by Pat Gilbert
The year had begun with the release of the majestic “This Is Not America,” a song Bowie had written and recorded with the Pat Metheny Group for the spy movie The Falcon and the Snowman. But in London, a tragic family drama was unfolding involving Bowie’s half-brother Terry Burns. On January 16, Burns walked out of Cane Hill hospital, where he was still undergoing treatment for mental health issues, placed his body across a nearby railway line, and awaited his fate. His death shocked Bowie’s family and prompted the singer’s aunt Pat to complain to the tabloids about Bowie’s alleged neglect of his brother over the previous decade or so. The public airing of such a private family matter deeply affected the singer, and he retreated to his home in Switzerland. In April, when Julien Temple arrived in Lausanne to shoot a video for “Loving the Alien,” Bowie explained that he didn’t feel able to participate. He apologized but stressed that he remained committed to appearing in Temple’s feature film version of Colin MacInnes’s 1959 novel Absolute Beginners, which was due to shoot in July. He also confirmed that he would fulfill his promise to record some songs for the soundtrack.
Bowie gives his final live performance, singing “Life on Mars?” at a Keep a Child Alive benefit in New York City, November 9, 2006.
Bowie confers with Roger Taylor and Brian May of Queen at the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, London, July 13, 1985. In the front row, organizer Bob Geldof discusses the performances with Prince Charles. Later, Bowie’s four-song set list not surprisingly included “Heroes”.
Bowie had been interested in Temple’s film ever since the idea had been suggested several years before. The story of Absolute Beginners had strong elements of autobiography for the singer, from its hip protagonist coming of age in late-1950s, jazz-obsessed London to the birth of the teenager and the rise of consumerism. Bowie had been cast in the film as sleazy advertising executive Vendice Partners, whose main scene involved him dancing on a giant typewriter to a song titled “That’s Motivation.” Feeling revitalized, Bowie booked into Abbey Road Studios in June to record the number, with session musicians including former Prefab Sprout guitarist Kevin Armstrong, ex–Soft Boys bassist Matthew Seligman, and the Attractions’ keyboardist Steve Nieve. At the end of the session, Bowie unveiled a rough idea he had for the film’s main theme tune. As it wasn’t complete, “Absolute Beginners” was laid down that evening in sections, as it was written, with none of the musicians quite knowing where the song was going next. The result was one of Bowie’s finest compositions of the 1980s, a stirring, happy-sad reflection on teenage romance that would reach No. 2 in the UK when it was released as a single the following year.
It was during the Abbey Road session that Bowie dropped a bombshell on the group—Mick Jagger would be joining them to record a version of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” to accompany a video that would be screened during the Live Aid concert. The original idea was that Bowie and Jagger would perform a live transatlantic duet via a satellite link, but it was decided that the time delay would make this impossible. Instead, Jagger, Bowie, and the group gathered at producer Alan Winstanley’s West Side studios in Holland Park and taped the track in four hours. Job done, director David Mallet then whisked Bowie and Jagger away to London’s then-derelict Docklands to shoot the hilarious promo film, in which the two old friends try to out-camp each other with ridiculous imitations of the other’s stage moves.
Bowie cut three very different non-album singles 1985: the Pat Metheny Group collaboration “This Is Not America,” the epic ballad “Absolute Beginners,” and a duet with Mick Jagger on “Dancing in the Street,” released to raise money for famine relief.
Bowie’s appearance two weeks later at Wembley Stadium, in a slot sandwiched between Queen and the Who, was triumphant, even though the group—essentially the Absolute Beginners session players—had little time to prepare the set, ultimately cut short so a film reminding viewers of the terrible famine conditions in East Africa could be shown. Such was the enthusiastic reaction to the good-natured frolicking of the “Dancing in the Street” video, screened twice during the day, that the track was eventually released at the end of the summer, gifting Bowie with yet another UK No. 1.
After Absolute Beginners wrapped in August, Bowie began work on another film, the children’s fantasy drama Labyrinth. The movie, written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones and directed by Muppets creator Jim Henson, told the story of a teenage girl, Sarah, who fancifully wishes that goblins would steal away her younger brother. Jareth, the Goblin King—played by Bowie—obliges, and a contrite Sarah embarks on a fantastical quest to rescue her sibling, with Jareth breaking into song on the numbers Bowie contributed to the soundtrack. Shooting done, the singer then took an extended break with Iggy and Suchi in Mustique, where he’d brought a property, before returning with the couple to Switzerland for a skiing holiday in Gstaad. “I enjoy [skiing] and knew Jim—Iggy—would too, because Jim is incredibly athletic,” he explained to Smash Hits’ Tom Hibbert. “I taught him to ski. He’s a very good skier.”
Bowie’s best-known film role was the musical fantasy Labyrinth, in which he starred as Jareth, the Goblin King.
Iggy remained with Bowie in Switzerland to record his next solo album, Blah-Blah-Blah, with Bowie co-producing with Mountain Studios house engineer David Richards. The record included several Bowie co-writes, including the title track and the wonderful “Shades,” together with three collaborations with the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and a cover of Johnny O’Keefe’s vintage rocker “Real Wild Child.” These sessions reunited Bowie with multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kizilçay, with whom Bowie had written the title theme for When the Wind Blows, the animated film of Raymond Briggs’s harrowing anti-nuclear war story. In October, the singer and Kizilçay started to sketch out the songs for Bowie’s next album, Never Let Me Down, with the addition of Carmine Rojas, Carlos Alomar, and Bowie’s old school friend Peter Frampton on lead guitar. The sessions were completed at New York’s Power Station studios, where Bowie wrote and recorded the title track, inspired by Coco Schwab’s unflinching loyalty as his personal assistant, in a single day. The record was, however, over polished and uncharacteristically short on highlights—though it did have its moments, including the propulsive “Beat of Your Drum” and stirring “Zeroes,” as well as the amusing mid-song rap on “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love)” by the actor Mickey Rourke, whom Bowie had befriended that year in London. In later years, Bowie would distance himself from the record, describing it as an “awful album” and admitting “I didn’t really apply myself.” Visconti, estranged from the singer after contributing a candid interview to Peter and Leni Gillman’s unforgiving 1986 biography Alias David Bowie, concurred that at this time “[David] let other people do his work,” a development he found “tragic.”
Bowie and Iggy Pop at the Ritz in New York City, 1986.
Though its name might suggest otherwise, Never Let Me Down, released in 1987, is widely considered to be Bowie’s worst solo album.
Tickets to a pair of Glass Spider dates at Wembley Stadium, London, in June 1987. Bowie played to around 140,000 fans across the two shows.
Bowie onstage at the Feijenoord Stadium in Rotterdam during his extravagant Glass Spider tour, May 29, 1987.
The Glass Spider world tour that followed in 1987 to promote the album met with the same critical derision meted out to Never Let Me Down, with the press corps deeply unimpressed by the huge mechanical arachnid that dominated the stage set and the extravagant convulsions of a five-piece dance troupe directed by the Diamond Dogs tour choreographer—and by now pop star in her own right—Toni Basil. The core of the group assembled for the occasion included Alomar, Rojas, Frampton, and drummer Alan Childs, but for many who witnessed the shows, the music seemed to play second fiddle to the opulent staging and theatrics. On the European leg, only an emotional performance at Berlin’s Platz der Republik on June 6, 1987, when thousands of East German fans gathered on the far side of the Wall and sang along to “Heroes,” matc
hed the levels of emotional intensity for which Bowie gigs were renowned. Two years later, Bowie attributed the lackluster ambience to the crushing level of detail he was compelled to deal with on a daily basis. “There was too much responsibility on the last tour,” he told Q magazine in 1989. “I was under stress every day. It was so big and unwieldly and everybody had a problem all the time, and I was under so much pressure. It was unbelievable.” When the tour wound up in New Zealand at the end of November, Bowie and the crew vented their frustrations by symbolically torching the giant spider in a field near the venue. “That was such a relief!” he explained.
Bowie’s reaction to becoming what he described as a “well-accepted artist,” something he “never wanted to be,” was to submerge himself in a project designed to be defiantly anti-mainstream and restore his credibility as rock’s coolest maverick. Having turned forty at the start of 1987, Bowie concluded that, rather than softening his sound further, it was high time he rediscovered hard rock. The catalyst was his friendship with Reeves Gabrels, the husband of Sara Terry, his PR during the US leg of the Glass Spider tour. “I never told [David] I was a musician, because I didn’t want to appear an opportunist,” Gabrels told writer Martin O’Gorman. “He thought I was a painter because we used to talk about fine art, or anything except music. One time we were watching Fantasy Island backstage with the sound down, making up the plot ourselves.” When Bowie discovered Gabrels was a composer and multi-instrumentalist, he invited him to work on a new version of Lodger’s “Look Back in Anger” to accompany a performance by dance troupe La La La Human Steps at London’s Dominion Theatre, as part of a fundraising event for the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Soon afterward, the singer had the idea of forming a rock band with Gabrels on guitar and his old friends Tony and Hunt Sales, Iggy’s rhythm section on Lust for Life and The Idiot tour.
The first rehearsals for what would become Tin Machine took place at the casino in Montreux in July 1988, where the group vibed themselves up by listening to live bootlegs of Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix. The guiding principle, it was explained, was to make as unholy a racket as possible. Bowie and Gabrels would communicate their musical ideas through references to art and architecture. Tension between the devoutly cerebral Gabrels and the more streetwise Sales brothers—whose father Soupy would perform routines over the phone to the band, to much hilarity—created a powerful sound that Rolling Stone’s David Fricke later exquisitely described as “Sonic Youth meets Station to Station.” For Bowie, the experience was exhilarating but also unnerving. “It was throwing myself into a group format, which is something I hadn’t done… forever, really,” he explained. “To have other members of the band making decisions was difficult.”
The self-titled debut album by Bowie’s divisive new group, Tin Machine.
Tin Machine—Reeves Gabrels, Tony Sales, Hunt Sales, and Bowie—at the Paradiso, Amsterdam, June 24, 1989.
The group began work on a Tin Machine album at Mountain Studios before upping sticks to Compass Point in Nassau, by that time guitarist Kevin Armstrong had joined them as an unofficial fifth member. The presence of Bowie’s new girlfriend Melissa Hurley, a dancer on the Glass Spider tour, inspired the confessional “Prisoner of Love,” while a visit from Sean Lennon prompted a cover of his father’s “Working Class Hero.” Elsewhere, Bowie’s impulse to fashion a new strain of gritty, challenging art-rock resulted in the coruscating social commentary of “Crack City” and “I Can’t Read,” with its approving nod toward Joy Division’s icy post-punk. (Joy Division had started life as Warsaw, of course, after Bowie’s “Warszawa.”) The group made its debut at a local bar in Nassau, in front of a stunned audience of holidaymakers wondering why on earth Live Aid star David Bowie was fronting an experimental hard-rock band.
A poster for Bowie’s Sound + Vision tour, which at the time he claimed would be the last chance for fans to hear his greatest hits onstage.
The group’s debut album, Tin Machine, was released in May 1989, and the group embarked on a series of club dates. The interest in Bowie’s new project was intense, though the initial sales of around two hundred thousand copies were modest compared with Bowie’s previous three EMI albums. As a repositioning exercise, the album achieved everything it set out to do, and though the music wasn’t to everyone’s taste, the singer’s courageous left turn signaled the end of a checkered, mainstream late 1980s. But with Bowie’s new spirit of adventure came a desire to remind the world of his extraordinary legacy, which he now negotiated to become available to a new generation of fans via Rykodisc’s superlative CD reissues of his RCA back catalog.
Plans for a world tour in 1990, taking the form of a straightforward greatest hits set, meant that sessions for a second Tin Machine album were interrupted. Instead, for the Sound + Vision dates, named for a retrospective career box set of the same name, Bowie recruited a new, stripped-down group, featuring Erdal Kizilçay on bass, guitarist Adrian Belew—who since the Stage tour and Lodger had become a mainstay in King Crimson—plus two members from Belew’s solo band, keyboardist Rick Fox and drummer Michael Hodges. Reeves Gabrels had been approached to play guitar but declined on the grounds that it would undermine the integrity of Tin Machine. The scale of the outing was impressive even by the standards set by the Serious Moonlight and Glass Spider tours, with 108 shows in twenty-seven countries. To signal the inclusive nature of the gigs—widely regarded as some of Bowie’s most entertaining ever—fans were invited to vote for their favorite songs in a telephone poll, which would be reflected in the final setlist. It was also declared, somewhat prematurely, that the tour was to be the last ever to feature Bowie’s old hits. Naturally, demand for tickets was overwhelming, and by the time the tour finished at Buenos Aires’ River Plate Stadium on September 29, 1990, the box office receipts had topped an estimated $20 million.
It was in Buenos Aires that Bowie experienced a romantic epiphany that would change his life forever—he met his future wife Iman, the Somali-born but United States–based supermodel. Belew recalled Bowie stopping at her photograph while flicking through a fashion magazine on a flight between shows and announcing he wanted to date her. “I think lightning struck,” the guitarist told David Buckley. “Just looking at her picture, he got interested in her.” Later, he revealed that he was nervous that his sense of humor and enthusiasm for bad jokes would put her off—it didn’t, and in 1992 they married in Switzerland.
With the Sound + Vision tour proving an uproarious success, Bowie returned to making Tin Machine II, which was released in September 1991 and promoted with a seventy-date world tour of medium-sized theaters that began in Dublin two weeks after the record appeared and ended at Tokyo’s hallowed Budokan Hall in April 1992. The album was more extreme and abrasive than the band’s debut, with Gabrels citing the industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails as a strong influence, and “Shopping for Girls” and “You Can’t Talk” remain overlooked pearls. For some fans, however, the group’s onstage sonic firefights were too challenging, and at several venues, the audiences thinned out dramatically towards the end of the show. Backstage, the atmosphere was no less tense. “The split was [ultimately] down to the simple fact that the band had four radically different personalities rubbing up against each other to the point of great irritation,” recalled Gabrels. Hunt Sales’s predilection for rock ’n’ roll excess was one difficult issue the band faced; another was the thorny issue of finance, as Bowie was underwriting the venture and reportedly losing money. Five years earlier, Bowie had been a critically immolated for being a mega-earning, airbrushed stadium superstar; now he was a misunderstood cult artist with his accountants on his back.
Bowie and his soon-to-be wife, Iman, in New York City in the summer of 1990, during a break between Sound + Vision shows.
Tin Machine’s second and final studio album, Tin Machine II.
Bowie would later claim that Tin Machine “charged me up—I can’t tell you how much,” at a time when he’d been artistically adrift. But his next albu
m, 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, was evidently a bid to reclaim the mainstream audience he had so successfully courted in the 1980s. His abiding connection with ordinary music fans, many of whom probably regarded Tin Machine as a bizarre blip in his career, was demonstrated soon after that band’s final dates in Japan. On April 20, Bowie performed at a tribute concert at Wembley Stadium for Freddie Mercury, who had died of an AIDS-related illness in November 1991. Fronting a group built around the surviving members of Queen, Bowie performed “Under Pressure” with Annie Lennox. Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson—at this stage terminally ill with liver cancer—joined him for “All the Young Dudes,” with Bowie playing sax, and then, after Hunter departed, they played an emotional rendering of “Heroes.” At the end of the song, Bowie dropped dramatically to his knees and recited the Lord’s Prayer, dedicating it to a playwright friend in New York ill with AIDS. The recital was unscripted, and Bowie later admitted that, such was the spontaneity of the act that “the most surprised person there was me.”
Bowie’s first solo album for six years, Black Tie White Noise saw him reunite with Let’s Dance producer Nile Rodgers.
Bowie’s choice of producer for Black Tie White Noise was telling: Nile Rodgers, the man responsible for Let’s Dance’s punchy dance grooves and gleaming pop sheen. Shuttling between Montreux, Los Angeles, and New York, Bowie and Rodgers pieced together the album over a period of several months, during which there were clashes over the direction of the record, with Bowie unimpressed by the Chic guitarist’s attempts to revisit the direct, catchy approach of Let’s Dance. Instead, the album became an interesting exercise in fusing contemporary dance-floor beats, slick 1970s soul, and free jazz. Several of the tracks featured trumpeter Lester Bowie, cofounder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and a veteran of sessions with blues and soul artists such as Albert King and Solomon Burke and Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. Elsewhere on the record, Mick Ronson was recruited to play guitar on a cover of Cream’s “I Feel Free,” which, together with “Looking for Lester,” also featured the distinctive piano playing of pianist Mike Garson. Since parting company with Bowie after Young Americans, Garson had enjoyed a critically acclaimed solo career in jazz and renounced Scientology somewhere along the way.
