space, the afterlife, or somewhere beyond suburbia) and is among the most fascinating pieces here.
5 BLEED LIKE A CR AZE, DAD If the more ambient instrumentals of the second sides of Low and and “Heroes” are the most apt points of comparison to the bulk of this album, then here, Bowie recalls the disjointed funk-rock spirit of the first halves of those classic records. With a bassline pilfered from and a soaring lead guitar line that has Sister Midnight and a Breaking Glass tone. Glass tone. Bowie’s repetition of “shame, shame, shame” gives way to a quickfire nurseryrhyme delivery of some fascinating lyrics that bring to mind the detached darkness of his mid-70s LA-based paranoia. Lines such as: “Party on the dead, put a net through his headache,” could have easily been penned by the Thin White Duke. 118
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Bowie comperes the Concert Of Hope World AIDS Day charity benefit show in 1993
Bowie is firing on all cylinders on Buddha… – aside aside from the instrumentals, the simple pulse and hooky riff of Dead Against It , the charming Untitled No. 1 and of course, the towering Strangers When We Meet (which would later be improved upon on 1. Outside ) find Bowie in rude health as a songwriter. The latter song, in particular particular,, is really quite something. It’s arguably one of his greatest songs of all. Many of the tracks foreshadow approaches that Bowie would pursue as the 1990s progressed. The robotic beats of Sex And The Church prefigure some of the more rhythmically oriented material on 1. Outside , such as We Prick You and Hallo Spaceboy , while the wistful nostalgia and immaculate songwriting of the title track and Strangers When We Meet would would be indulged further on 1999’s Hours – a period where Bowie even went the extra mile of regrowing his luscious, 1971-era locks. The aforementioned title track is not just a lush evocation of half-remembered boyhood dreams in suburbia, but is also fascinating in terms of its release context, too. As with Ashes To Ashes in 1980, here Bowie takes stock of his pop-cultural legacy (then a potent element in the cauldron of Britpop) and remembers his humble beginnings. “Living in lies by the railway line,” Bowie wearily sings as his recalling of suburban confinement, and the pull of aspiration, gradually ascends to its stunning chorus: “Down on my knees in suburbia, down on myself in every way”. It’s clear that Bowie has somehow reconnected with the same outsider spirit that he so consciously sought to shed through the ‘having it all’ 80s. “Zane, zane, zane. Ouvre le chien,” Bowie repeats, mantra-like, at the song’s conclusion: the same coda that marked the finale of 1970s paean to the ostracised, All The Madmen . Embracing an outsider status, and the way that society treats the ‘different’, would be one of Bowie’s thematic hallmarks as the decade progressed; Bowie would make his definitive statement on the subject on his next full-length LP. ●
6 STRANGERS
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A future single, and the grand finale of the superb 1. Outside , this early version of the song contains pretty much all the elements that would make it one of Bowie’s finest songs of the decade, with a bassline reminiscent of “Heroes ”, a sublime vocal “Heroes”, and one of Bowie’s most infectious melodies in a long time. There’s a sense of regret in the reflective, yearning yearn ing lyric l yric with the repeated re peated line: “I’m so thankful, that we’re strangers when we meet,” a wonderful, poetic bit of writing. We’ll discuss the (in our view) definitive version of the track in the next volume of The Bowie Years ears..
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A euphoric riff and propulsive rhythm suddenly lifts the album to a new plane, with the withdrawn Bowie vocal casting a wonderful, hypnotic spell on the listener. Dead Against It sounds sounds simultaneously quirky, lo-fi and also utterly modern (see some of the earlier work of Pulp for a more contemporary comparison). The lyric, as with the previous track, reads as a reflective rumination on a flawed relationship, with the line: “She loves to talk into the phone, no matter who, no matter when, no matter where,” being characteristically prophetic for a song written in the early 90s.
8 UNTITLED
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With an arrangement that superficially sounds like an offcut from Black Tie White Noise , before long, the song becomes its own quirky beast that finds Bowie adopting a faux Marc Bolan-style voice in the song’s coda. The arrangement has many fascinating elements going on, but despite the stripping away of a few track elements in the bridge, it doesn’t really go anywhere dynamically. Like the record’s instrumental tracks, it lulls the listener into a certain passive mood.
9 IAN
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Among the most ambient pieces that Bowie ever recorded, Ian Fish, U.K. Heir (an (an anagram of Buddha Of Suburbia’s Suburbia’s author, Hanif Kureishi) is a gloomy, minimal piece that features an occasiona l peppering of acoustic guitar lines, including a subtle revisit to the title tr ack’s chorus melody. It works very well on the record and is a stirring instrumental, yet is perhaps is a little too ambient for newcomers. Nevertheless, coming from a man who, just three years prior to this record, had everything turned up to 11 in the raucous Tin Machine, a work of such delicate beauty is yet another indication of Bowie’s artistic renaissance.
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BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA (FEATURING LENNY KRAVITZ) Bookending the album is another version of the title track, though unlike the reprises of It’s No Game and The Wedding, Wedding, here we have exactly the same recording as we heard on track one, but now with the addition of an incongruous Lenny Kravitz guitar solo, which – while serviceable – doesn’t really fit into the nostalgic mood conjured elsewhere. T H E
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THE INSPIRATIONAL
DAVID BOWIE WHILE NOT THE CREATIVE FORCE HE ONC E WAS WAS BY THIS P OINT, THE MUSICAL LANDSCAPE OF THE 1 980S WAS DOMIN ATED BY ARTISTS WHO OWED A GREAT DEAL TO BO WIE’S INSPIRATIONAL 70S HEYDAY. ANDY PRICE EXPLORES HIS CONTINUING STA ST ATUS AS A TOWERI NG POP-CULTURAL FIGURE…
he pretty things of the 70s, who’d followed David Bowie’s career voraciously – from glam-rock titan to avant-garde electronic-music journeyman via plastic soul boy – had now grown up, and by 1983 were making their own noises, and scoring successful chart placements as a result. By the time of the release of Let’s Dance , Bowie was in the curious position of competing with a new generation of artists who had transformed the pop landscape in the UK into something new by taking their cues primarily from Bowie’s own innovative stylistic and musical choices over the previous decade. Culture Club are a particular point of reference. Formed by George O’Dowd (alias Boy George) in 1981, his controversially glamorous, androgynous aesthetic – and the band’s penchant for writing floorfilling, upbeat pop songs – took much inspiration from Bowie’s own movements the preceding decade. By the time of Let’s Dance ’s ’s release, they’d progressed from regular ‘Bowie Night’ attendees at New Romantic clubs such as the Blitz and were dominating the airwaves with hits such as the infectious, immaculately Want to Hurt Me? crafted Do You Really Want Despite his own status as a titan of the 80s pop scene in his own right, Boy George would articulately reflect on the influence of Bowie later, in the wake of David’s passing, when he told the Daily Mail : “As a teenager growing up in suburbia, I was very much the odd one out and Bowie was the light at the end of a very grey tunnel. He validated me and made me realise I was
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Ziggy was still a huge influence on pop culture in the following decade, as this attendee of the 1983 David Bowie World Convention in London demonstrates T H E
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I WAS VERY MUCH THE ODD ONE OUT AND BOWIE WAS WAS THE LIGHT AT THE END OF A VERY GREY TUNNEL. HE MADE ME REALISE I WAS NOT ALONE
Duran Duran’s look owed a lot to Bowie’s more masculine, besuited late70s incarnation
not alone. Listening to his early songs, I felt he was speaking directly to me when he sang: ‘We’re painting our faces and dressing thoughts from the skies, from paradise’. Bowie painted a mythical landscape where otherness and individuality reigned supreme.” Those influenced by Bowie’s later work included the likes of Duran Duran, who embraced Bowie’s more straight-laced, besuited masculine aesthetic (that Bowie himself returned to during the decade) and took many stylistic cues from Young Americans and Americans and Station To Station.. The tailored swagger would be a recurring Station visual motif throughout the 1980s: just think of Talking Heads, ABC and Spandau Ballet. WITHOUT WITHO UT YOU YOU
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name of Kate Bush eagerly took up his mantle. Though her 1979 debut The Kick Inside was was quirky and promising, by the middle of the 80s she’d proven herself to be a colossal talent, and was seemingly on a path to supplant Bowie himself in terms of the experimental quality and artistic merit of her work. Records such as The Dreaming, Dreaming, Never For Ever and and the astonishing Hounds Of Love demonstrate demonstrate that Bush was possessed of the same burning creative drive that Bowie had previously exhibited. Consequently, many of the more cerebral members of Bowie’s audience, aghast by the commercial sheen of their former idol’s EMI output, subsumed themselves into Bush’s deep and textured musical worlds. Bush herself, though, was indebted to Bowie: past, present and future, as she herself revealed in an editorial piece in a 2007 edition of Mojo. Mojo. “He’s “He’s made all the
had been introduced to the power of music via artists such as Bowie. Joy Division began life as a punkier incarnation called Warsaw – named after Bowie’s Warsawza from Low – – and fittingly imbued their music with the same bleak, monochromatic aesthetic that also pervaded The Idiot and and “Heroes”. The Smiths were among the biggest success stories of the indie world, leaving behind many of their contemporaries and ascending to worldwide pop stardom, despite being massively out-of-step with the then pop hierarchy, and the having-it-all aesthetic that even Bowie himself flaunted. The union of the poetic lyricist and vocalist Morrissey with the supremely gifted Johnny Marr yielded yielded some of of the decade decade’s ’s best best music music and cultivated a loyal following. Their approach, too, was partly motivated by Bowie, as Johnny Marr remembered in an interview with the NME in in 2012:
Bowie helped Boy George feel less of an outsider during his formative years, and was a huge influence
right moves, each album exploring a new sound, a new way of looking at things, experimental and brave. Starring in The Man Who Fell To Earth made him a successful actor as well. His introduction to The Snowman animation, although brief, made the film more poignant, as if the whole thing somehow belonged to him. I just loved his hilarious Extras cameo, and the quirky Tesla in The Prestige .” .” Bush concluded by saying that for her, David Bowie remains “…the quintessential artist, always different and ever surprising. An inspiration for us all.” Elsewhere in the 80s, in the face of the increasing ubiquity of watered-down, committee-written pop, indie-rock labels allowed idealistic young bands a network and a platform to reach a hungry audience and address subjects never before documented in pop. Their creative spirit was fuelled by songwriters who T H E
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HE’S MADE ALL THE RIGHT MOVES, EACH ALBUM EXPLORING A NEW SOUND, A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS, EXPERIMENTAL AND BRAV BR AVE E
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“I first heard of him in the glam-rock days with the amazing run of RCA singles – I think Suffragette City was played at my youth club. What was fantastic was that it was this tough, tight rock music, but the cool girls liked it, because back then, a lot of rock music was good guitar players but was just guy-zone – music for spotty, greasy boys. So many parents hated that ‘Ziggy Stardust’ period, because it was so obviously sexually loaded and erotic. That was really liberating. It was naughty, and it was exciting, and it was illicit. It was about a world that I just couldn’t wait to join. He really understood what a great artform commercial pop could be.” TILL THE BAD STUFF BREAKS…
So despite Bowie himself feeling creatively spent throughout the 80s, his former fans had reshaped his artful music-making philosophy and used it as a stimulus to soundtrack the decade. As for the influence of Bowie’s 80s pop triumvirate itself, well for Nile Rodgers, Let’s Dance helped helped to secure his position as a funk-pop Svengali whose sparkling touch would yield dramatic commercial success. This held true even as recently as 2013, when Daft Punk’s Get Lucky dominated dominated the airwaves, featuring Rodgers adding his distinctive funk guitar. At times like these, Let’s Dance gets gets another moment in the sun, as well-structured, populist funk-rock is made popular again. Mark Ronson would later build on this
re-energised funk sound with his 2015 record Uptown Special : an album that featured amongst its players one Carlos Alomar (on the ultra-hit UpT UpTown own Funk! Fun k!). ). In this lineage, Let’s Dance can can be looked at as a step along the road to the widespread acceptance of funkinfluenced pop in the charts. Alas, when it comes to the frequently maligned Tonight and and Never Let Me Down, Down, finding anyone who regards them, or indeed Bowie’s pop direction, as a major influence, is hard. But in the context of how David Bowie’s work had shaped the minds of the new generation of pop stars, he could – like a proud parent – easily afford to sit back and survey a landscape dominated by his progeny. ●
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Above: Joy Division were originally named ‘Warsaw’, after Bowie’s song Warszawa
Below: The Smiths were inspired by Bowie’s ability to use pop music as a vehicle to create interesting art
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O F T O S L O A D O N G 0 S. E N T S 1 9 9 T U R E A T L R A F G N T O E R I A N I T T A O L M R O V E E A N D G E M S U F E S S S U R E T E C A D E A R D C C E A A D E R H U T T S R L L N T F T H U N D L Y A A I T C T L L A K S O B E S T R L L I E T S M S T R A C T T H E O M H E R E ’ S C S T T O U N D L L L O U ’ S E E I W Y B U D S O P U , O Y B A S A N T S T S, A W W 0 8 E F A N S E C O R D E E P C U H A T U T B R A L H E R H E D O T O T G H C E R E G S T T U O N T N I S T H R M O R E A M O N V L E E S S I D H D E N I C E C D D R I P H D Y A N
20 HEAVEN’S IN HERE
TIN MACHINE (1989) The first track on Tin Machine’s first record is among its more engaging moments. With a traction engine of a riff grinding the band into a bluesy motion. Bowie’s vocal and stylistic debt to Iggy Pop is fairly obvious: an association made transparent with that fact that Iggy’s one time rhythm section – the infamous Sales brothers – provide the pounding bedrock. Due to Tin Machine’s policy of only allowing first-take, instinctual approaches to songcraft, the lyric is somewhat duff by Bowie’s standards. Yet the collective intensity of the song conceals it.
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19 ’87 AND CRY
NEVER LET ME DOWN (1987) is often written off as the Never Let Me Down is work of an artist bereft of ideas. However, a closer look reveals that great songs do lurk here. ’87 And Cry is is among the strongest, with a lyric that finds Bowie re-connecting with the politics of his homeland over a heavy arrangement, that prefigures his rock-oriented next move, and the raw guitar solo was performed by Bowie himself. A nice example of a lyrically and thematically interesting song, swamped somewhat by the record’s hallmark overblown production.
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18 GLASS SPIDER
NEVER LET ME DOWN (1987) Another Marmite track, Glass Spider is is the dramatic centrepiece of Never Let Me Down, harking back to Bowie’s more sci-fi early works. And when the music kicks in, it also becomes one of Never Let Me Down ’s’s more colourful high-points. The dramatic synthstrings and uncertain bass is a great relief from the uncomplicated major chords that dominate the record otherwise.
17 TIN MACHINE
TIN MACHINE (1989) The Tin Machine project is much maligned, but Tin Machine the the song is actually fun in a ramshackle way. This raucous explosion of noise and a breathtakingly impactful rhythm section finds Bowie adopting his most overtly (and semi-parodic) ‘punk’ vocal on record. Though it’s tongue-in-cheek, Reeves Gabrels’ riffs effortlessly glide the song to its conclusion. An infectious and enjoyable little piece. It’s a shame the rest of the record doesn’t continue with this looser sound.
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16 YOU’VE YOU’V E BEEN BEEN AROUND AROUND
BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE (1993) The industrial hum of You’ve Been Around belies its orthodox Tin Machine-era origins. Live drums propel the track forward, while Bowie’s processed vocals wrench him back – musically at least – into the ‘weird’ camp. His Scott Walker-aping croon blends with the fuzzy synths wonderfully. Bowie was an artist truly reinvigorated for a new decade.
12 THE WEDDING
BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE (1993) The pulsing instrumental that opens Black Tie was composed to mark Bowie’s White Noise was 1992 marriage, but also saw a return to nuanced composition after the overblown production ethos of the 80s. While many love songs deal in trite cliché, here, Bowie communicates his sense of very real joy through a variety of instruments – the slightly nervous two-note bassline, the repeated bells motif and the soaring, lovely saxophone that also recalls Bowie’s more exotic works on the latter end of “Heroes” .
15 CRIMINAL WORLD
LET’S DANCE (1983) This cover of Metro’s 1976 track has one of the most sumptuous arrangements on Let’s Dance . From the sharp, stabby opening riff to the warmth of the shiny synth pads that run throughout the song, Nile Rodgers’ production shines and Stevie Ray Vaughan has some wonderful guitar moments. Though the original song was a gay anthem (and banned by the BBC as a result), Bowie’s version makes some unfortunate edits to the lyric, making it less challenging, perhaps, for the still very socially conservative wider public of the time. Despite this, the song remains an enjoyable listen.
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NEVER LET ME DOWN (1987) Bowie’s love letter to 60s counterculture is perhaps the strongest of Never Let Me Down ’s’s album tracks, with Peter Frampton’s electric sitar a notable element. Again, this is an example of how Bowie writing new and interesting material frequently went unnoticed. The purposefully naïve Zeroes is is a deconstruction of the entire rock ’n’ roll myth and remains a great listen. It’s also actually a bit of an anthem, and w ould have made a great single.
WITHIN WITH IN YOU YOU
LABYRINTH (1986) is a surprisingly dark track for Within You is the soundtrack to a kids’ film. Vocally, it’s reminiscent of Bowie’s delivery on the Baal album, album, with some suitably theatrical enunciation underlining the character-based nature of the song. Oscillating between intense projected lyrics that imply a spurned lover, to a more tender, breathy delivery of the “I can’t live within you” refrain, the song is wonderfully dynamic. Okay, so Labyrinth the film may not be ‘high art’, but here, Bowie demonstrates that he’s still the master of character-based songwriting.
11 RICOCHET
LET’S DANCE (1983) The most fascinating lyric on Let’s Dance , features a characteristically tight Ricochet features Nile Rodgers production and some of Bowie’s most sublime melodies on the record. His words allude to the darker side of 80s capitalism: Bowie sings of the world “o n a corner, waiting for jobs” and the growing despair of the working class. Throughout the track, countermelodies and backing vocals weave in with repeated refrains. It’s a tense and agitated track that works well after the summery euphoria of the record’s beginning.
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Recorded by Tony Visconti in the same environment (and with the same technique) where he captured Bowie’s career-best vocals on “Heroes” , Baal’s Hymn is a showcase of Bowie’ Bowie’ss supreme mastery of his vocal chords
9 BAAL’S HYMN
10 DEAD AGAINST IT
THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA (1993) Growing out of The Buddha of Suburbia ’s’s understated (but genuinely beautiful) soundscapes comes one of Bowie’s most infectious and celebratory tracks, and one that doesn’t get anywhere near enough attention. Built around a scintillating synth and guitar riff and a rolling, unstoppable beat, Dead Against It was, was, as with the rest of the soundtrack’s compositions, constructed in isolation. With a lofty lyric that finds Bowie in thrall to the “apple in my eye” delivered with a weary resignation, Dead Against It prefigures Bowie’s more intense rhythmic experiments as the decade progressed, and is a highlight of the reco rd.
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WITHOUT WITH OUT YOU YOU
LET’S DANCE (1983) Though Let’s Dance is is dominated by a trio of glorious singles, the rest of the album contains some equally worthy moments. Without You , the track that immediately follows that forked salvo of hits, has a wonderful Chic-recalling arrangement that features a curiously restrained Bowie gliding effortlessly over the tightly constructed, bouncy framework. Though lyrically sparse, it’s a pleasant listen and promisingly indicates a route that equally melds both boisterous 80s production and fantastic songcraft which, sadly,, Bowie rarely pursued through the sadly decade. Though it was released as a single in some territories, in the UK, it remained a low-profile piece, and a hopeful indication that Bowie was still an artist who constructed album tracks with the same diligence as his chart-bothering singles.
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BAAL (1982) The opening track of the Baal soundtrack soundtrack contains an utterly superb Bowie vocal – growing from what is ostensibly a line delivery to a fully fledged powerhouse vibrato. Bowie snarls, quips and semi-raps an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative that is backed by a murky, sombre arrangement before launching into a militaristic march. Recorded by Tony Visconti in the same environment (and with the same technique) where he captured Bowie’s career-best vocals on “Heroes” , Baal’s Hymn is is a showcase of Bowie’s supreme mastery of his vocal chords.
B O W I E
THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA (1993) Throughout The Buddha Of Suburbia , Bowie frees himself from the strictures of the pop and rock worlds, and once again soaks into a world of instrumental music. Of all the soundscapes he crafts on the album, the crystalline beauty of The Mysteries is is the one that lingers in the memory. Bowie here recaptures a dreamy mood that listeners hadn’t previously experienced since Side B of “Heroes” . The Mysteries ’ staggered, beguiling reversed-piano parts work to lull the listener into a semi-transcendental state: the song paints an aural picture of a daydreaming individual, aspiring to greater things, beyond suburbia. Bowie the sonic pioneer was back.
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8 NITE FLIGHTS
BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE (1993) Bowie’s cover of Scott Walker’ Walker’ss Nite Flights was a doffing of the cap to his fellow avant-garde baritone (as was his cover of Morrissey’s I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday later later on Black Tie White Noise ).). Nite Flights was was the title track of The Walker Brothers’ 1978 album, a record that contained what Bowie described as “quite the most lovely songs I’d heard in years”. Bowie’s uniquely reworked version contains a recurring, robotic synth drone that adds a futuristic sheen to the song’s uptempo, rollicking beat. It would be one of Black Tie White Noise ’s’s higher profile tracks, performed live on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno in in 1993.
5 I CAN’T READ
TIN MACHINE (1989) The most well known of all the Tin Machineera songs (as Bowie would perform it well into his 90s career), I Can’t Read is is a really great composition that proves that even in creatively uncertain times, Bowie was still a superb – and self-aware – songwr iter. Ironic then, that this eventually beloved song would focus lyrically lyrically,, as with 1977’s Sound And Vision , on Bowie’s then lack of inspiration. “I can’t read and I can’t write down”, Bowie drawls through the deliberately stifled melody, which precedes the explosive chorus of “I can’t read shit anymore” and we’re wrenched to alertness. We feel Bowie’s frustration here, and know t hat he’s doing all he can to find that spark again…
4 AS THE THE WORLD WORLD FALLS DOWN
LABYRINTH (1986) For many of those in the more cerebral corners of Bowie-fandom, his infamous performance in Labyrinth (and, (and, by association, on the soundtrack record) is dismissed as further evidence of Bowie chasing mainstream acceptance and an erosion of his artistic edge. Those who really listened to to the record, however, could dredge up enough Bowie sustenance to keep them afloat. For keen listeners, it becomes apparent that As The World Falls Down is is (secretly) among Bowie’s finest 80s songs: an exquisite vocal performance of a heart wrenchingly gorgeous melody with a lyric as rich as anything on any Bow ie record proper. As The World Falls Down is is a beautiful song, and its quality shines through the saccharine 80s production.
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3 GOODBYE MR. ED
TIN MACHINE II (1991) The final track on Tin Machine’s long long deleted (and long derided) second outing turns out to be a lost Bowie highlight, and so toweringly worthy – particularly when compared to the other tracks on the record – that we had to place it high on our list here, just to draw your attention to it. It’s difficult to really consider this as a Tin Machine track at all, being such an utterly ‘Bowie’ song lyrically and musically. musically. There are intimations of resignation and retirement (and a slightly suicidal air) as Bowie punctuates each ver se with “Goodbye Mr. Ed” and paints a picture of a character absorbing the jumbled mess of pop cu lture, racial tension and violence with a powerless, weary shrug. It’s a surprisingly beautiful end to the Tin Machine project which, if nothing else, allowed David Bowie to rediscover himself as an artist.
2 THE DROWNED GIRL
BAAL (1982) Containing one of Bowie’s finest-ever vocal performances, The performances, The Drowned Girl – – a track from Bowie’s Baal soundtrack, soundtrack, written by Bertolt Brecht – is a theatrical, emotionally resonant and dynamic showcase for Bowie: as both actor and vocalist. Rising from a melancholy and unemotional close-mic’d delivery to a soaring, impassioned and majestic expression of pain, The Drowned Girl thoroughly thoroughly underlines Bowie’s now-towering vocal strength as a baritone v ocalist (and, as with Baal’s Hymn , recalls “Heroes” ).). An undervalued gem, the song uses a traditional and restrained Kurt Weill arrangement and although it comes and goes incredibly quickly, during its brief runtime, we witness Bo wie demonstrating his full range and vocal power.
1 THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA
THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA (1993) We generally disqualify singles in this feature, but this song is so under-heard that it had to take the No. 1 crown here. Among Bowie’s most gorgeous 90s compositions, The Buddha Of Suburbia ’s’s title track welcomes back an incarnation of Bowie we’d not really heard from since 1971’s Hunky Dory . Here, the wistful songwriter with big ideas returns, as Bowie aptly paints a picture of naïve aspirations, shackled by the weight of conformity in a suburban prison. Clearly he’s singing from experience here, while also alluding to the narrative of Karim Amir (the television series’ title character) and, really, every alienated dreamer everywhere. Bowie is taking stock of his caree r, too, with a musical reference to Space Oddity ’s’s fourchord motif and, fascinatingly fascinatingly,, 1970’s All The Madmen , with which it shares its surreal outro lyric. Once again, and for the first time in a long time, Bowie taps into a pop-cultural mood: with Britpop in the ascendency and musical identity being a paramount concern to the chart-topping bands of the day, it’s it’s fitting that Bowie (whose influence was palpably rippling throughout the movement) realigned himself with his venerated younger self. ● T H E
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THE BOWIE VOL.3 YEARS Inside 132 pages of classic photos and in-depth Bowie features
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Track-by-track album analysis
Profiles of Bowie collaborators Nile Rodgers and Queen, plus brand new interviews int erviews with 80s sidemen s idemen Carmine Rojas and Kevin Armstrong ●
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The essential alternative Bowie playlist, and much more!
