Jonh Wilde - Tin Machine - Tin Machine II - Melody Maker - August 31 1991

 

Apparently there is a new documentary on David Bowie - I think it's about the later years of his life, making a case for his continued creativity - and at one point, they present the journalist who wrote the brutal take-down above with his own words. Which he hadn't seen in decades.  Startled by the disrespect to the (inter)national treasure and immortal icon, he recants it. Or at least expresses regret for the harshness.

I dunno, though...  there's a certain zesty vehemence to the way the verdict is handed down, but I can't actually see anything inaccurate about the points made. 

File under: "right-footed in real-time". 

I get it - I've certainly winced now and then at some of my more savage reviews from back in the day...  

Yet while the task of demolition might have been gone about with an unseemly exuberance, invariably the reason for the demolition stands. 

I also think (having received some bad reviews over the years, nasty missives to the readers' letters page, plus the sort of bizarre aspersions and attributions of motives that pop up in the channels of  online chatter) that if you put yourself in the public eye or public ear, you kind of have to take your lumps... 

Here's what I wrote about Bowie's Tin Machine phase in the Aftershocks section of Shock and Awe: 

1989, May 

The Eighties started out looking like they were going to be the Bowie Decade, both in its terms of his own full-spectrum dominance (album sales and tours, but also starring film roles like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and acclaimed Broadway roles like The Elephant Man) and his influence being legion. But by the mid-decade point, it all went very wrong: Tonight, the Live Aid “Dancing In the Street” video team-up with Jagger, the  preposterously overblown Glass Spider tour, Never Let Me Down, the flop Jim Henson movie Labyrinth.... Bowie later recalled being unhappy and directionless for much of the late Eighties, while his friend Julien Temple spoke of the singer’s struggle with the “grueling nature of reinvention... the huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically.”

Bowie-ism itself has gone out of style, with a shift towards underground rock and anti-glamour. Bowie’s antennae, sharp as ever, detect this. Although he has sometimes mocked the notion of himself as a chameleon – pointing out that the lizard changes colour to be inconspicuous, to not stand out from their surroundings: hardly Bowie’s M/O or desire! –  “chameleonic” fits what he does when he forms Tin Machine. Influenced by alt-rock groups like Pixies and Sonic Youth, who’d been developing the template for what would later reach the mainstream as grunge, Bowie subsumes himself for the first time within the band format.  Tin Machine, at least in theory, is a democracy:  on the self-titled debut’s front, Bowie appears as just one bloke among four equals. The album is recorded live, with no overdubs,  a raw blast of guitar, bass, drums and voice, that is intended - says guitarist Reeves Gabrels - as a two-finger gesture to all that dance crap on the radio. Tin Machine songs are “screaming at the world”, adds Gabrels  - and note how the interviews pointedly involve the entire band, not just the star front man. In another first, Bowie grows a beard – a sign of the coming times, anticipating the facial hair soon to be rife among alt-rock and grunge bands.

I seem to remember one of my colleagues getting the chance to interview Bowie for the first time off the back of that debut Tin Machine album. Finally a chance to meet the hero of his youth!  And then, he told us  bitterly, he was ushered into the record company conference room and found Bowie flanked by the other three members of Tin Machine. How his heart sank! He'd dreamed of a tête-à-tête with the most fascinating man in all of rock. Instead, there was he was, sat on one side of  the conference table, Bowie deferentially letting his colleagues speak, Reeves Gabrels expatiating about guitar sounds... 

On the cover, not only is it not just Bowie's face on the front  - as it was with all his previous album covers - but he is the smallest and furthest back figure.  The suits and ties don't look very alt-rock admittedly.  But the Julien Temple megamix promo film above does show "audience members" jumping onstage and diving off again at one point, which does seem like an attempt to reposition DB with the young thing. Also struck by the fact that Tin Machine played Town and Country Club - i.e. the sort of venue the likes of Pixies and Loop would play - and much smaller than the kind of venue Bowie could command normally. 

I suppose the parallel work at that time to Tin Machine / Tin Machine II -  elders trying to get with the young thing - would be Achtung Baby.  After the debacle (not commercially but in terms of credibility as well as quality) that was Rattle and Hum, U2 had a major rethink and an aesthetic refueling / reorientation. And apparently what they listened to was things like The Young Gods and My Bloody Valentine  - i.e. the Maker canon.   

In fact, here is an Eno quote about the self-induced transvaluation U2 underwent:

"Buzzwords on this record were trashy, throwaway, dark, sexy, and industrial (all good) and earnest, polite, sweet, righteous, rockist and linear (all bad). It was good if a song took you on a journey or made you think your hifi was broken, bad if it reminded you of recording studios or U2. Sly Stone, T. Rex, Scott Walker, My Bloody Valentine, KMFDM, the Young Gods, Alan Vega, Al Green, and Insekt were all in favour. And Berlin ... became a conceptual backdrop for the record. The Berlin of the Thirties—decadent, sexual and dark—resonating against the Berlin of the Nineties—reborn, chaotic and optimistic ..."

Now, who the fuck were Insekt? I have always wondered that and have never thought to find out!

Also "rockist" as a no-no? You can't get more rockist - in the sense of exulting-in-guitar, than MBV or The Young Gods (albeit in their case done through sampling punk and metal riffs)... Alan Vega is pure rock'n'roll: Elvis filtered thru Iggy..  T. Rex is the eternal spirit-sprite of rock'n'roll.,, 

But I get what Eno means - U2 were rejecting a certain kind of rockism prevalent in the compact-disc Eighties: that godawful Robbie Robertson album (that now I think about it he made with Daniel Lanois), the comeback of John Fogerty, Dire Straits's Brothers In Arms...  with Achtung, they were jettisoning all that rootsy, bluesy, Memphis-invoking bollocks that infused Rattle.

But U2 being rockers (and rockist) at core far more than Bowie ever was, on Achtung they managed to pull it off handsomely. 

I wonder if it was galling for DB to see U2 scoring hits and plaudits having done such a similar move to what he'd attempted on the two Tin Machines...