Review - David Bowie - Loving The Alien (1983-1988) (Parlophone UK)
LP / CD / DL
Out Now
The fourth in the
series of box sets celebrating the career of David Bowie, 'Loving The Alien
(1983 - 1988)' covers the often maligned "stadium years". Simon
Tucker looks back and wonders if it really was as bad as people make out.
Let's be honest about this. Out of all the recent box-sets
that have been reissued covering the career of David Bowie this is the one most
would not be so keen to purchase. To many diehards, Eighties Bowie was the
'sell-out' commercial boredom years lacking the innovation and vision of his
previous output. Is this a fair assessment or are people being unfairly unkind?
Yes, the suits and hair smacked of yuppie. The music was covered in a gloss not
heard on his albums before and he was unashamedly aiming for the charts but
does that mean Bowie's muse had left him completely? Had he sold his soul for a
slice of the Wembley pie? Bowie himself would be dismissive of much of this era
but what this box-set shows that whilst there are certainly a few misses and low
points there were also some extreme highs. So let's go down to the underground
and get stuck in.
Opening the collection is the remastered Let's Dance album. The record that did exactly
what its author intended and got him into the charts, onto MTV and selling out
bigger and bigger venues. Teaming up with Niles Rodgers was another Bowie
collaboration masterstroke and hearing the album now you get a real sense of
the strength of song writing that is on the collection. Modern Love, China Girl
(Bowie's smoothed out version of his and Iggy's track from the latter's The
Idiot), Let's Dance all nail the dancefloor but it is the deeper cuts that
carry the intrigue. Ricochet is a weird blend of art-pop and reggae whilst
Shake It basically has Bowie and his team reimagining Let's Dance itself and
adding some odd kinks and twists. People often use the tired line of
"...is his best since Scary Monsters" but the truth of it is that
even though Let's Dance has a more palatable sonic palette it is still a kooky
and odd pop record and one that has stood up rather well.
The famed Serious Moonlight tour is what falls next and boy
what a recording this is. Recorded in 1983 and previously unreleased, Serious
Moonlight shows us that in regards to UK pop megastars, Bowie was in a field of
one. Think about his peers at the time
(McCartney, Queen, Rolling Stones) and what they were producing at this time.
Not one of them was making music that was so subversive and avant-garde and
filling out stadiums. The band are tight as hell, Bowie's vocals are powerful
and the whole show rocks to the most creative art-rock to ever fill a football
stadium. Who else could place a huge hit like Let's Dance right next to the
cocaine-induced satanic musings of Breaking Glass? The marching majesty of
Station to Station to the sleaze of Cracked Actor and have an entire stadium
singing along.
"suck baby suck / give me your head"
Serious Moonlight is the grown up and flexed version of the
Diamond Dogs tour and whilst he may not have been quite clean and sober you
certainly are not worried about his health as you were on that now notorious
tour.
So far so good then but then up comes the album Tonight and
it is safe to say that this is where the criticisms of Bowie's 80s output are
fully justified. No amount of remastering can save this dogs dinner of an
album. Recorded in the knowledge that he was to be spending the next year or so
on the road, Tonight is an abject display of laziness and rushed project. There
are some moments on here which hold up such as the
opener Loving The Alien, Bowie's musings on religion and Blue Jean which just
stays the right side of interesting to warrant its place on one of the many
Greatest Hits compilations that have been made but the dross outweighs the good
in a major way. We get Bowie turning his and Iggy's Tonight (from Ig's Lust For
Life album) from its original crooning glory into a cod-reggae insipid dirge,
the shocking Charleston pastiche I Keep Forgettin' and the frankly appalling
cover version of The Beach Boys God Only Knows which is so bad John Lewis would
refuse to use it for their Christmas ads. If there is one part of this box set
that is unessential then this is it.
Never Let Me Down follows and this is the point where Loving
The Alien gets really interesting as we are not given one but TWO version of
the album with the first being the original album remastered and the second a
completely reworked version. The original is still us unremarkable as on its
initial release but the second version....
According the press release, the seeds for the new
production of Never Let Me Down were sown back in 2008 when Bowie asked Mario
McNulty to remix the track Time Will Crawl whilst also recording new drums with
Sterling Cambell and some added strings. The new version received a lot of
praise and Bowie commented "Oh, to redo the rest of that album"
Now in 2018, McNulty entered the studio with Cambell, Tim
Lefebvre on bass (from the Blackstar band), David Torn and the ever reliable
Reeves Gabrels on guitars. The result is nothing short of a revelation. Shorn
of its 80s sheen and riff wankery, Never Let Me Down (2018) reveals the true
heart of the songs and brings Bowie's songwriting prowess to the forefront.
Where once it was buried, it is now out in the open and what happens is you get
an album that is as dark as the snarky and slashing Scary Monsters. Bowie's
lyrics are wonderfully abstract and poetically on-point with his ever reliable
vocal delivery standing tall and proud. Gabrels and Torn discover and create
guitar lines that are more succinct and powerful than the originals overbearing
nature. Zeroes has an acoustic treatment that taps into the sound of The Man
Who Sold The World whilst Glass Spider becomes a forerunner for his swerve back
to the Eno collaboration 1. Outside.
Everyone involved in bringing this album back to its purest
form deserve to be applauded and you get a sense that its author would be
extremely proud of the finished result. A perfect tribute and due to an absence
of unreleased material this is the closest we will get to discovering a
"lost" Bowie album.
Another live album follows and this time is the much
maligned Glass Spider tour. The tour where Bowie went full Spinal Tap and OTT
with huge production values and excessive stage props.
Recorded in Montreal in
1987, Glass Spider does much of what Serious Moonlight does in showing us what
a vast array of sonic weaponry Bowie and his band had in their armour at this
point. The only difference being that this concert is there is a definite
smoothness to the sound now that takes away some of the bit that existed on the
Serious Moonlight tour. For all the slickness that Glass Spider displays there
is still moments that surprise like the inclusion of All The Madmen from 1970's
The Man Who Sold The World but whereas the original was a tasty slice of
proto-metal the new version suffers slightly due to its high production and the
wonderful Sons Of A Silent Age from the seminal 'Heroes' album.
Glass Spiders is an interesting artefact and worthy of your
time even though it does slightly suffer in comparison to the also-included
Serious Moonlight recording.
The penultimate LP included is Dance which is a collection
of extended versions of remixes that quite frankly is, like Tonight, easily
avoided and one of the least essential components of this box-set as none of
the tracks here really add anything to the originals and will only appeal to
real Bowie completists.
Finally then we arrive at RE:CALL 4 which is a new
compilation featuring newly remastered contemporary single version, non-album
singles, album edits, b-sides and songs featured on various soundtracks such as
Labyrinth, Absolute Beginners and When The Wind Blows and is, for this writer,
one of the most essential parts of this project. Putting aside the single
versions of Let's Dance, China Girl, and Modern Love it is the soundtrack
choices that really excite because it is these songs that were my first tasters
of Bowie the performer. Yes the 'rents were always playing the Ziggy Glam
period but it was Labyrinth where my own personal obsession about all things
Bowie began.
Watching the film repeatedly with my siblings is one of my fondest
memories and the songs from the film included here truly do stand up as some of
Bowie's finest 80s moments. Magic Dance is obviously cemented deep in the
period it was created in with its drum machines and synth keys playing
oh-so-80s melodies but by god is it infectious in its joy and unrepentant pop
glee. Novelty pop done to perfection. If you're 'too hip' or so tied to what
your idea of what Bowie should sound like or what music you think he should have been making then I am afraid it is you who
is missing out as on the Labyrinth soundtrack there lies some of Bowie's
strongest pop songs including the Gothic and insidious of Within You and the
Gospel infused Underground.
The real crown of the RE:CALL 4 collection is Absolute
Beginners. Maybe due to its association to the dreadful film from which it was
taken, Absolute Beginners doesn't seem to get the love it deserves from outside
of the core Bowie fan base and this is criminal as this is a song that rivals
"Heroes" as possibly his greatest expression of love. Lyrically, the
song is devastatingly beautiful:
"As you're still smiling
There's nothing more I need
I absolutely love you
But we're absolute beginners
But if my love is your love
We're certain to succeed"
Everything about this song is perfection and if anyone ever
tries telling you 80s Bowie was rubbish just play them this song and wait for
an apology.
Loving The Alien (1983 - 1988) does an excellent job of
putting into sharp focus the work of an artist who was walking the line between
artistic freedom and mainstream acceptance. It shows an artist filling stadiums
with songs about fascism, the occult, mental health issues and dancing. This
was when Bowie was indeed conflicted about where he was heading but stripping
away the preconceived ideas of this being his "bad" period you find
that whilst there were indeed moments where the work turned stale and product-filler,
there were plenty of other moments where the creative fire was still burning
strong in the belly of one of our all time greatest.
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