Never Let Me Down
Never Let Me Down is the seventeenth studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released on 21 April 1987 through EMI America Records. Co-produced by Bowie and David Richards and featuring the guitarist Peter Frampton, the album was recorded in Switzerland and New York City from September to November 1986. Bowie's goal for the project was to record it differently following his disappointment with 1984's Tonight. Musically, Never Let Me Down has been characterised as pop rock, art rock and hard rock; Bowie himself considered the record a return to rock and roll music. The cover artwork features Bowie surrounded by numerous elements from the songs.
Never Let Me Down was commercially successful, reaching the UK top 10; its three singles all reached the UK top 40. Despite this, the album was poorly received by fans and was met with negative reviews from critics, with most criticising the "overblown" production. Bowie supported it on the Glass Spider Tour, a world tour that was at that point the biggest, most theatrical and elaborate tour of his career. The tour, like the album, was commercially successful but critically panned. The critical failure of the album and tour were factors that led Bowie to look for a new way to motivate himself creatively, leading him to create the rock band Tin Machine in 1989; he did not release another solo album until Black Tie White Noise in 1993.
In later decades, Never Let Me Down is generally regarded as one of Bowie's weakest releases. The track "Too Dizzy" has been deleted from subsequent reissues due to Bowie's dislike of it. Throughout his lifetime, Bowie was critical of Never Let Me Down, distancing himself from the arrangement and production of the finished album. He expressed a desire to remake it numerous times, eventually remixing "Time Will Crawl" for the career retrospective iSelect in 2008.
Background and development
's rise in fame and success from Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983 made him feel disconnected from his newfound fanbase. After the poor reception of 1984's Tonight, he worked on a series of miscellaneous projects that included collaborations with the Pat Metheny Group for "This Is Not America" and Mick Jagger for "Dancing in the Street". He also continued acting and composing for film soundtracks such as Absolute Beginners and Labyrinth.Wanting another record, EMI compiled a compilation of 12″ mixes from Let's Dance and Tonight following Bowie's successful performance at Live Aid in 1985. Titled Dance, it reached the artwork stage before being shelved. In mid-1986, Bowie produced and co-wrote multiple tracks with his old friend Iggy Pop for his solo album Blah-Blah-Blah, recorded five songs for the soundtrack for Labyrinth, and recorded the title song of the 1986 film When the Wind Blows with the Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay, before commencing work on his next studio record.
Writing and recording
Bowie spent mid-1986 in his home in Switzerland writing songs with Iggy Pop. He bought a Fostex 16-track and AHB mixing console to record elaborate home demos, which he recorded with Kızılçay before regrouping with a full band. Having worked together sporadically since 1982, Bowie greatly appreciated Kızılçay's musicianship, proclaiming, "He can switch from violin to trumpet to French horn, vibes, percussion, whatever... His knowledge of rock music begins and ends with the Beatles! His background is really jazz." During the sessions, Kızılçay played keyboards and synthesisers and, according to the biographer Chris O'Leary, "provided any sound" Bowie requested. Unlike the sessions for Tonight, Bowie encouraged collaboration for the new album's sessions, mainly wanting "better" versions of his home demos.Never Let Me Down was recorded between September and November 1986, beginning at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, and completing at the Power Station in New York City. It was co-produced by Bowie and David Richards; both had co-produced Blah-Blah-Blah and the latter previously engineered "Heroes". Let's Dance engineer Bob Clearmountain returned for Never Let Me Down. According to Bowie, he was responsible for the album's "great, forceful sound". Returning from the Tonight sessions was regular collaborator Carlos Alomar on guitar, Carmine Rojas on bass and a group of saxophonists known as the Borneo Horns. With Kızılçay, they were joined on lead guitar by Bowie's former classmate Peter Frampton, whom Bowie hired after listening to his latest record Premonition. He stated at the time, "I always thought it'd be good to work with him 'cause I was so impressed with him as a guitarist at school." Frampton played on all but three tracks; lead guitar duties for "Day-In Day-Out", "Time Will Crawl" and a cover of Iggy Pop's "Bang Bang" were done by Sid McGinnis, a some-time member of David Letterman's band. For the first time since 1980's Scary Monsters , Bowie played instruments in addition to singing, contributing keyboards, synthesiser and rhythm guitar on some tracks, and played lead guitar on "New York's in Love" and "87 and Cry". The band worked from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.. Kızılçay recalled Bowie being "very disciplined" during the sessions and "always" trying new things.
Bowie, Richards and Kızılçay recorded backing tracks at Mountain for the first two weeks, after which Alomar and Frampton were flown in for guitar overdubs. Sessions then moved to the Power Station, where horns and backing vocalists were added, with additional percussion from Errol "Crusher" Bennett. According to Richards, these were elements that Bowie said "you can only get in New York". Regarding Bennett's contributions, Richards recalled: " set all his 'bangers' and 'scrapers' on a table, which I miked at each end. So whenever he moved around, the sounds would pan with him, creating some strange spatial effects." The majority of Bowie's vocals were taken from guide vocals recorded at Mountain, although some were later redone at the Power Station. Richards explained that most of vocals were so good and had such great spontaneity that they ended up on the record." "Never Let Me Down" was a last-minute addition to the album, written and recorded in one day during the last week of mixing at the Power Station. Actor Mickey Rourke also performed the mid-song rap for "Shining Star ". The two had met in London where the actor was based while filming A Prayer for the Dying and requested to contribute. Two tracks were recorded that ended up as B-sides, "Julie" and "Girls", the latter of which was briefly considered for inclusion on Never Let Me Down in late 1986.
Songs
The music on Never Let Me Down has been characterised as pop rock, art rock and hard rock. At the time, Bowie said the musical styles reflected the different styles he wrote with over the preceding years, and further stated the sound and style was reminiscent of Scary Monsters and less like its immediate predecessors, calling it "an eclectic hybrid of long-standing influences and personal nostalgia." At the time, a writer for the Canadian Press considered the record "a basic serving of high-energy, guitar rock", representing a departure from his "adventurous" late 1970s works and the "R&B-flavoured" Let's Dance. The biographer Paul Trynka says the record contains mostly "conventional music, lyrics and sounds".Side one
The opening track, "Day-In Day-Out", offers the artist's commentary on the treatment of the homeless in Los Angeles. The author James E. Perone states that the song is a good example of Bowie's experimentation with the R&B genre. "Time Will Crawl" was inspired by the Chernobyl disaster and the idea that someone from one's own neighborhood could be responsible for the end of the world. Compared to Prince's "1999", Bowie said his vocals on the song were indebted to Neil Young, and noted that the variety of voices he used on the album were a nod to the musicians who had influenced him in the past. Bowie called "Beat of Your Drum" a Lolita song, a "reflection on young girls... 'Christ, she's only 14 years old, but jail's worth it!'" The biographer Nicholas Pegg, who called the song one of the album's better tracks, noted that it could be called a "direct ancestor", both lyrically and musically, to Tin Machine's "You Belong in Rock n' Roll". Perone finds it resembles the contemporary techno craze, while further exhibiting punk rock influences.The title track is about Bowie's long-time personal assistant, Coco Schwab. The song's direct reference to her acts as a counterpoint to the rest of the songs, which the artist felt were mostly allegorical. Bowie attributed his vocal performance to John Lennon. One reviewer later called it one of Bowie's "most underrated songs". "Zeroes", which Rolling Stones Steve Pond called the most heartening and successful track on the album, is a nostalgia trip. Bowie explained: "I wanted to put in every 60s cliche I could think of! 'Stopping and preaching and letting love in,' all those things. I hope there's a humorous undertone to it. But the subtext is definitely that the trappings of rock are not what they're made out to be." Musically, the track features a sitar reminiscent of George Harrison's work with the Beatles and references Bowie's earlier songs "Diamond Dogs" and "Heroes" in its music and title, respectively.
Side two
"Glass Spider" marks a return to the electronica of Bowie's late 1970s Berlin Trilogy, as well as influences of psychedelic folk and heavy metal. It presents a mythological story based on a documentary Bowie had seen about black widow spiders, describing how they lay the skeletons of their prey out on their webs. Echoing the Diamond Dogs track "Future Legend", he thought that the Glass Spider's web would make a good enclosure for a concert tour, thus giving the supporting tour its name and stage dressing.Bowie described "Shining Star " as one that "reflects back-to-street situations, and how people are trying to get together in the face of so many disasters and catastrophes, socially around them, never knowing if they're going to survive it themselves. The one thing they have got to cling on to is each other; although it might resolve into something terrible, it's the only thing that they've got. It's just a little love song coming out of that environment." He rejected the notion that his "high, little" voice in the song was a new character, instead saying it was just what the song needed, as he had tried the song in his regular voice and did not like the outcome: "That never bothered me, changing voices to suit a song. You can fool about with it." "New York's in Love" is a dance track that Bowie described as a sarcastic song about the vanity of big cities. Pegg later called it "a strong contender for the... wooden spoon" of the album.
"87 & Cry" was written as a statement about "Thatcherite" England, referring to the distinction between the authoritarian government and the citizens. Bowie acknowledged that the lyrics verged on the surreal, describing people "eating the energies of others to get to what they wanted." "Too Dizzy" was the first song Bowie and Kızılçay wrote together for the album and was written in homage to the 1950s. The former said, "a real Fifties subject matter was either love or jealousy, so I thought I'd stick with jealousy because it's a lot more interesting". Bowie covered Iggy Pop's "Bang Bang", which originally flopped as a single, for Never Let Me Down as he felt it could be a hit. For his version, Bowie imitated Pop in his vocal performance, while lyrically, it contains themes present in other album tracks. Perone compares Bowie's version to the work of Talking Heads' David Byrne.