The “nadir” of David Bowie: how success pushed an artist over the edge
After releasing Let’s Dance in 1983, David Bowie was seemingly on top of the world. Co-produced by Chic hitmaker Nile Rodgers and featuring the pulsating guitar of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Let’s Dance, and its blend of post-disco, dance-rock, and new wave, made Bowie a global superstar and remains his best-selling record. Demonstrating just how far the Londoner had come, 1972’s era-defining Ziggy Stardust was now just a distant memory.
Remarkably though, regardless of the tremendous success, Let’s Dance commenced a period of deficient creativity for Bowie. He later looked back on this chapter with extreme disdain, with the following albums, 1984’s Tonight and 1987’s Never Let Me Down, the two he hated most from his impressive creative career. Reflecting negatively on this era, he would describe this period as his “Phil Collins years”.
Bowie would admit that he was creatively “dissatisfied” during this chapter. As a pure artist, one who had not only excelled in the realm of music but acting, painting and even mime, he fell out of love with creating art due to the parameters of success, and naturally, this started to show in his work. He told Rolling Stone: “It didn’t make me feel good. I felt dissatisfied with everything I was doing, and eventually, it started showing in my work. The next two albums after Let’s Dance showed that my lack of interest in my own work was really becoming transparent.”
Although Bowie thought Tonight did have some redeemable features, it was its successor, Never Let Me Down, that he loathed more than any other release. He went as far as to describe it as his lowest artistic point and the “nadir” of his career. He said: “My nadir was Never Let Me Down. It was such an awful album.”
He continued: “I’ve gotten to a place now where I’m not very judgmental about myself. I put out what I do, whether it’s in visual arts or in music, because I know that everything I do is really heartfelt. Even if it’s a failure artistically, it doesn’t bother me in the same way that Never Let Me Down bothers me. I really shouldn’t have even bothered going into the studio to record it. [laughs] In fact, when I play it, I wonder if I did sometimes.”
Elsewhere, when speaking to Guitar Player in 2021, Bowie’s former guitarist, co-producer, and Tin Machine bandmate, Reeves Gabrels, looked back on how Never Let Me Down seemed to “gnaw” at his late friend. He even posited that Bowie felt “obliged” to follow up on the success of Let’s Dance with Tonight and Never Let Me Down, something he thinks he did “half-heartedly”.
Gabrels said: “Our whole thing was very much rooted in being in the moment. There wasn’t a lot of looking back going on between us.” However, at one point in the 1990s, Bowie told the guitarist that he wanted to return to the studio to re-record songs from the 1987 album.
“The record seemed to gnaw at David a bit,” Gabrels recalled. “He’d had such a big hit with ‘Let’s Dance’, and I think he felt obliged to follow up that success on Tonight and Never Let Me Down, but I think he did so half-heartedly. He told me that he’d kind of checked out mentally during the recording of Never Let Me Down, and he wanted a chance to take a mulligan. He would always say, ‘I just know there’s some good songs on it. I wouldn’t mind redoing some of them.'”
Gabrels understood his friend. Before working with Bowie, he and his “smart-ass musician friends” had compared their readings of the album. “We were like, ‘Gee, it’s 1987, but this seems a little 1985,'” he continued.
Adding: “It was very synthy, a little too Duran Duran-ish, if you will. But when I saw David perform tracks from the album on the [1987] Glass Spider tour, the music came off more muscular live than on record. It had grit to it. So I could see where he was coming from about revisiting those songs. It just wasn’t something I thought I should be a part of, and I always shot it down.”
Interestingly, this isn’t the end of the story of Never Let Me Down. In a strange twist of fate, years later, Gabrels played a part in reworking the entire album, released as Never Let Me Down 2018, a disc that arrived as part of the boxset David Bowie: Loving the Alien (1983–1988), the fourth in a series of career-spanning retrospectives. “We absolutely tried to respect David’s wishes with this new version of the album,” he said.
