The album that saw David Bowie lose his way: “I really want you to make hits”
Few artists can shapeshift and reinvent themselves quite like David Bowie.
His rebirth as David Bowie – from his given name, Davie Jones – cemented his early intentions of becoming a pop star, and he seamlessly journeyed through psychedelia, folk rock, hard rock and glam, fashioning himself in androgyny that polarised and enticed audiences, and as intended, Bowie looked as though he was an alien who’d crash-landed from another planet, delightfully disruptive in his pursuit of greatness.
Bowie’s glam rock period, roughly between 1972 and 1974, is perhaps the most synonymous with his cultural image, while the Thin White Duke of the mid-decade and his later Berlin period established Bowie as a proper chameleon, thrillingly so. His pop music era in the following decade began with a New Romantic sensibility, sparking yet another creatively fruitful period for the ever-inventive singer.
This post-disco period spawned Bowie’s 15th studio album, Let’s Dance, released in 1983 and remaining his best-selling album. Bowie entered the studio with Nile Rodgers as his producer, whose band Chic played during the sessions; it would mark the first time that Bowie solely contributed vocals and no instruments.
“I don’t play a damned thing,” Bowie asserted to Musician in 1983, “This was a singer’s album,” and Bowie and Rodgers bonded over a shared affinity for classic blues and R&B music, and Rodgers’ success with Chic and in writing and producing for the likes of Sister Sledge and Diana Ross in the late 1970s appealed to Bowie, who wanted to veer into a more commercial sound.
“Nile, I really want you to make hits,” Rodgers recalls Bowie telling him, as quoted in biographer Nicholas Pegg’s 2016 book The Complete David Bowie, “And I was sort of taken aback,” Rodgers continued, “Because I’d always assumed that David Bowie did art first, and then if it happened to become a hit, so be it!”
The two musicians worked tirelessly to craft some of Bowie’s most recognisable hits.
The titular ‘Let’s Dance’, which Rodgers spun from a soft vocals track to a dance song, was inspired by old records of the 1950s and ’60s. ‘China Girl’, written by Bowie and Iggy Pop in 1976 for the latter’s 1977 album, The Idiot (which Bowie co-wrote and produced), was reimagined in Bowie’s voice, while ‘Modern Love’ opens the album with a blend of rock ‘n’ roll and new wave that marks an infectious danceability. Bowie later described the album to Details in 1991 as “a rediscovery of white-English-ex-art-school-student-meets-black-American-funk, a refocusing of Young Americans“.
The release of Let’s Dance satisfied Bowie’s hopes of shifting into commercial status, an instant success that not only charted significantly – the album peaked at number four on the US Billboard chart and remaining on the chart for a staggering 69 weeks, and was named by label EMI as their fastest-selling record since The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper – but prompted Bowie’s other albums, released between 1969 and 1974 to chart, once again. Every iteration of Bowie thus far saw a resurgence, but Bowie himself became lost in the mix. Let’s Dance marked a moment in Bowie’s career where he had lost his footing, questioning his identity as a musician.
Bowie proceeded to release two more albums in the decade: 1984’s Tonight, with its sound resting in a similar vein to Let’s Dance, and 1987’s Never Let Me Down, which combined pop and hard rock. Both were critical failures, in comparison, leading Bowie to put his solo career on ice, for the time being. He decided to reinvent himself, yet again, this time as the frontman of Tin Machine, a hard rock quartet.
“Tin Machine had been a reset,” Reeves Gabrels told Express, explaining that Bowie “felt he had lost his way after Let’s Dance. He didn’t like where he was going and wanted to change it, so Tin Machine fell on that grenade.” Despite his desire to reach such heights, Bowie remained stunned by the success of Let’s Dance and, left to find himself again, saw an opportunity to return to his roots.
Tin Machine saw Bowie recruit Gabrels on guitar and brothers Tony on bass and Hunt Sales on drums; both brothers played with Bowie on Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in 1977. Though rejuvenated with a new spirit, Bowie and his bandmates were still no strangers to criticism: their self-titled 1989 debut was panned as “pompous, dogmatic and dull”, according to biographer Paul Trynka, and EMI were displeased with Bowie’s output, stating that it contained “lyrics that preach” with “repetitive tunes” and “minimalist or no production”. But this posed no hindrance to the band, who wanted to feed off of Bowie’s experimental energy.
“We tried to forget about external pressures and just make music,” Gabrels concluded. “In the ’90s, he enjoyed all the possibilities he wanted to explore having, through Tin Machine, built up more armour. He was more impervious to criticism. The ‘90s were an adventure.”
