The album David Bowie said he was stupid to make: “I did a foolish thing”
As soon as David Bowie sang that vamping crescendo scale into the microphone in 1983, the world was enraptured by a man at his stratospheric prime.
The take-off of Let’s Dance as an album was not necessarily what you could call unexpected, but it did certainly shoot Bowie into an unparalleled league of rock superstardom that very few had experienced before him. For a man who was already considered to be at his most prolific height in the previous decade, that was really saying something.
So it was all champagne and roses in the Bowie camp after he’d created yet another album that would redefine the genre and go on to become one of his finest staple legacies. However, we can all sense the major ‘but’ coming. The trouble is, once you’ve created a seismic album, it’s only natural for the record label to expect more.
This streak of capitalisation was never often in Bowie’s nature, whether this acted to the benefit of his creative genius or occasionally to the detriment of his commercial success. Yet the lights of being on top of the world are certainly blinding, so that fateful mid-1980s period represented a rare moment where the bug of competitive greed finally managed to infect him.
That might seem like a slightly dramatic way of putting it, but following through and delivering the successor to Let’s Dance in the form of Tonight so quickly the next year was something that Bowie later lived to regret. Many people might wager that he was being overly critical in this sense, but the album just seemed so out of nature for a man who prided himself on never doing anything merely for the sake of it.
“I did a foolish thing… something that never happened to me before,” he later admitted. “I had outrageous success with the Let’s Dance album and the record company said you ought to get another album out… there is this big audience waiting.” It’s a pretty vindictive ultimatum when you think about it – accept, and be accused of selling out, or refuse, and be considered a label pariah.
There’s no denying that it’s an impossible situation to navigate, and no one can blame Bowie for caving to the pressure. To the outside world, there was nothing overly offensive about Tonight, of course, but the man himself knew it wasn’t right. It was an album for which his hand had been forced, rather than his own free will taking him to the studio when the lightning struck with a killer idea.
Put simply, that just went against near enough every principle he ever stood for in his lifetime. It allows you to almost wryly laugh, then, when you remember that Bowie’s next move was a slow transition into commercial freefall with Tin Machine and his bizarre electronic era. Some simply class these as bad years, and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but was it really all deliberate?
What Bowie really needed was a period of true eclectic experimentalism that freed him from the shackles of delivering albums and accruing chart hits. Sure, that taste of champagne was nice for a while, but eventually you do get sick. Where the man was truly happiest was not at the top of the charts, but in his own little creative lair, brewing up the next concoction to send him on his newest adventure.
