‘Outside’: the David Bowie album that he struggled to find support for
It has been nearly a decade since David Bowie left this mortal coil, and the music world is still struggling to adjust to a landscape without the endless innovations of Brixton’s very own spaceman, which makes it all the more bizarre that, during his lifetime, the songwriter struggled to sell some of his most profound material.
With the endless onslaught of reissues, unreleased demos, and expansive box set releases that have followed in the wake of Bowie’s passing, it is clear that any iota of material that he worked on over the years is worthy of widespread release. In fact, audiences seem desperate to soak up as much of the Starman’s work as possible; he was so beloved by fans that the lack of new material since his death has been hard for many to handle. However, that wasn’t always the case within Bowie’s career.
In hindsight, it is easy to heap praise on any number of Bowie’s era-defining, life-changing albums, from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, to Low, Scary Monsters, and even his 21st-century material, like the obituarial Blackstar. If we are all honest with ourselves, though, the songwriter had his fair share of lacklustre albums and forgettable projects, too.
Bowie’s 1987 record Never Let Me Down, for example, probably represents the worst of his discography, reflecting just how far the songwriter had fallen from the dizzying heights of his Aladdin Sane glam era, or the genius of his Berlin period a few years later. Even Bowie himself was aware of just how dismal that record was, and he took a number of years away from the recording studio in order to recuperate and revitalise his career. However, that journey didn’t exactly go to plan.
Although Bowie did return to the music industry during the 1990s, he didn’t come back to the hero’s welcome he deserved, or perhaps expected. Despite a run of interesting, innovative records that re-established Bowie among the most original, inventive songwriters in musical history, the mainstream didn’t seem overly interested in what he had to say. The music industry had changed; Britpop was the prevailing power of the mid-1990s, a scene that prioritised youthful energy, not the profound ramblings of an established figure like David Bowie.
This lack of interest in Bowie’s new material culminated in the fact that the artist struggled to find anybody to distribute his 1995 Twin Peaks-inspired album Outside. “Nobody would take Outside when we first recorded it,” he said during a 1999 interview. “It was held back for a year until we could find somebody to distribute it in America, and by that time my enthusiasm was pretty thin on the ground.”
In the end, Outside did find American distribution, and although it didn’t become one of Bowie’s most beloved efforts, its ambitious composition and unique theming soon amassed a cult audience for the record, even if Bowie himself had already moved on by the time it was released.
Still, it is ludicrous to think, in the modern age, that any album by David Bowie ever struggled to find distribution, given how universally beloved the songwriter is. That reputation, of course, owes a lot to his earlier efforts in the glam rock age, but his mid-2000s output certainly played a role in revitalising his relevance after the lacklustre reception of records like Outside in the previous decade.
