DAVID BOWIE - TONIGHT @ 40

 

Released on September 24th, 1984, David Bowie's sixteenth studio album, Tonight, turns 40 years old today. Coming on the heels of his career peak LP, Let's Dance, expectations were high for a repeat of that success, a situation which would ultimately be a constraint on Bowie's creativity, as the pressure to keep delivering chart toppers bared down on his sense of artistic integrity. It's a situation that, for an artist of constantly evolving influences and passions, can become something of a prison, which is exactly the kind of situation Bowie found himself in during the latter half of this decade. He'd been successful before, but hitting these heights with Let's Dance put him in the sights of a lot of expectations that were impossible to dismiss or ignore.

Production on the album commenced soon after the conclusion of the massively successful Serious Moonlight tour. Bowie and band set up camp at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, in Canada. The catapult into the stratosphere of superstardom, however, had come at a price in the form of Bowie feeling creatively bereft of ideas. It's not an uncommon situation for an artist, after a significant achievement, to find themselves at something of an impasse in terms of trying to come up with fresh inspirations. As a result, when it came to song writing, Bowie was simply not able to put up the goods when the time came, instead relying on close friend Iggy Pop to help bolster his efforts. Bowie wasn't even up for recording another album, initially proposing a live album following the tour, but his label were eager to keep the ball rolling from the momentum of the previous release. Leaning on Iggy made sense because Pop was struggling financially and the success of China Girl had given him a shot in the arm, so the duo were eager to work together more closely on the new album, solidifying their relationship while on a brief vacation together after the tour.

Production on the album would not, however, involve the return of Nile Rogers, who was the producer for Let's Dance. Instead, Bowie self-produced the album along with Derek Bramble. Bowie invited Bramble to Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, to record demos of his new material with a group of local Swiss musicians. The intent with the new album was to push further into the R&B, funk and reggae styles that had been explored on Let's Dance. According to biographer Chris O'Leary, musicians present at the Tonight sessions said the demos were "tremendous", describing them as "funky, raw, and full of promise". Once Bowie arrived at the studio in Canada, he came prepared with 8 of the album's 9 songs basically all worked out, something collaborator Carlos Alomar noted as surprising, given that he was used to Bowie coming to the studio with virtually nothing, in all the times he'd previously worked with him. It was an unusual case of being ahead of the game.

In terms of the writing, only two songs are credited to Bowie alone, with four tracks being Bowie/Pop compositions and the rest being covers of songs like Brian Wilson's God Only Knows, and one of Iggy's. Don't Look Down, from his New Values album. In a lot of ways, the album is like a return to the relationship Iggy and Bowie had while working on Pop's solo album come-backs in 1977, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Yet while the vibe may have echoed back to that classic Berlin era creative watershed, the results for Tonight were not nearly as satisfying.

Though the album was a commercial success, reaching number one in many key markets, critically it was met with a great deal of disdain, and remains considered one of Bowie's weakest albums. It was ultimately an album that Bowie was pushed into creating when he was not at all in a position to summon his full creative forces. He was depleted by the work on the previous album and a gruelling massive tour across the globe. It's entirely understandable that he'd need time to recharge, and regrettable that the industry would demand he keep producing new works when he was clearly in need of a respite. It's an album that would mark the turning point for Bowie as his career success hit its highest ebb. Not that he was out of the game after this, but he would certainly end up reevaluating his position after seeing his fortunes wane through the remainder of the decade.