The 1980s album David Bowie wanted to delete from history: “I really shouldn’t have even bothered”
Throughout his life, David Bowie often seemed like a god-like genius who could do no wrong, especially if you only discovered him after he was immortalised following his death in 2016.
Over the last decade, Bowie has been the subject of countless exhibitions, documentaries, books, and even an unauthorised biopic, which have all played a role in enhancing the legend surrounding ‘The Starman’.
There’s now so much mythology connected to Bowie that it can be convenient to forget that not everything he touched turned to gold. For every ‘Life On Mars’ that Bowie wrote, there is a ‘Too Dizzy’, which we all collectively pretend doesn’t exist.
Admittedly, Bowie did have a knack for ensuring most of his misses didn’t make it out of the studio floor, but there’s an entire album that he later admitted never should have seen the light of day.
Bowie’s perennial risk-taking instincts were his greatest attribute, but his intrinsic ability to think outside the box could also be his Achilles heel, which brought him brutally crashing back down to earth in the late 1980s. Even when Bowie had the world at his feet, challenges were never far from the horizon.
The ’80s were a peculiar decade for Bowie, which epitomised his entire career. At the start of the 1980s, Bowie found himself without a record label, and it seemed as though the music industry had moved on from him. However, being the unpredictable figure he was, Bowie spectacularly responded to his critics with Let’s Dance in 1983, a record that catapulted him back into the spotlight and made him more relevant than he had been in years.
Rather than continuing his renaissance, though, Bowie could not immediately recapture the brilliance of Let’s Dance on his two following projects. Those two LPs, Tonight and Never Let Me Down, failed to deceive, and there was nobody more disappointed than Bowie himself.
“[The great public esteem at that time] meant absolutely nothing to me,” Bowie reflected to Rolling Stone in 1995. “It didn’t make me feel good. I felt dissatisfied with everything I was doing, and eventually, it started showing in my work. Let’s Dance was an excellent album in a certain genre, but the next two albums after that [Tonight and Never Let Me Down] showed that my lack of interest in my own work was really becoming transparent”.
“My nadir was Never Let Me Down. It was such an awful album.”
David Bowie
For Bowie, he didn’t particularly care for how well an album performed from a commercial standpoint, as long as he could keep his head held high by knowing it represented him as an artist and was delivered from the heart. However, with Never Let Me Down, he let himself down.
The singer explained: “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.”
Bowie had lost sight of who he was during this stage of his career, and his output reflected that. His mystique had dissipated, and there were question marks about whether he would ever make another masterpiece. Of course, he would, but it wasn’t plain sailing.
It took a long road to get back there, with the formation of Tin Machine in 1988 acting as another critical moment that made Bowie start making music for himself once again. While it didn’t replicate the commercial success of Let’s Dance, Bowie didn’t want it to. It was instead about recapturing the creative spark within himself, even if their two albums divided critics.
While he was no stranger to making the occasional musical faux pas, he was comfortable with each mistake because they reflected his artistry, apart from Never Let Me Down. Bowie could accept making missteps when following his gut, but deep down, he always knew Never Let Me Down should never have been recorded, let alone released.
However, all things happen for a reason, and Never Let Me Down acted as a wake-up call that he needed to get his house in order, rather than getting even further lost down the wrong path.
