The only song on ‘Tonight’ that David Bowie actually liked
David Bowie was a genius, but even geniuses have bad days, and 1984’s Tonight was definitely a bad day for the songwriter. Even the most contrarian of Bowie fanatics would have to concede that the album is one of his worst efforts, if not the worst, and that is a sentiment that was shared by the performer himself.
To be fair to Bowie, his songwriting muscles were becoming understandably fatigued by the time the mid-1980s rolled around. After establishing himself as the intergalactic god of glam rock, before killing himself off and returning with the expansive, incredibly influential genius of his Berlin period, and even experimenting with synthpop on Scary Monsters at the beginning of the 1980s, the songwriter should have probably taken some time off to recuperate.
Instead, he worked himself almost to death, spurred on by his increasingly debilitating, unshakable dependency on drugs and alcohol, and the material he produced inevitably bore the brunt of that destructive period. Tonight was the hotly anticipated follow-up to the successful disco-pop influenced Let’s Dance, and to say that it did not live up to expectations would be a gross understatement.
While Let’s Dance certainly isn’t Bowie’s greatest record, it was a solid effort that saw him move in yet another creative direction. Tonight, on the other hand, was a confused mess of poor performances and pandering songwriting that alienated both Bowie devotees and the wider music-buying public in one fell swoop. Almost immediately, upon its release, the performer himself recognised its lack of quality, viewing it as a failed effort.
“I guess I wanted to put my musical being in a similar staid and healthy area,” he said in one interview around the album’s release, “But I’m not sure that that was a very wise thing to do”. In the years that followed, Bowie’s view of Tonight only seemed to deteriorate further, with him making no attempt to conceal his hatred for that ill-fated album.
Even in David Bowie’s worst moments, though, there are moments of brilliance, and there was one diamond in the rough of Tonight’s dismal tracklisting, according to the songwriter himself. When putting together the tracklisting for his 2008 compilation iSelect, he made sure to include that one redeeming track from back in 1984, which was ‘Loving the Alien’.
One of the only two tracks from the album to be composed solely by Bowie himself, the rest having been helped along by various collaborators, most notably Iggy Pop, ‘Loving the Alien’ forms the opening track of Tonight, and as such, it provides listeners with a fairly inaccurate view of the record to follow.
A cacophony of influences stretching from old-school R&B to experimental, and even the marimba making a notable appearance, the song is expectedly divisive among Bowie fans. It does, however, provide some insight into the kind of styles that the songwriter was experimenting with at the time, and what Tonight as a whole might have sounded like had it all gone to plan.
Exactly why David Bowie viewed ‘Loving the Alien’ as a separate entity from Tonight is up for interpretation, but regardless, it seems as though the song is the one redeeming quality of that otherwise disastrous mid-1980s effort.
