The White Duke's self-criticism

Critics have always slammed them mercilessly. And for many fans too, these are often considered the two weakest records in the glorious discography of David Bowie. Two albums released in the 1980s, when the White Duke had by then reached the peak of his success with the 1983 bestseller “Let's Dance”, steeped in a post-disco sound courtesy of Nile Rodgers. The albums in question are “Tonight” and “Never Let Me Down”. Two collections of songs that are hardly irresistible (save for a few exceptions, see “Loving The Alien”), which arrived during a period of artistic crisis that Bowie himself admitted to. The London-born artist confessed his discomfort with the final outcome of these two records, in which he glimpsed great potential that, for various reasons, he failed to bring out as he would have liked.

In a 1989 interview, speaking about “Tonight” and “Never Let Me Down”, Bowie stated: “I thought it was really good material, but it got reduced to the level of a commercial product”. He admitted that “Tonight” lacked the creative effort that had characterized his earlier work, and was more of a pretext to get back to working with his friend Iggy Pop. Bowie added: “I shouldn't have worked on it in such a 'studio' way. Some songs were really wasted. You should hear the demos: the comparison with the final versions is like night and day”. He was referring in particular to “Loving The Alien”, which ended up in a less satisfying version than its author would have wished. “The demo version was wonderful, I can assure you. But the version on the album... isn't quite as wonderful, unfortunately”.

On “Never Let Me Down”, however, Bowie wanted to invest greater care: “I knew I wanted something I could take out on tour on a very concrete level”, he said, before ironically signing a sponsorship deal with Pepsi to fund an elaborate three-stage set.

In the 1980s Bowie had left the art-rock era behind him and had become a hugely popular pop star, largely free of the addictions that had plagued him throughout the 1970s. But paradoxically, success turned out to be an obstacle for an artist who had always been incapable of resting on his laurels. “I'd look at this sea of people coming to the shows and think: how many Velvet Underground records do these people actually have at home? I soon felt alienated from my own audience. And it was depressing, because I didn't know what they really wanted”. It's yet another Bowie paradox: right after achieving the kind of global success he had craved ever since the days of Ziggy Stardust, the London-born artist found himself in a dead end that would lead him to the lowest point of his career: he would have to wait for the new decade to start releasing albums worthy of his standards again.

In the years that followed, Bowie would go on to disown his entire 1984-1987 period. “I wasn't interested in what I was doing and I let anybody tell me what to do,” he would recall in 1993. “I let them arrange my songs, I let designers come up with whatever they thought were fabulous, fashionable clothes. I didn't want to be disturbed. A wave of total indifference had washed over me”.

To mask the crisis, a new marketing move would follow: the outsized Glass Spider Tour, which would draw nearly three million people to stadiums across 15 countries over 86 shows, with kitsch, blockbuster-scale staging built around a giant glowing spider. A kind of 1980s Rocky Horror Show, in which the camp aesthetic and grotesque theatricality of the old Diamond Dogs Tour were turned into an exaggerated circus backdrop, designed by set designer Mark Ravitz.

Once the high of the Glass Spider Tour had worn off, Bowie would once again have to face the impasse he remained trapped in. “I didn't know what I was doing anymore,” he would recall. “Intoxicated by success, I'd lost my natural enthusiasm for things. I felt like an empty vessel, and I was afraid I'd end up like everyone else, doing those stupid fucking shows, singing Rebel Rebel until I dropped dead”.

The spark capable of reigniting his lost creativity would come in the form of a 31-year-old American guitarist named Reeves Gabrels, whom Bowie met at the end of the Glass Spider Tour. By reconnecting with his rock'n'roll roots in Tin Machine, Bowie would undergo a kind of return to lost integrity, a purifying catharsis from the hedonism and disengagement that had followed the commercial breakthrough of “Let's Dance”. The man who had become one of the biggest rock stars in the world would simply turn himself into a member of a band, playing small clubs, as if seeking out a new anonymity, echoing the one that had brought him back to life in Berlin.

The two Tin Machine albums won't go down as landmarks in rock history. And yet it was precisely that hard-rock jolt that reactivated Bowie's energy, carrying him into the brilliant experiments of the following decade.

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31/01/2026