Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Stage

  Recorded: April – May 1978; The Spectrum, Philadelphia, PA, Providence Civic Centre, Providence, RI, and Boston Garden, Boston, MA.

  Released: RCA, September 1978.

  Chart Peak: 5 (UK); 44 (US).

  Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar, Adrian Belew (gtr); Dennis Davis (dms and perc); George Murray (bs); Simon House (vln); Sean Mayes (pno); Roger Powell (kbds and synth).

  An impressive memento of a challenging, innovative tour, Stage still sounds bravely unconventional today; its finest moments, rather than the expected crowd-pleasers, are the glacial and uncompromising ‘Warszawa’ or the spiky, off-kilter ‘Breaking Glass’. In isolation, the Ziggy-era tracks falter, sorely lacking the muscularity of the original versions, but Bowie’s voice, at least, is mostly flawless, undiminished.

  Lodger

  Recorded: September 1978 and March 1979; Mountain Studios, Montreux, Switzerland, and Record Plant, NYC.

  Released: RCA, May 1979.

  Chart Peak: 4 (UK); 20 (US).

  Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar, Adrian Belew (gtr); Dennis Davis (dms); George Murray (bs); Brian Eno (synths etc.); Simon House (vln); Sean Mayes (pno); Roger Powell (synth).

  Producers: David Bowie and Tony Visconti.

  Both more conventional and more intellectual than its predecessors, Lodger was denoted the last of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy (or ‘triptych’, as he termed it) but is distinct both in mood and method – and disappointing in comparison. The singing is mannered – self-conscious yelps on ‘Red Money’, Bowie channelling David Byrne channelling Bowie on ‘DJ’ and an alarmingly literal Scott Walker imitation on ‘Look Back in Anger’ – the songs more conventional and the recording process dryer, in every sense of the term. Still, once preconceptions are abandoned, the album is studded with delights. It’s quirky rather than emotional, with delicious detailing: the fairground Arabic lilt of ‘Yassassin’, the unassumingly romantic theme of ‘Fantastic Voyage’, the constant tension between the plain, almost predictable chord sequences and the random guitar and vocal explosions scattered throughout. Although Lodger would never equal the emotional impact of Low or “Heroes”, it nonetheless defined the sound of eighties art rock, and echoes of its spiky, New Wave quirkiness can still be heard today.

  Scary Monsters … and Super Creeps

  Recorded: February 1980; Record Plant, NYC. April 1980; Good Earth, London.

  Released: RCA, September 1980.

  Chart Peak: 3 (UK); 12 (US).

  Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp (gtr); Chuck Hammer (synth gtr); Dennis Davis (dms); George Murray (bs); Roy Bittan (pno); plus Pete Townshend (gtr); Andy Clarke (synth).

  Producers: David Bowie and Tony Visconti

  Recorded during yet another frenzy of activity, as Bowie re-explored New York and prepared for The Elephant Man, Scary Monsters was a kind of organised pop version of Lodger. The endless experimentation favoured by Brian Eno was abandoned; instead, Bowie stalked the sessions with a clipboard, ticking off items on a to-do list, for songs that were mostly sketched out in advance. The material was almost old-fashioned in Bowie terms: ‘Up the Hill Backwards’ evokes both Bill Withers’ ‘Lean On Me’ and Young Americans; ‘Ashes to Ashes’ features the old-school musical bridge (‘the shriek of nothing is killing me’) used in classic Bowie songs from The Lower Third’s ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ to ‘China Girl’. Self-references abound: ‘Teenage Wildlife’ addresses Bowie’s influence on the world over the classic two-chord change of ‘Heroes’, while, of course, Major Tom pops up once more on ‘Ashes to Ashes’ – an almost impossibly sophisticated assemblage adorned by the guitar synth of Chuck Hammer, who noted the almost telepathic bond between Bowie and Tony Visconti as they seized on musical ideas and honed the sound, intuitively. The dense, tough, rock-meets-funk backing was hugely influential – listen to Blur, The Strokes, or dozens of art-rock bands for evidence – and represents Bowie’s most versatile band, ever, at their very peak. A few months later, they’d all be looking for new jobs.

  Baal

  Recorded: September 1981; Hansa Studio 2, Berlin.

  Released: RCA, February 1982.

  Chart Peak: 29 (UK); – (US).

  Key Personnel: Dominic Muldowney (gtr, arrangements). Main backing comes from Berlin session musicians headed by percussionist Sherry Bertram.

  Producer: Tony Visconti.

  The blinkered overview of Bowie’s career is that his last great album was Scary Monsters, yet this contract-filler – recorded in two rushed days in Berlin – is, in its own way, a masterpiece. The setting of Brecht’s songs is small-scale, almost domestic, with most of David’s vocals dropped in during a single afternoon. The result is a masterclass in singing and an album that is always intriguing. On first impression it seems polite and formal, but on better acquaintance, it is as great an evocation of Bowie’s Berlin years as “Heroes”, for it preserves magnificently the last echoes of Brecht’s adopted city.

  Let’s Dance

  Recorded: December 1982; Power Station, NYC.

  Released: EMI, April 1983.

  Chart Peak: 1 (UK); 4 (US).

  Key Personnel: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Nile Rodgers (gtr); Carmine Rojas, Bernard Edwards (bs); Rob Sabino (kbds); Tony Thompson, Omar Hakim (dms).

  Producers: David Bowie and Nile Rodgers.

  Vilified in the decades after its release, partly because it signalled the rise of mainstream Bowie, it is arguable that Let’s Dance is one of his most underrated albums. It was certainly one of his most influential, for its luxurious, minimal sound, dominated by Tony Thompson’s swinging drums, stripped-down R&B horns and tough but exhibitionist guitar, would become a template for the late eighties. It’s fair, too, to comment that it launched the era of form over function for Bowie, as well as his followers: with just eight tracks, including old collaborations with Iggy Pop and Giorgio Moroder and a cover of ‘Criminal World’, written by arty New Wavers Metro, he was plainly short of good songs. But not of great ones, for the title track – which, according to producer Nile Rodgers started life as a folksy Byrds-style ditty – and the impeccably infectious ‘Modern Love’ were a pinnacle of eighties pop. ‘China Girl’, too, is a sumptuously pimped-out version of the dark, gothic original, completing the irresistible opening trio of songs which announced Bowie’s ascension to the mainstream. Other songs – ‘Without You’, ‘Ricochet’, ‘Criminal World’ – are an assemblage of pleasant noises and pass the time nicely, ‘Shake It’ is dull and ‘Cat People’ desecrates the memory of a Bowie classic – it was lost until exhumed by Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds. While not a Great Album, Let’s Dance is at least a Great Eighties Album.

  Tonight

  Recorded: May – June 1984; Le Studio, Morin Heights, Canada.

  Released: EMI, September 1984.

  Chart Peak: 1 (UK); 11 (US).

  Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar (gtr); Derek Bramble (bs); Carmine Rojas (bs); Omar Hakim (dms).

  Producers: David Bowie, Derek Bramble and Hugh Padgham.

  In retrospect, every failing of Tonight had been evident in Bowie’s career to date: a rushed recording, shameless lifting of ideas, overwrought vocals, undistinguished songs and excessive reliance on sidemen. But on Tonight, they came together all at once, in a perfect storm of mediocrity.

  The prime example of Tonight’s failure is its best song, ‘Loving the Alien’: a decent, subtle tune, it also represented a crucial loss of confidence, for whereas previously Bowie had taken his stylistic cues from the underground, here he sources from the mainstream – the chorused guitar sounds from The Police, the vocal ‘ah ahs’ from Laurie Anderson and the marimbas from The Thompson Twins. The three Iggy songs were likewise decent enough, but were reworked as leaden white reggae. Worse still, the warbling vocal style, apparently influenced by Bryan Ferry, plumbs new depths on ‘Tonight’ and ‘God Only Knows’, which with its clumsy, predictable arrangement sounds like a pub singer punting for wedding and bar mitzvah jobs – two dec
ades on, he’d reinvented The Kon-Rads. As one of his musicians once commented, David Bowie was known for ‘stealing from the best’. Now the self-proclaimed tasteful thief was finally pilloried for taking something worthless.

  Never Let Me Down

  Recorded: Circa December 1986; Mountain, Montreux, Switzerland, and Power Station, NYC.

  Released: EMI, April 1987.

  Chart Peak: 6 (UK); 34 (US).

  Key Personnel: Carlos Alomar, Peter Frampton (gtr); Erdal Kizilcay (bs, dms, kbds etc.); Carmine Roja (bs); Phillipe Saisse (pno, kbds).

  Producers: David Bowie and David Richards.

  Often in Bowie’s career, preconceptions and received wisdom are wrong; however, the 1980s consensus that Never Let Me Down stinks still holds good today. Bereft of inspiration, fantasising of one last hit to provide a glorious exit, Bowie abandoned the intuitive, impressionistic approach to recording he’d used for a decade and prepared meticulously. Perhaps it was lack of confidence that inspired his bizarre vocal mimicry: on the title song he copies John Lennon, on ‘Day-In Day-Out’ it’s Prince, ‘Bang Bang’ is a cover of Iggy Pop copying Billy Idol, while the laughably slushy ‘Zeroes’ sounds like a Michael Jackson reject: Bowie had gone from Heroes to Zeroes in just a decade.

  More confused even than his Deram debut, the album was a strange throw-back to David Jones, the teenager who’d mimicked his idols for Shel Talmy. As with those earliest efforts, the results were not so much awful as forgettable. The album seemed to indicate a man in the grip of a midlife crisis, adrift without talented sidemen – but for the fact that, over the same period, he’d bashed out superb songs for director Julien Temple and friend Iggy Pop.

  Tin Machine

  Recorded: August 1988 – 1989; Mountain, Montreux, Switzerland, and Compass Point, Nassau, CA.

  Released: EMI, May 1989.

  Chart Peak: 3(UK); 28 (US).

  Key Personnel: Reeves Gabrels (gtr); Tony Sales (bs); Hunt Sales (dms); Kevin Armstrong (gtr, kbds).

  Producers: Tin Machine and Tim Palmer.

  Tin Machine’s debut was mostly greeted with relief and enthusiasm by fans and critics, grateful for another album that, like Low or Station to Station, offered elements of challenge and mystery. The feelings of gratitude eventually evaporated, with the very same material criticised as pompous, dogmatic and dull. The worst Tin Machine songs did indeed deserve that description – many were assemblages of blues clichés, while the cover of ‘Working Class Hero’ is turgid and monotonous. All the same, some of the material was Bowie’s best in years: ‘Prisoner of Love’, obviously Pixies-influenced, still sound fresh today; ‘Run’ is haunting despite its resemblance to ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, while ‘I Can’t Read’ is simply spellbinding – Bowie’s most emotionally affecting song of the decade. Outside of those gems, though, the album is hard to love – which was quite possibly Bowie’s intention, for the band apparently worked on more commercial, memorable songs which never made the final edit, presumably because Tin Machine were designed primarily as a scorched-earth policy to wipe out the memory of eighties Bowie.

  Tin Machine II

  Recorded: October 1989 and March 1991; Studio 301, Sydney, and A&M, Los Angeles, CA.

  Released: Victory, September 1991.

  Chart Peak: 23 (UK); 126 (US).

  Key Personnel: Reeves Gabrels (gtr); Tony Sales (bs); Hunt Sales (dms).

  Producers: Tin Machine, Tim Palmer and Hugh Padgham.

  Released as the enthusiasm for Tin Machine was already fading outside diehard fans, Tin Machine II exhibited exactly the same virtues and drawbacks as its predecessors – each of them magnified. Most of the album was prosaic, predictable rock ‘n’ roll, and if anyone was bored by the bluesy jams of the first album, they could hardly be enthused by hearing Hunt Sales, an excellent drummer, display his mediocre abilities as a singer – twice! ‘Goodbye Mr. Ed’, on the other hand, was a beautiful song, destined to become a lost classic.

  Black Tie White Noise

  Recorded: 1992; Mountain, Montreux, Switzerland, and 38Fresh and Hit Factory, NYC.

  Released: Savage Records, April 1993.

  Chart Peak: 1 (UK); 39 (US).

  Key Personnel: Pugi Bell, Sterling Campbell (dms); Barry Campbell, John Regan (bs); Nile Rodgers (gtr); Richard Hilton, Philippe Saisse, Richard Tee (kbds); plus guests including Lester Bowie (tpt), Mick Ronson (gtr, ‘I Feel Free’), Mike Garson (pno, ‘Looking For Lester’).

  Producers: David Bowie and Nile Rodgers.

  Bowie’s most commercially successful album for years saw him being fêted by a new generation of fans and featured on the cover of youth-oriented magazines alongside young guns like Britpop pioneers Suede. Songs like the tough, edgy ‘Jump They Say’, devoted to half-brother Terry, or the stripped-down, taut ‘Miracle Goodnight’ – which featured the welcome return of Bowie on sax – further heightened the sense of renaissance. But there were plenty of cloying moments, too, such as the cutesy ‘Don’t Let Me Down & Down’ – featuring David singing in a kind of Brixton Caribbean patois – and the general over-polite, airbrushed sheen of the album means that, when it disappeared from the shelves following the bankruptcy of record label Savage, few bemoaned its passing.

  The Buddha of Suburbia

  Recorded: circa September 1993; Mountain, Montreux, Switzerland.

  Released: Universal, December 1993.

  Chart Peak: 87 (UK); – (US).

  Key Personnel: Erdal Kizilcay (gts, bs, kbds, tpt etc.); David Richards (programming etc.); Mike Garson (pno); Lenny Kravitz (gtr).

  Producer: David Bowie and David Richards.

  A rushed recording, assembled as an expanded version of the themes Bowie and multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kizilcay had conjured up for Hanif Kureishi’s BBC film, The Buddha of Suburbia featured much the same collection of dance beats and melodies as Black Tie White Noise. It demonstrated what could be achieved by lack of time and lack of expectations, for it is throughout a far more gripping album than its predecessor. The title song is conventional – shimmering guitars and mid-paced drum machine – but displays a beguiling simplicity long absent from Bowie’s work; it’s shot through with the loneliness of suburbia and kicks into action with a vintage, impassioned middle eight. Other songs – notably ‘Strangers When We Meet’ – are his catchiest material in years, but never overblown, while there is experimentation aplenty in the form of grandiose or disturbing tracks like ‘Sex and the Church’ and ‘South Horizon’, as well as the welcome return of pianist Mike Garson. Undoubtedly Bowie’s best album in nearly a decade, it was given a low-key, belated release by Universal, limped out on to the schedules and disappeared without trace.

  1. Outside

  Recorded: March – November 1994; Mountain, Montreux, Switzerland, and West Side, London. January 1995; Hit Factory, NYC.

  Released: ISO/Virgin, September 1995.

  Chart Peak: 8 (UK); 21 (US).

  Key Personnel: Reeves Gabrels (gtr); Brian Eno (synths, treatments); Erdal Kizilcay (bs); Mike Garson (pno); Sterling Campbell (dms); plus Carlos Alomar, Kevin Armstrong (gtr) and Joey Barron (dms).

  Producers: David Bowie, Brian Eno and David Richards.

  Bowie’s long-awaited reunion with Eno is a fascinating curate’s egg, developed over drawn-out sessions which featured Bowie painting and the musicians each allotted bizarre roles – with much of the action filmed by underprivileged kids. It features the best of Bowie – the courage, the ability to spur musicians on to new creative heights – and the worst – namely over-thinking, weighing his material down with too many ideas. The album is packed with significant songs – the hard-bitten, ominous ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’, ‘Thru These Architect’s Eyes’ and ‘I Have Not Been to Oxford Town’ – but as a musical experience it’s hampered by a ludicrous voiceover and the sense that its maker was simply trying too hard.

  Earthling

  Recorded: 1996; Looking Glass Studios, NYC.

  Released: BMG, February 1997.

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nbsp; Chart Peak: 6 (UK); 39 (US).

  Key Personnel: Reeves Gabrels (gtr, synth, programming); Mark Plati (programming etc.); Mike Garson (pno); Gail Ann Dorsey (bs); Zachary Alford (dms, perc).

  Producers: David Bowie, Reeves Gabrels and Mark Plati.

  Bowie would be mocked as a ‘dad at the disco’ for this collection of mostly drum ‘n’ bass tracks, but there is a rush of excitement in the opening moments which banishes cynicism: ‘Little Wonder’ features the return of cheeky, cockney Bowie, its agile, sweet melody perfectly offset by crunchy guitar and clattering drum machine – like Outside’s ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, it’s a classic which stands outside of style. But the trick soon wears thin. Despite some innovative structures, like the slightly loopy ‘Looking for Satellites’, and ruthlessly efficient rock songs like ‘Dead Man Walking’, the album soon develops into a drearily repetitive loop, each chorus followed by two bars of chattering drums and then a heavy guitar riff. As a whole, the album is conservative and formulaic – even the self-referential title and Union Jack cover seemed to indicate a jaded palate. Those faults would have been forgivable had the album been released two years earlier; its appearance just as the nineties drum ‘n’ bass craze was subsiding suggested Bowie was content to surf on someone else’s wave, rather than making his own.

  Hours

  Recorded: April 1999; Seaview Studios, Bermuda, and Looking Glass, NYC.

  Released: ISO/Virgin International, October 1999.

  Chart Peak: 5 (UK); 47 (US).

  Key Personnel: Reeves Gabrels (gtr); Mark Plati (bs); Mike Levesque and Sterling Campbell (dms); Holly Palmer (backing vox, ‘Thursday’s Child’).

  Producers: David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels.

  Refreshingly unadorned, sometimes hauntingly intimate, Hours abandoned the high-tech cut and paste of its predecessor for a production that was distinctly downhome – indeed, too much so, for the real David Bowie is surely to be found more in gloss and the artifice, than in dress-down introspection. Although some material was thin – ‘What’s Really Happening?’, for instance, a collaboration with fan Alex Grant, featuring a melody lifted from ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ – songs like ‘Seven’ and ‘Thursday’s Child’ were finely crafted – beautiful, even – but the distinctive Bowie voice that he’d rediscovered on Earthling was gone, to be replaced mainly with a Nick Cave-ish throaty baritone. The third in a string of stylistic about-turns, the album once again suggested a return to the teenage Bowie struggling to find a unique voice – and rather like Space Oddity, Hours, for all its finely crafted moments, ended up being less than the sum of its parts.