The two David Bowie albums that David Bowie hated with a passion: “Didn’t make me feel good”
David Bowie never had any rules when it came to his music.
Whatever he felt at the moment was always captured in his sound, and he would never release material that he didn’t have some sense of conviction for. However, when looking back on his years of creativity, Bowie had a particular disdain for some parts of his 1980s period.
As the MTV age began, Bowie became one of the most photogenic rock stars in the world, making him the perfect choice to make the leap to television. After working with colleagues like Nile Rodgers, Bowie made his biggest pop smash with Let’s Dance, a project featuring some of the best songs of his career, like the title track and ‘Modern Love’, for example. As Bowie continued this road, he started to have an issue with what he would later call his “Phil Collins years”.
Although he was one of the biggest stars at the time thanks to his past work, Bowie thought he dropped the ball while making albums like Tonight, later telling 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”.
Taking on some of Iggy Pop’s songs with a helping hand from his shirtless friends, and also saw one of the finest Beach Boys covers of all time. His rendition of The Beach Boys’ song ‘God Only Knows’ is one of the definitive covers of the California band, but it is perhaps one of the few bright spots on the otherwise maudlin record.
While Tonight features some of the more outlandish sides of what was going on on his ‘80s smash, Bowie was at arm’s length. Although Bowie might have claimed not to have had his hand on the wheel during those sessions, he believed the following album, Never Let Me Down, was a disaster from back to front.
Bowie continued by calling Never Let Me Down his “nadir”, going on to say, “It was such an awful album. 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”.
With the album, which is widely disliked, Bowie created a record which paid tribute to the sounds of 1950s musicals and for that he succeeded. However, the LP lacks the panache and poise of a Bowie album and falls down the list of his best because of it.
Of all of Bowie’s ‘80s period albums, this one has aged the poorest, suffering from some of the worst production of his career and more than a few questionable decisions, like having actor Mickey Rourke have a spoken word piece towards the end of the album. This would turn out to be a learning experience for Bowie, though, moving into the ‘90s with more adventurous ideas on albums like Outside and Earthling, exploring different conceptual ideas as well as toying with different genres like drum and bass.
Despite Bowie being content to wash his hands of the project, the songs on Never Let Me Down did get a second life in the next century. For the album’s anniversary, producers David Richards and Mario J. McNulty updated the album, shedding away the production and presenting a clear artistic statement for the fans. As much as Bowie didn’t look fondly on this album, this version of these songs might have been closer to what ‘The Starman’ was hearing in his head when he came up with these songs.
