David Bowie in 1987. Bowie wasn't always a universally adored star. Photo / Getty Images
David Bowie wasn't always a universally adored star. During the 1990s, he was largely ignored. As live recordings from this period are released, his friends recall how he coped.
In October 1999 the music website Pitchfork, which would go on to dictate taste for a decade, reviewed David Bowie's latest album, Hours. "For a lot of kids, David Bowie is a guy that's never been remotely cool, let alone taken seriously," it said, going on to compare the one-time Ziggy Stardust to Sting. It called the new record embarrassing — but this was simply parroting popular opinion. The NME was just as nasty to Bowie at the time, while in a Time Out interview from 1995, the singer was asked, "Does it hurt if people say, 'David Bowie, what a pretentious tosser'?"
How times ch-ch-changed. By the time Bowie died in January 2016, anyone calling him anything other than the Greatest British Artist Ever was scorned. Eulogies rained down, with everyone from Debbie Harry to David Cameron, Macca to Nasa, offering memories and praise. This is the least he deserved: from the 1960s on, via various guises, Bowie arguably created more pop wonder than anyone and that legacy was clear this June when Twitter was lit up by a rerun of Bowie's hit-packed Glastonbury set in 2000. Praise be to the heavens for the man who fell to Earth. But in the 1990s things were very different.
Alan Edwards, who joined Bowie in the early 1980s as a press officer before becoming his quasi-manager a decade later, is on Zoom, riffling through files of media cuts that contain notes from Bowie himself. He was hands-on, funny, relaxed. Edwards finds pages for a 1999 tour. In France, as with Bob Dylan, the singer was made a commander of the prestigious Ordre des Arts et des Lettres but in the UK he was struggling. Glastonbury started a slow upturn in respect, however, two days after the festival, Bowie played a two-hour set at the titchy BBC Radio Theatre, where he sang songs such as Ashes to Ashes and Heroes, telling fantastic stories about them all. Edwards couldn't persuade any journalists to come.
"The press wax lyrical about David now but I had wads of tickets I couldn't give away in the 1990s, because he was not deemed cool," he says, shaking his head. "It wasn't happening here at all. Sometimes, which we all do, people take what's in front of them for granted. Tony Blair was a big fan, though."
The 1990s were a brash decade; 10 years that combined the proliferation of the internet and various magazines with people who happened to be interesting to write about too. That cemented stars fast and from Kurt and Courtney to Posh and Becks, via Noel, Damon, Tarantino, Tony, Bill, Naomi, Cindy and Kate, there was such a thrilling sense of freshness in the air that, inevitably, much that had taken place in preceding decades was ignored or openly attacked. Britpop owed vast debts to the 1960s and 1970s - but only to artists who happily traded on their glorious pasts. Yet Bowie spent much of the 1990s creating hard industrial music and throbbing drum'n'bass — all the while having the audacity to be a 50-year-old man sporting spiky hair.
"Was it David or was there a bigger societal explanation?" Edwards asks of his friend's fall from favour. "Had everyone got so obsessed with 90s culture — new, new, new — that everything from the past was rubbish? The mid-90s were extraordinary. Britain was hot again. It was swinging. It was a very exciting country. David got overlooked a bit."
In fairness, Bowie's 1990s output as a solo artist was hard to keep up with. First there was the well-received if conventional Black Tie White Noise in 1993, with the lush Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack coming that year too, to little fanfare (something Bowie was disappointed about). Then as Britpop entered its arrogant retro-pomp phase, he released the hard-edged, modern 1. Outside and soon after Earthling, before seemingly needing a rest and making the very relaxed Hours.
This era has been captured by the live albums LiveAndWell.com and Something in the Air, both re-released this year. The former in particular, recorded on his 1997 tour, shows what, for a while, Bowie became. It was a drum'n'bass gig with added jazz, metal, glitch and few hits. Michael Eavis walked out of one such show, while a disgruntled fan at a festival shouted, "This is bollocks! We want Let's Dance!" at which point somebody punched him. But that punter was hardly a lone wolf. At the Hanover Grand, so many people left that the venue was half empty by the time Bowie performed an hour-long drum'n'bass solo set as a closing-stretch bonus.
"He had turned his back on the commercialisation of his career," John Giddings explains over the phone. Giddings was Bowie's live agent for years. "He wanted to experiment, so decided to do different things. Some were brilliant, some weren't. He just didn't want to get up on stage every night and play the same songs. That's what it boiled down to. If audiences didn't like it? Well, you can educate them."
I ask Edwards if he thinks people had forgotten that, from Ziggy to the Thin White Duke to his hazy Berlin days and beyond, Bowie had always shape-shifted? "Yes," he says. "I love the Rolling Stones, but their music is generally blues-rock. Yet I remember the jumps David made, all in the first 10 years of his career. It was the whole essence, so it was unimaginative for people in the 1990s to ask why he couldn't just play the stuff he played back then."
Was he bitter that the music he was making wasn't better received? "I never really detected bitterness," Edwards says. "And when a project didn't work out, he didn't blame anyone. He would say, 'I might start painting next week.' He'd design wallpaper. Working for him was intense and he was focused but it was magical. Always a new adventure. He didn't dwell on the negatives. As Iggy would say, he really did have a lust for life. He was frustrated, but determined to get it right. He wanted to prove everyone wrong."
In 1987 Bowie met Reeves Gabrels — a friendly American guitarist who was, at the time, teaching. We speak on the phone. Gabrels' then wife, Sara Terry, was a hard-news journalist who quit her job "in the jungle looking for child labour in silver mines" to do the press for Bowie's Glass Spider Tour. No fool, Gabrels tagged along and soon the superstar and the hanger-on were watching Fantasy Island on TV together with the sound turned off, making up a different storyline to the show. "He was becoming my friend," Gabrels recalls sweetly. "I didn't see any way in hell I was going to end up playing music with him."
Within a year the two men were in a band together, Tin Machine — a hard rock act that existed to stop people shouting out for Space Oddity. By the end of the 1990s Gabrels had co-written more Bowie songs than anyone else. The two men, he says, were "in the same church but on a different pew" when it came to music, which is great for collaboration. They would debate the relative merits of the Pixies and the Prodigy while creating the first draft of 1. Outside as "a tight two-hour improvised opera". That was sliced down. But Gabrels seems fonder of the journey than the destination anyway.
"One of the things I used to argue with David about was that he wasn't the tail — he was the dog," he says. "He kept thinking he was the tail. My role was to tell him what he didn't want to hear." When Gabrels found out Bowie had died, he says he laughed. His partner asked why and he said: "Because we had so much fun."
"I was proud of everything we did, whether people liked it or not," he says, although he admits he was unused to selling any records at all. "We did what we set out to do but what we encountered was that if you're fortunate enough to do this for 40 years, you're in competition with your past. Or what the public and press decide is your best work and want to hear in perpetuity."
The problem, as always, was the excess of the 1980s. This is a particularly British problem, whereby kneejerkers associate any artist who wore shoulder pads with Thatcher and turn them into a persona non grata. It is why the video of teenagers listening to In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins for the first time went viral last week — they adored the song because it is fantastic but, for a long time , Collins has been synonymous with bankers, which is no way to get a decent write-up in the music press. Bowie, to a lesser extent, was the same. In the space of seven years he went from his trickiest work, Low, to the stadium-strutting disco pop of his biggest-selling album Let's Dance. From there? He was rather stuck — a man who read William Manchester and Peter Ackroyd and visited galleries in every city on tour, caught in an anti-artistic record-label loop.
"Was he treading water?" Edwards asks rhetorically. "Then did he throw Tin Machine in to smash the whole thing up? I suspect he did. Look, it happens to all of us in our careers. You have moments when you realise you're just doing the same thing and you try to challenge yourself."
Gabrels enjoyed being the disrupter. The problem, he claims, was the team Bowie had, who had joined at the time of Let's Dance. "They came on when David became a cash cow, and so my years were viewed as difficult by the people David was paying." He says in the 1990s they would be told TV appearances would not be able to happen but, in fact, they were just being saved in the hope of more commercial music soon. Gabrels heard an assistant say, "Tin Machine is totally devaluing David's currency!" He cackles. "We were paying her f***ing salary!"
The front cover of Hours shows an older Bowie, with the shoulder-length hair he had at Glastonbury, cradling a knackered rave version of himself from the five years gone by. From then on, up to his comeback with The Next Day in 2013 and Blackstar, released just before his death, he never released anything as frenetic as he did in the 1990s. "David made a record that had a reflectiveness," Edwards says of The Next Day. "Sadness, in places, looking back on his life. And we all do that at times. It caught the mood, and those words were enough to make you cry." It was a whole world away from the head rush he made with Gabrels, songs like the seven-minute, incredibly alive Dead Man Walking.
"By the time we got to Hours, I wanted to make Earthling Part 2," Gabrels says. "Like Aladdin Sane following Ziggy: same, but advanced. But he said something that signalled my time for departure was coming. He wanted to make music for his generation. I said, 'I am 10 years younger than you; what does that mean?' In my mind he never made music for his generation. He made it for his tribe."
What a great way to put it; even those most eccentric albums from the mid-1990s found their tribe for sure. My first exposure as a teen to new Bowie was during this era and songs like Hallo Spaceboy and The Motel have aged well. It helps, too, that as a society we now celebrate nostalgia rather than despise it. Maybe it is because many of the new bands feted in the 1990s amounted to very little. Maybe it is comfort. But we look after our heroes better than we did, because it hurts when they go.
In an interview from the start of this century Bowie was looking back at his work from the closing two decades of the last. "My success as a songwriter really flies on whether I'm doing it with a personal integrity," he said. "There were albums in the 1980s I'm not proud of … All my biggest mistakes are when I try to please an audience. My work is stronger when I just do what I want to do." Hence the 1990s, a time when he was possibly at his happiest, despite the ridicule. He was on the outside, where he always liked to be.
"A lot of it just comes from pure pleasure, you know?" he said. "I work, because it's such a great way to escape having to work in a shop. I can't tell you how exciting it is. It really is great."
Tin Machine 1989
Fed up with his career, Bowie forms a band and does chugging hard rock. The sort of better-than-you-remember dissonance that fans had to get used to in the 1990s.
Tin Machine II 1991
More from the band that was really Bowie, but the rust was starting to show. Bowie still sounds energised — Betty Wrong has a great vocal — but many songs feel rather empty.
Black Tie White Noise 1993
Recently married to Iman, Bowie opens his first solo album for years with The Wedding — a house music and sax crossover that encapsulates a record with one foot in the past, one in the future.
1. Outside 1995
Here we go … for years after this art-rock epic, many Bowie fans were utterly confused. A concept album about murder, its convolutedness rather hid some terrific songs; from pile-drivers to ballads, it's all here.
Earthling 1997
The highly technical drum'n'bass record that led to half-full venues. It pummels and rattles and terrified fans who only liked Starman. The most out-there Bowie got this decade.
Hours 1999
Bowie calms down. From here until the end, it was largely rock music for the man who always did so much more. As such, given what came before, and the greatness of his two final albums to come, it feels rather flat.
Hits ...
1 Prisoner of Love (1989)
2 Hallo Spaceboy (1995)
3 Strangers When We Meet (1995)
4 I'm Afraid of Americans (1997)
5 Thursday's Child (1999)
... and misses
1 Working Class Hero (1989)
2 Segue - Ramona A Stone / I Am with Name (1995)
3 Battle for Britain (The Letter) (1997)
4 Something in the Air (1999)
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
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