by Pat Gilbert
The album was completed within three weeks, unusually without Bowie contributing any instrumental parts, Rodgers manning the mixing console while Bowie directed proceedings from the sofa in the control room. The sessions adhered to civilized hours—from 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.—and had little of the willful experimentation heard on Bowie’s previous albums. His role this time was as “The Singer,” placing his voice and persona center stage, just as the star vocalists did in the days of the R & B big bands. Most of his performances, captured in the last two days of recording, were first takes, while the lyrical content of his new songs was simple and positive (in stark contrast to the moody, sexually ambivalent subject matter of the cover of “Criminal World”).
The cover art to Let’s Dance, the most commercially successful album of Bowie’s career.
Bowie used the tapes to try to close a new record deal with EMI, which together with the other main label was naturally eager to sign him. RCA wanted to renegotiate its terms with the singer, but after the travails of the MainMan years and its unenthusiastic reaction to Low (which Bowie still smarted about), it had further offended him in the run-up to Christmas by releasing a single of his and Bing Crosby’s “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy,” a recording Bowie detested. On January 27, 1983, Bowie finally inked a contract with EMI worth a reported $17 million, a vast sum which would bankroll his studio work until the end of the decade.
Two years after Lennon’s death, it was evident that Bowie was now ready to re-enter the pop world and play live again. After making a cameo in the comedy pirate romp Yellowbeard while on holiday in Mexico, he offered an olive branch to Alomar, hiring the guitarist as musical director for the Serious Moonlight world tour, an ambitious jaunt that by the end of 1983 would notch up almost a hundred performances in sixteen different countries, with ticket sales topping the $2.5 million mark. While Alomar recruited what was essentially the Let’s Dance studio group, Bowie traveled to Australia with David Mallet to shoot videos for the first two singles from the album, the title track and “China Girl.”
The promo film for “Let’s Dance,” where a sun-bleached Bowie performs the song in the bar of the remote Carinda Hotel in the outback of New South Wales while two young Aboriginals, Joelene King and Terry Roberts, dance to the music, is one of the most memorable of the 1980s. The 2015 documentary, Let’s Dance: Bowie Down Under, revealed that the nugget-y-faced locals weren’t forewarned of King’s and Roberts’s roles so that their reactions—mostly perplexed/disapproving glances—were spontaneous. Bowie referred to the promo as “a very direct statement about integration of one culture with another”—something that also rang true of the “China Girl” shoot, which saw Bowie rolling around in the surf on a beach, From Here to Eternity–style, with New Zealand actress Geeling Ng. “Can I point out, contrary to popular belief, David and I did not have sex on the beach,” Ng told Q magazine in 2009. “It was shot at 5 a.m., the water was freezing and wasn’t a great lubricant, and we were being watched by a film crew and joggers passing by. Not very romantic.” The shoot did, however, mark the beginning of a short relationship between Bowie and Ng.
A Japanese edition of “China Girl,” the second single from Let’s Dance, and a song Bowie originally co-wrote with Iggy Pop for The Idiot.
The release of “Let’s Dance” as a single in March 1983 signaled the beginning of a new phase in Bowie’s career, when the international fame of his RCA years was eclipsed by superstar status. Part of this was due to the launch in 1981 of MTV, the cable channel devoted to broadcasting music videos. Though MTV’s influence on record sales in the very early 1980s has been overstated—it wasn’t until 1983 that it became widely available to subscribers in some of the United States’ biggest cities, and in Europe the format didn’t take off until the 1990s—it proved to be the perfect vehicle for promoting Bowie, an artist who’d been making memorable promo videos since the Aladdin Sane days. Bowie was naturally supportive of a channel that played music 24/7, but during an MTV interview to promote Let’s Dance, he joined the chorus of musicians enraged that few videos featuring black artists were never aired, a policy mercifully reversed in subsequent years.
An advertisement for Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour—his first world tour since 1978.
By the time Bowie joined the tour rehearsals in April, “Let’s Dance” was No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, with the album soon to follow suit. The touring band was his biggest yet, and as well as Carlos Alomar, Tony Thompson, Carmine Rojas, and keyboardist David Lebolt, it included a three-man saxophone section—dubbed the Borneo Horns—plus brothers Frank and George Simms on backing vocals. The lead guitarist’s job initially fell to Stevie Ray Vaughan, but toward the end of rehearsals in Dallas, Vaughan’s hometown, a number of incidents set him on a collision course with Bowie and his management. The first was the sequence in the video for “Let’s Dance” where Bowie mimed to the guitarist’s solo, a seemingly innocent act which nonetheless outraged the purist, authenticity-obsessed Vaughan. The second was the realization that Vaughan’s group, Double Trouble, would not be the support act during certain legs of the tour, as he had apparently been led to believe. The third was money—his manager was, at the last minute, angling for a higher fee for his client. It was also reported that the hard-living Vaughan was incredulous that the group’s contracts demanded they steer clear of drugs, an activity Bowie had once so freely enjoyed. With the tour bus set to leave for the airport, from whence the group was due to fly to Europe, Bowie’s team called Vaughan’s bluff over his demands for a bigger wage and his other gripes and left him on the pavement with his gear. “One of the most heart-breaking things I’ve ever seen,” recalled an emotional Rojas. (Vaughan would, however, go on to achieve international fame before tragically dying in a helicopter crash in 1990.)
A studio portrait taken around the time of the release of Let’s Dance, showing Bowie’s new and decidedly “pop” image.
Bowie and his trusty skull onstage at the Vorst Forest Nationaal in Brussels, Belgium, on the opening night of the Serious Moonlight tour.
Another shot of Bowie on the Let’s Dance tour, flanked by keyboard player Dave Lebolt and sax men Steve Elson, Stan Harrison, and Lenny Pickett. His band for the tour also featured longtime collaborators Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick on guitar.
With just days before the first show in Brussels, Bowie called Earl Slick, whom he had last encountered on the Station to Station sessions before they had fallen out amid the chaos of MainMan’s dismissal. Over dinner in Paris, Bowie and Slick settled their differences, and after four days locked in Alomar’s hotel room learning the set, the guitarist joined the group for the opening night of the tour at the eight-thousand-capacity Vorst Nationaal arena in Brussels. For the stage set, as with the Station to Station and Stage tours, Bowie opted for simplicity and for drama relied on powerful and imaginative lighting effects devised by Mark Ravitz, who’d overseen the most extravagant leg of the Diamond Dogs tour. The daily regimen emphasized Bowie’s interest in keeping fit, with morning aerobics sessions and healthy meals. His image for the tour was an updated 1950s rock ’n’ roll look, with a bleach-blond quiff and a series of striking pastel-colored suits designed by Peter Hall. Meanwhile, the group was dressed in theatrical costumes—Alomar as a prince, Rojas as a Far Eastern sailor, the Simms brothers in boating garb, and Earl Slick, to his relief, as his unalloyed rock ’n’ roll self. The setlist was as diverse as the costumes and revisited material from all of Bowie’s 1970s albums, bar The Man Who Sold the World, with new arrangements that kept the Borneo Horns busy—and Bowie too, who on various numbers played guitar and sax.
The final Let’s Dance single, “Without You,” with cover art by the American artist and activist Keith Haring.
As well as the arena dates, there were also several summer festival engagements, including the vast Us Fest in San Bernardino, for which Bowie was paid a fee of $1.5 million, spent on building a second stage set that would allow the crews to leapfrog ahead
to next dates. At Milton Keynes Bowl in the UK and Madison Square Garden, a large globe, lit to glow like a moon, was suspended high above the crowd, disgorging balloons at the show’s finale. At Hammersmith Odeon, which served as a warmup for the outdoor Milton Keynes shows, Bowie called in Tony Visconti to sort out problems with the sound—which he did, while declining the offer of soundman for the rest of the tour. It would be another fifteen years before he and Bowie worked together again.
The North American leg of the tour ran from mid-July through mid-September and, with his fear of flying long conquered, Bowie traveled when necessary on his own specially chartered jet. In Vancouver, on September 3, he was unexpectedly reacquainted with Mick Ronson, who was in town working with a band. Ronson had requested guest tickets for the show from Coco Schwab and met Bowie backstage afterward. Bowie, who hadn’t spoken to his Ziggy sidekick since 1975, invited him to join the group on stage the following evening for an encore of “The Jean Genie,” which he duly thrashed his way through on a guitar borrowed from Earl Slick. In October, the tour moved on to Japan, then to Australia and New Zealand. On the final night of the tour, at Auckland’s Western Springs Stadium on November 26, Bowie performed to a crowd of almost seventy-five thousand, at that point deemed to be the biggest-ever public gathering in New Zealand’s history.
The Serious Moonlight concert film was recorded at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, Canada, on September 12, 1983, and released on VHS and laserdisc the following year.
Released in 1984, Tonight featured only two new Bowie originals. The rest of its nine tracks comprised cover versions and re-recordings of songs he had previously cut with Iggy Pop.
After the tour ended, Bowie elected to stay in the Far East, and in December several further dates were appended to the scheduled, using a stripped-down version of the stage set. His visits to Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong were documented in Ricochet, a fascinating hour-long film by director Gerry Troyna, comprising fly-on-the-wall footage and staged scenes. “I came over to Japan in ’72 [sic], I think it was, and I’ve had an ongoing affair with the East ever since,” Bowie explained at a press conference in Hong Kong. The film provides an interesting counterpoint to David Mallet’s official document of the tour, Serious Moonlight, a solid performance video that, in its original VHS form, including interview segments.
The tour ended on a poignant note. The last night in Hong Kong, on December 8, marked the third anniversary of John Lennon’s murder. To commemorate his passing, Earl Slick, who’d worked on Lennon and Ono’s Double Fantasy album, suggested the group play “Across the Universe” as recorded by Bowie for Young Americans. The singer countered with the idea of performing “Imagine,” which the band duly did to a predictably emotional response. Tour over, Bowie and Schwab stayed on to holiday in the Far East with Iggy and his girlfriend Suchi Asano, visiting Bali and Java. Having relapsed throughout the early 1980s and believing he was the subject of a voodoo curse, Iggy was now in recovery, and as Bowie had revealed at the Hong Kong press conference, he was in the game for producing Iggy’s next album.
Bowie and Tina Turner duet on “Tonight” at the NEC in Birmingham, England, March 23, 1985.
The Serious Moonlight tour had been spectacular, and there was no doubt that, as 1984 dawned, Bowie was one of the biggest acts on the planet, occupying the same elevated tier of multimillion-selling artists as Michael Jackson, the Police, and Lionel Ritchie. Let’s Dance had racked up sales of six million copies, boosting Bowie’s back catalog along the way. But being a megastar wasn’t a status Bowie necessarily felt comfortable with. In acquiring mainstream appeal, he sensed that he’d become disconnected from his real fans: “I suddenly didn’t know my audience and, worse, I didn’t care about them,” he later admitted. But having delivered EMI with one blockbuster, the pressure was on to provide another, and by May 1984, he was back in the studio working on the follow-up to Let’s Dance.
“Loving the Alien,” which was edited down to 4:43 from its original running time of 7:11 on Tonight for its release as the album’s third and final single.
Perhaps it was inevitable that after twenty years and fifteen studio albums, Bowie’s extraordinary creative élan would begin to wither. When recording began at Le Studio near Montreal, his desire to create another landmark record appears to have evaporated. The location had been chosen by Hugh Padgham, the Police’s producer, with whom Bowie wanted to work—though it was agreed that Padgham would concede overall control to Derek Bramble, a former member of the Brit-funk group Heatwave. Bowie had been impressed by demos Bramble had produced for Brit soul singer Jaki Graham and was also intrigued at the idea of the Anglo-Caribbean Londoner providing an authentic reggae feel to the record.
But as soon as work on the record began—with Alomar, Rojas, and Hakim, plus the Borneo Horns, recalled for duty—Bowie appeared uncharacteristically “bored.” Though Bowie’s vision for the album seemed to favor blending white reggae and soft blue-eyed soul, the two new originals he was keen to record, “Loving the Alien” and “Blue Jean,” didn’t necessarily suit either of those styles. A raison d’être for the album, if not any unifying musical style, was finally settled on by the arrival of Iggy Pop. Perhaps with the success of the remade “China Girl” in mind, Bowie now envisioned Tonight, as it would be titled, as another classic Bowie/Iggy collaboration. Instead of producing Iggy’s new album, they would work on Bowie’s album together.
Together, the two artists debated which songs from their past adventures could be resuscitated. In the end, they chose “Tonight” from Lust for Life, which was denuded of its original reference to a heroin overdose and given to guest vocalist Tina Turner to sing, and “Don’t Look Down” from Iggy’s New Values, which as with the title track was given an insipid pop-reggae makeover. “Neighborhood Threat,” also from Lust to Life, was revisited too, while Bowie and Iggy together penned two brand-new songs, “Tumble and Twirl” and “Dancing with the Big Boys,” the latter also credited to Alomar. The inclusion of covers of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and Chuck Jackson’s “I Keep Forgettin’” were subsequently justified by Bowie as an attempt to add a Pin-Ups-style dimension to the record, paying homage to songs that had touched him as a young man. But neither did its original much justice.
In subsequent years, Bowie would lament the fact that Tonight wasn’t realized as powerfully as it could have been and was particularly disappointed with the released version of “Loving the Alien,” which he’d originally recorded by himself in Montreux. “You should hear [it] on demo,” he told Q’s Adrian Deevoy in 1989. “It’s a wonderful demo, I promise you! What am I meant to say?” Yet “Loving the Alien” and “Blue Jean” would sit seamlessly within his illustrious canon and showed that, left to his own devices, Bowie still had a knack for writing unusual and magnificent hit material.
On September 21, 1984, a full-length promo film for “Blue Jean” was premiered on UK TV amid a crackle of expectancy. Made by Sex Pistols filmmaker Julien Temple and twenty-one minutes long, it saw the singer in the dual roles of window cleaner Vic and an exotic Far East pop star Screaming Lord Byron. At the denouement, Byron steals Vic’s date, to which the window cleaner froths, “You conniving, randy, bogus-Oriental old queen! Your record sleeves are better than your songs!” The real-life Bowie was having fun at his own expense, of course, but some critics felt that Vic may have had a point. “Blue Jean” and the subsequent singles “Tonight” and “Loving the Alien” sold well, and Tonight topped the chart in the UK and made No. 11 in the States, but reviews of what Bowie described as his “attempt to keep hold of my new audience” were decidedly mixed.
The singer’s career would begin to plateau over the next decade or so, but until his renaissance in the three years before his death, he would never lose his ability to surprise and innovate—and no more so evident than in his decision to forsake pop music entirely and become the singer in a hard-rock outfit called Tin Machine.
CHAPTER 8
1985–20
16
Little Wonder
At 7:23 p.m. UK time on July 13, 1985, David Bowie took the stage at Wembley Stadium to perform for an audience of seventy-two thousand, plus an estimated worldwide television audience of nearly two billion. The occasion was Live Aid, the fundraising event for famine-hit Ethiopia, organized by the Boomtown Rats’ singer Bob Geldof. Bowie’s presence on the bill was no surprise—after the huge sales of Let’s Dance and Tonight, and as an icon of the MTV generation, he was now one of the biggest mainstream artists on the planet. But few in the vast crowd watching his short set, ending with a passionate rendition of “Heroes,” were aware that the concert represented Bowie’s return to the public eye after a difficult six months of reflection, and that, far from being meticulously rehearsed, his hastily assembled group had only run through their set three times.
