“IT WAS A LABOUR OF LOVE!”
The second coming of Never Let Me Down
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of Loving The Alien (1983-1988), the latest in parlophone’s ongoing series of Bowie boxsets, is the inclusion of an entirely new recording of Never Let Me Down. Initially released in april 1987, Bowie later dismissed the album as “awful”, regretting his lack of application when it came to the record’s production. “about a year later, David and I were sitting on deckchairs by Mountain studio in switzerland, looking across Lake Geneva,” recalls songwriter/guitarist reeves Gabrels, with whom Bowie had just begun recording as Tin Machine. “he started telling me, ‘Y’know, I’m proud of the songs on
Never Let Me Down, but I wasn’t in the best shape and wasn’t as present as I should’ve been at the sessions.’ he later pointed to a couch in the studio and said, ‘I did most of my work on the record from there, passed out.’ he blamed himself for a lot of it and suggested we try re-recording some of those songs back then. It was a subject that would come up periodically through the years, usually late at night on the tour bus or in the studio.”
Under the guidance of engineer/ producer Mario McNulty, Gabrels is now part of the band responsible for finally granting Bowie his wish, alongside David Torn (guitar), sterling Campbell (drums) and Tim Lefebvre (bass). The revamped Never Let Me
Down also features string arrangements by Nico Muhly and a guest appearance by Laurie anderson. Bowie himself set the ball rolling in 2008, when he asked McNulty to re-record and remix “Time Will Crawl”, the album’s second single, for his iSelect compilation. “Oh, to redo the rest of that album,” wrote a wistful Bowie in the liner notes.
“There were three major changes that David was specifically looking for when we redid ‘Time Will Crawl’,” McNulty tells Uncut. “One was replacing the cold, badly programmed drum machines with real acoustic drums. he also wanted to have a very modern string arrangement, in the style of philip Glass or steve reich. and the other thing was to make a new arrangement, getting rid of most of what was there, then taking bits and looping them. he was getting creative with the existing track.”
Using “Time Will Crawl” as a blueprint, McNulty and the band – all of whom share history with Bowie – entered electric Lady studios in New York earlier this year. The most striking aspect of
Never Let Me Down 2018 is its relative simplicity. McNulty has weeded out all the synthetic clutter, giving Bowie’s vocals the live-in-the-room feel they deserve. songs that previously sounded slack now jump with new life. “It was a labour of love and we were following David’s wishes and, to some degree, instructions,” explains Gabrels. “at one point I thought to myself, ‘he’s just doing this to fuck with us.’ [David] Torn and I cut some of the guitar overdubs spontaneously. We were really having fun, and in a way you’re thinking, ‘Wait ’til David hears this tomorrow.’”
Campbell, whose studio association with Bowie ran from 1993’s Black Tie, White Noise through to The Next Day, some 20 years later, adds, “We didn’t have any real plan, we would throw the old multiple tracks up and do them one by one. The spirit of David was definitely in it. You’d laugh if you saw how most of the stuff I did with that man was done. It’s almost comedic. We’re technically dicking around, but at the same time we know what we’re doing.”
“Zeroes” is a prime example of the band’s approach to the source material. “David’s voice was astounding to listen to after everything else had been stripped away,” marvels Campbell, who played on the 2008 version of “Time Will Crawl”. “I couldn’t trip on the record in ’87, but just hearing him on an acoustic guitar and vocals made me go, ‘holy crap! This is an amazing song.’ It’s sounds so much more powerful now.”
Tackling “Zeroes” was a particularly poignant moment for Gabrels. “Mario played it to me with bass, drums and just David’s acoustic guitar and vocals on the first day at electric Lady,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow! There’s a song here!’ It was obvious that a second acoustic guitar would beef it up a little. One of the things David and I often used to do, from Tin Machine through to Hours
[1999], is play double acoustic guitar together. sometimes he’d play 12-string and I’d play sixstring, and vice versa. We’d sit facing each other with our guitars in front of the mics. so I started playing ‘Zeroes’ on acoustic guitar, with my eyes closed while we were recording. In my mind’s eye I saw David sitting across from me. I could see the way he would move his shoulder and even the way he’d cross his legs and bounce the crossed leg while he was playing. he’d look at you, but at the same time get this faraway look in his eye. When I got to the end of the track, I opened my eyes and of course he wasn’t there. I knew at some point during the session that I was going to feel like I was about to cry. I was just glad I was sitting alone in the studio when it happened.”
Other songs feed from the Bowie back catalogue. The intro to “New York’s In Love” barrels away to the rhythm of “Boys Keep swinging”; “Bang Bang”, the Iggy pop cover, is recast in the image of “Moonage Daydream”. “I turned that one right around, off the top of my head,” says Campbell. “If there was one lesson I took from David Bowie, it was about how you could flip the script in a second.”
“It was like Mario had cast a great movie,” says Gabrels. “We all looked at each other at one point and went, ‘Fuck, we should take this band out on the road if only the singer was still alive.’ There were a number of things that were said where I could imagine David laughing at them. he was the one who once told me, ‘Death will never hurt an artist’s career.’”
“I was like, ‘Wow! There’s a
song here” REEVES gABRELS
“There was a lot happening on that stage,” recalls Carmine Rojas. “It was like Lindsay Kemp meets Mad Max and had a baby. I said to David, ‘This has to be a headfuck to take on.’ He said, ‘My dear boy, you’re absolutely right. She’s a handful.’”
It didn’t always work. Adverse weather at some of the outdoor shows caused the more daring manoeuvres to be scrapped. At other times, the lengthening summer daylight hours meant that the light shows became redundant. The detailed routines tended to lose their impact in the bigger venues. “It was very difficult for people to grasp onto, especially in a stadium atmosphere,” Rojas admits. “The concert itself would have been a lot more suited for theatres.”
“David was sometimes playing to giant arenas of 60-80,000 people,” adds Alomar. “So the frame of reference had gone galactic. Money was being thrown at this tour every day like you wouldn’t believe. Suddenly, we had a new way of looking at the concert stage and the concert performance.” According to Toni Basil, “the Diamond Dogs Tour changed rock’n’roll theatre for ever, and Glass Spider blew it up even more. I think Glass Spider was a huge influence on Broadway shows, because it had all the sets and through-lines, plus all the groundbreaking technical stuff.”
Perhaps the most memorable night of the tour came in June ’87, when Bowie played before 80,000 Germans at Platz Der Republik, a short distance from the Berlin Wall. Less than a mile away lie Hansa studios, where Bowie had cut “Heroes” 10 years earlier. “The crew had set up PA speakers pointing east towards the Wall, so that the East Germans could enjoy the concert too,” recalls Rojas. “There was a moment in the show when we heard them sing back the chorus of ‘Heroes’. A few us were in tears.”
“There are very few moments where everything really reaches that pinnacle, and that was one of them,” says Alomar. “It was so emotional.” The vast crowd on the other side of the Wall was eventually dispersed by police with tear gas. On his death in 2016, the German Foreign Office paid tribute on Twitter: “Goodbye, David Bowie. Thank you for helping to bring down the wall.”
The Glass Spider Tour can be seen as the lavish endgame of Bowie’s ’80s, the point where he turned his back on mainstream commercial fame. Reeves Gabrels, whose then wife was a publicist for the US leg of the tour, befriended Bowie. “We’d hang out in his dressing room, watching Fantasy Island with the sound off and doing made-up voices for the characters,” he says. “David once told me that the only thing good about being famous is that you can get a good table in a restaurant and free tickets for shows. He was eager to do something that would destroy any commercial pop expectation where his career was concerned, but also something that would shield and preserve the Bowie brand name for the future. Something to fall on the grenade.”
Bowie’s wish was to pull back completely and return to basics. But what exactly did that mean? Ostensibly, Bowie hadn’t properly been in a band since the 1960s – when he’d played in beat groups The Konrads, The King Bees, The Manish Boys and The Lower Third. But things were different now. He wasn’t just another struggling face on the regional touring circuit; he was David Bowie. At least if Tin Machine – the band Bowie formed with Gabrels, Hunt and Tony Sales, veterans of Iggy’s ’70s outfit – didn’t allow Bowie to ‘disappear’ as fully as he might have liked, the band environment did at least recalibrate his working practices. “I wanted to be part of a group of people working towards one aim,” he told Uncut in 1999. “Success was rather immaterial. I needed the process to acclimatise myself again to why I wrote, why I did what I did. All those issues that an artist going through ‘a certain age’ starts to think about. Of course, smack on ’87 was 40 for me. I’d been thinking, ‘OK, I’ll go off and paint now.’ I’d made a lot of money. I thought, ‘I could just bugger off and do my ‘Gauguin in Tahiti’ bit now.’ But then what do you do? Re-emerge at 60 somewhere?”
Gabrels describes Tin Machine as “Glen Branca meets Neil Young” – and certainly the band’s excursions in experimental rock laid the groundwork for Bowie’s solo work in the ’90s. In this context, it’s possible to view Bowie’s ’80s in a different light. The success of Let’s
Dance and the Serious Moonlight Tour was due to a chance convergence of art and commerce, at a time when Bowie was perfectly primed for it. His subsequent trials, from Tonight through to the Glass Spider Tour, were a manifestation of the struggle to break free of the constraints that mainstream acceptance had brought. It was a decade of transformation that led to Bowie being reconciled with his own creative self. Never again would he court the mass market. His ’80s experiences convinced him that his true place was on the artistic fringe. Had Tonight never existed, then neither would Outside or Earthling. Had he not made Never Let Me Down, then he might never have arrived at Blackstar. On their own peculiar terms, the ’80s are as vital a part of Bowie’s legacy as his ’70s.
“The ’70s had been a wild and creative ride for him,” offers Kevin Armstrong, who was part of Bowie’s band, off and on, for 10 years. “But he found that he was losing control of his money, because of his notorious ex-manager. So he was probably craving some stability by the ’80s. If you’re David Bowie and you’ve got that creative fire, you can take a few left turns and try out things. Not everything he did was amazing, but if you look at it as a totality, he took risks all the time.”
“I always felt that David was well in control over the years,” says Frampton. “I’m not saying he didn’t have his crazy period – we’re all entitled to go nuts occasionally – but his strength of character and sense of survival remained intact. It was a case of ‘Knock me down and I’ll get up stronger’. He was powerfully self-directed.”
“Looking back at that ’80s period, you might even think Bowie was ahead of his time,” suggests Alomar. “It’s just that people weren’t ready to receive the message.”