David Bowie’s impossible personal problems with Tin Machine: “That was pretty sad”
The entire career trajectory of David Bowie thrived on maintaining a sense of momentum.
Most people would have been happy to have a couple of decent hits like ‘The Starman’ did during the Ziggy Stardust era and milk that for the rest of their career, but Bowie’s greatest strength was being one step ahead of his audience at every opportunity. He wanted to give them what they didn’t know they wanted whenever he performed, but he knew when a certain period of his career had to come to an end.
That didn’t stop him from giving every one of his fans a heart attack when he said that his famous shows at the Hammersmith Odeon would be the final shows that he would ever do. People were convinced that they saw the rock and roll alien meet his end onstage that night, but when he re-emerged a few months later with albums like Young Americans, people started to get a better idea of what he was doing. All of these albums were characters, and it was up to him to play them for a while and then move on.
But around the time that the 1980s began, Bowie entered into one of the more contentious eras of his career. The pop-flavoured version of him may have been a great introduction point for kids watching MTV, but even if Let’s Dance and even his appearance in Labyrinth came with some stellar tunes, that didn’t stop him from running into a few potholes like every other second in Never Let Me Down.
So before he shed his musical skin, he figured he needed another band to help him course correct. His ‘Phil Collins years’ had clearly been going on a little too long, but compared to the music he was known for, creating Tin Machine was the closest that he would ever come to making heavy music. His two albums with the band were the heaviest things he had done since The Man Who Sold the World, but no one was going to buy that Bowie was now a band member.
It worked within the context of The Spiders From Mars because he had people like Mick Ronson to bounce off of, but when listening to Tin Machine, there aren’t nearly as many highlights. You can tell that Bowie has a lot more passion for making this kind of music, but by the time he got to the end of Tin Machine II, even he felt that the rest of the band could never be sustained the way he wanted them to.
So while Bowie was sad to dismantle the group after their sophomore release, he was the first to say that he couldn’t go on working with the band another day, saying, “I look back on the Tin Machine years with great fondness. They charged me up. I can’t tell you how much. Then personal problems within the band became the reason for its demise. It’s not for me to talk about them, but it became physically impossible for us to carry on. And that was pretty sad really.”
And while Bowie did end up kicking off the next decade fairly strong on Black Tie White Noise, hearing him get more abrasive would sound a lot better in the 1990s. Tin Machine may have been the catalyst for him to make music that messed with people, but even if Earthling isn’t the best thing he’s ever made, ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ is one of the greatest tunes of his later years thanks to what he learned from working in his old band.
But still, Tin Machine’s output ends up feeling like a better chapter in Bowie’s story than actual albums of music. They aren’t terrible, and Bowie is in fine form getting his creative juices flowing again, but for any completionists looking to go through his whole discography, this is one of the last stops that you should make.
