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.
