Yes, I know, but it's not like he's going to be recording any new ones so it seemed like time I went in, just out of curiosity. After all, it might not be that bad.
Having been loyal to Bowie right up until Let's Dance, I spent most of the eighties looking in the other direction. It seemed as though he'd lost the plot from where I'd been standing, and I still loathe the plinky-plonky banality of ying-tong-iddle-I-China Girl, and it was surely only a matter of time before he turned up dressed as a foam rubber parrot on Celebrity It's a Knockout!
Anyway, I've grudgingly come to accept that I was wrong about Let's Dance - excepting Bowie's cover of Aneka's Japanese Boy - and I guess the same is true of this one, which is weird. I expected it to be worse, like Let's Dance with shoulder pads and blonde highlights instead of tunes. Firstly I should admit that both Blue Jean and Loving the Alien sounded all right as singles, even at the time, if admittedly not cut from quite the same cloth as Rebel Rebel or Drive-In Saturday. They've aged pretty well, particularly now that the glossy eighties production has begun to sound like a novel affectation rather than something from which there's no fucking escape. Loving the Alien actually comes surprisingly close to magnificent, particularly the Howard Goodall style staircase of ascending notes leading up to its suitably epic chorus.
The prosecution should probably also take into account that Bowie does cod reggae on this record, and twice, and one of those times in the company of his famous friend Tina Turner. It should be awful but somehow isn't, although I've never really had a problem with cod reggae, apart from finding it funny. It additionally provides a clue to why Tonight turned out as it did, at least once we take into account that it's produced by Hugh Padgham, father of the gated snare and other eighties crimes: Bowie wanted to be Sting.
Play Tonight enough and it sounds okay; another few days and it sounds decent once you've stopped noticing the haircuts and the jackets with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow; and by the end of the second week, it sounds better than either Low or Heroes, or if not better, at least like it had some idea of what the fuck it was doing.
Everything I've ever known is wrong.
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