The albums David Bowie never wanted to be remembered: “My biggest mistakes”
Every part of David Bowie was about trying to make something new every time he walked into the studio.
Any chance of getting stagnant would have been boring for him, and every other record that he made was like a new adventure whenever he was locked into the right musical wavelength. And while not everything that he did had to be the greatest music the world had ever heard, he was aware when he was making something that he didn’t need most people to hear for more than a few years.
Because as much as Bowie loved making his own flavours of rock and roll, not all of them were going to work out in the exact same way every time he played. There was a lot going into making the glam rock period what it was, but even if Mick Ronson was his partner in crime, Bowie couldn’t see a future where he was playing the exact same rock and roll alien for the rest of his life.
What he was doing needed to have a lot more depth to it, and even if he needed other players to work with him, like Brian Eno, he still had the same singular vision. He wanted to be on the cutting edge of whatever was going on, and even if some of the songs, homemade, weren’t setting the world on fire, he was happy to be remembered as someone who broke new ground on albums like Station to Station or Low.
In fact, the worst thing that anyone could have done to Bowie was make him one of the biggest stars in the world. He relished in being on the fringes of music culture just like his idols likeLou Reed and Iggy Pop, but when you look at the way that he was moving in the 1980s, taking the leap over into the commercial world was a no-brainer. His characters were perfect for MTV, but you’d have to wonder at what cost.
Make no mistake, there are some fantastic songs on albums like Let’s Dance, but it’s also a version of Bowie that seems far too sanitised. Sure, the songs are classics, but when you look at the way that he was moving on his subsequent albums like Tonight and Never Let Me Down, it sounded like Bowie was taking his foot off the gas for the first time. He seemed interested in the idea of singles, and that should have been a sentence that wasn’t allowed within a five-foot radius of ‘The Starman’.
So when making more adventurous projects like The Buddha of Suburbia, Bowie felt that his artistry was more about those kinds of records rather than anything he got on the charts, saying, “All my biggest mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it and just do what I want to do.”
Adding, “Even if they’re dismissed, and perhaps rightly, there were a couple of albums in the ’80s that did exceptionally well for me – and I’m not a huge selling artist – but they’re not albums I’m proud of.”
Granted, there are probably countless kids who got introduced to Bowie in that way, but even if he was a little too over the top, that doesn’t mean that the classic stuff had gone anywhere. Ziggy Stardust would forever be the pinnacle of what he could do, and even when he started working on more off-kilter material, hearing him embracing different textures on Earthling or reinventing his old sound on The Next Day was just another example of him thinking outside the box of what people expected of him.
Because if he was going to become a legend, he was going to do it by being one step ahead of everyone else, and albums like Let’s Dance were when he started to follow what the trends were all about. And if you know anything about Bowie, some of the bravest choices that he ever made were when he was following his heart rather than the industry.
