The album David Bowie called a “glorious disaster”
As the 1980s arrived, David Bowie was in a musical league of his own. Having found stardom as the messianic Martian Ziggy Stardust and serving up glam’s enduring archetype, the ‘cracked actor’s’ restless creative drive would always ensure he was one step ahead of the pop world for the rest of the previous decade.
Plastic soul, electronic exorcisms, and warped world rhythms all set the stage for the ensuing punk and new wave revolution that sought to do away with the old guard. Bowie stood confidently as the new kids’ elder statesman.
Yet, after a renewed taste of commercial success with 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), Bowie shook off the last vestiges of Berlin experimentalism, enlisted the writing and production chops of Chic’s Nile Rogers, left RCA Records, dyed his hair blonde and sought to enter the emerging MTV age as one of its biggest names.
He got exactly what he wanted. Released in 1983, Let’s Dance would propel Bowie to a whole new stratum of fame, standing as his biggest-selling album of all time off the back of the monster singles ‘Modern Love’, ‘China Girl’, and its strutting title track. For the first time in his career, he was playing stadiums on the mammoth Serious Moonlight Tour.
However, Bowie’s grab for superstardom came at a cost of artistic vitality. In a few short years, the pioneering post-punk haunts with Brian Eno and Iggy Pop were a distant memory, which then saw him collaborating with Tina Turner and playing the pantomime villain in the Muppet-laden Labyrinth movie. What followed was his absolute nadir with 1987’s Never Let Me Down, a glossy pop inanity supported by the equally camp and spectacularly gaudy Glass Spider Tour. Bowie had won a surer footing in the world of fame, but the days of dogged creative pursuit and dictating trends were long gone.
Pulled from the brink of complete artistic oblivion, an encounter with guitarist Reeves Gabrels prompted the biggest creative reset since Young Americans‘ embrace of soul in 1975. Eschewing his star status in favour of the egalitarian band model, Bowie looked to the alternative rock dominating the American college radio underground, in particular, soaking up the surrealist racket from Boston’s Pixies, and fronted the short-lived Tin Machine project, recruiting the Sales brothers who’d played with Iggy Pop during the Lust for Life era.
While their debut, Tin Machine, in 1989, peaked at number three on the UK charts, critical reception was mixed, deeming their rock shtick a rehash of the glut of bands doing a much better job. But Bowie didn’t care, seeing the project as a sorely needed refocus that reoriented his career for the 1990s and beyond.
“For better or worse, it helped me to pin down what I did and didn’t enjoy about being an artist,” Bowie told The Telegraph in 1996. “It helped me, I feel, to recover as an artist. And I do feel that for the past few years, I’ve been absolutely in charge of my artistic path again. I’m working to my own criteria. I’m not doing anything I would feel ashamed of in the future, or that I would look back on and say my heart wasn’t in that.”
While the two Tin Machine LPs dropped before their dissolution in 1992 don’t make for remarkable listening, they stand in Bowie’s story as essential exercises of reinvention and plunging oneself into new and unfamiliar artistic territory to rekindle a creative spark. Languishing as a footnote in his discography, Tin Machine‘s raw and slapdash “glorious disaster” of a debut is the sound of an old master finding his way out of the dark, a necessary stepping stone unconcerned with trends and commercial expectations towards reclaiming his mantle as pop’s perennial modernist innovator.
