“Driving me mad”: The classic album from 1983 that left David Bowie fed up with music
The worst nightmare for any musician is waking up one day and not having the drive you did starting out. Especially when you started out wanting to change the world as David Bowie once did.
The whole idea of being a musician is to have fun and not have a real job – and maybe reshape the fabric of society if you’re the Starman – so, the minute you find out that your passion isn’t fun any more is enough to get anyone depressed. Although Bowie usually didn’t have that problem, enthused by a desire to keep radically reinventing, even he had a few issues when people tried to put him in a specific box throughout his career.
Because Bowie’s entire career was based on him not wanting to be stifled by what other people expected out of him. The minute that people thought they had him figured out was usually when he would try something different, and even if it ended up being a horrible mistake (ahem, Hours), he was always proud that he could experiment rather than relying on the same tired sound again and again. “Never play to the gallery,” is how he put it.
That even applied to the genres that were incredibly kind to him. Anyone who played glam rock for their entire life would love the opportunity to have songs like ‘Changes’ or ‘The Jean Genie’ to their name, but if that had kept going for Bowie, there was a good chance that he would have been playing the same handful of songs and forced to have the spiky red hair for the rest of his career. The future was much more exciting, but there was a way to be typecast twice as well.Going through his career, Bowie had already started toying with genres a little left-of-centre for him, like soul and krautrock, but by the time the 1980s dawned, he suddenly seemed cool again. Considering how many times he had tried to stay ahead of the game, the MTV generation was the minute that the times started catching up to him, which probably did him a lot more favours once Let’s Dance kicked in.
“I pandered to that in my next few albums, and what I found I had done was put a box around myself.”
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‘Ashes to Ashes’ was already proof that Bowie could dominate the music video world, but working with Nile Rodgers to create a dance record gave him the same reputation as someone like Michael Jackson or Prince. He was suddenly a star, and he missed the avant-garde. Listening to the albums he made directly afterwards, you can sense that Bowie was starting to chase after that kind of fame rather than relying on his muse.
Looking back, Bowie saw Let’s Dance as a record that could have killed his musical drive if he hadn’t been careful, saying, “I pandered to that in my next few albums, and what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did Let’s Dance, and it was driving me mad – because it took all my passion for experimenting away.”
It might have been a huge hit record and landed him a massive new contract with EMI, but he was dismayed. In truth, both of those victories were richly deserved, not just because of the back catalogue that came before Let’s Dance, but also because it is simply a cracking pop record. But Bowie worried that he had sold-out in some way and comically feared that “Phil Collins fans” were now coming to his shows.
Yet, undoubtedly, it derailed his muse for a while. Listening to the following few records that came after the lofty EMI contract, it was as if Bowie made a conscious effort to distance himself from his past and he struggled to be inspired. Outside of the experimental hard rock project Tin Machine, his step into conceptual works on Outside before making strange industrial rock on Earthling were further reasons why he should never have been kept in a box in the first place.
Because up until the very end of his life, Bowie was never someone who could appease the masses every time he made a record. If it had his name on it, he had to be proud of it first, and for someone who had been in the public eye for as long as he had, even he understood the importance of not getting too tied down.As his famous quote goes, “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”
