Never Let Me Down

Did You Know?

• EMI compiled a compilation of 12″ mixes from Let's Dance and Tonight following Bowie's successful performance at Live Aid in 1985, titled Dance, which reached the artwork stage before being shelved.
• In Australia, the album appeared on blue vinyl and in Japan, a Japanese vocal version of the outtake "Girls" was included.

Writing and recording

In mid-1986, David Bowie was at his Swiss home writing songs with Iggy Pop. He purchased a Fostex 16-track recorder and an AHB mixing console to create detailed home demos, first recording them with Erdal Kızılçay before assembling a full band. Bowie admired Kızılçay's versatility, saying he could move from violin to trumpet to French horn and vibes, and that his rock knowledge was limited to the Beatles while his real strength was jazz. Kızılçay handled keyboards and synthesizers during the sessions, and according to biographer Chris O'Leary, he supplied whatever sound Bowie asked for. Unlike the Tonight sessions, Bowie encouraged collaboration this time, aiming for improved versions of his home demos. Recording for Never Let Me Down ran from September to November 1986, starting at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, and finishing at the Power Station in New York City. Bowie co-produced the album with David Richards, who had co-produced Blah-Blah-Blah with him and previously engineered "Heroes." Bob Clearmountain, the engineer on Let's Dance, returned for this album; Bowie credited him with its strong sound. Regular collaborators from Tonight came back: guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist Carmine Rojas, and the Borneo Horns saxophone group. Peter Frampton, a former schoolmate of Bowie's, joined on lead guitar after Bowie heard his 1986 record Premonition. Bowie said he had always wanted to work with Frampton, impressed by his guitar skills at school. Frampton played on all tracks except three; Sid McGinnis, occasionally from David Letterman's band, handled lead guitar on "Day-In Day-Out," "Time Will Crawl," and a cover of Iggy Pop's "Bang Bang." For the first time since Scary Monsters, Bowie played instruments beyond vocals, contributing keyboards, synthesizer, and rhythm guitar on some songs, and playing lead guitar on "New York's in Love" and "87 and Cry." The band worked from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Kızılçay recalled Bowie being very disciplined and constantly experimenting.

Songs

Critics have described the sound of Never Let Me Down as pop rock, art rock, and hard rock. Bowie himself said the album’s musical styles reflected the different approaches he had taken over the years, and he compared its sound to Scary Monsters rather than his more recent work, calling it a mix of long-standing influences and personal nostalgia. A Canadian Press writer at the time called it straightforward, high-energy guitar rock, a shift away from his adventurous late-1970s material and the R&B-influenced Let’s Dance. Biographer Paul Trynka noted that the record mostly sticks to conventional music, lyrics, and sounds. The opening track, “Day-In Day-Out,” comments on how homeless people were treated in Los Angeles. Author James E. Perone sees it as a strong example of Bowie trying out R&B. “Time Will Crawl” was inspired by the Chernobyl disaster and the idea that someone from your own neighborhood could cause the end of the world. Bowie compared his vocal on that song to Neil Young’s style and said the different voices he used throughout the album were a nod to his past influences. He called “Beat of Your Drum” a Lolita song, a reflection on young girls, adding, “Christ, she’s only 14 years old, but jail’s worth it!” Biographer Nicholas Pegg, who considered it one of the album’s better tracks, said it was a direct ancestor, both lyrically and musically, of Tin Machine’s “You Belong in Rock n’ Roll” from 1991. Perone found it similar to the contemporary techno trend, with punk rock influences as well.

Legacy

Never Let Me Down has remained a target of criticism over the years, widely regarded as one of David Bowie's weakest albums. Many reviewers have compared it unfavorably to Tonight. In the 2010s, critic Charles Shaar Murray described Never Let Me Down as "just awful" next to Tonight, which he called a record of "classy filler with no center." Rob Sheffield of The Rolling Stone Album Guide wrote that Tonight was an expensive quickie filled with weak covers, and that Never Let Me Down worsened things with its original songs. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic found Never Let Me Down more interesting but less consistent than Tonight. Looking back at the 2018 remaster, critic O'Leary noted that despite its flaws, the album has a certain unity and now feels like a charming period piece, one of the most time-stamped records of 1987. In 2019, Patrick Moran of Ultimate Classic Rock argued that Never Let Me Down is far from the worst album Bowie released between Let's Dance and Outside, though it remains among his weakest. He called it an undigested mix of ideas, time signatures, and grooves that never fully comes together, but acknowledged it contains a handful of tracks that blend commercial and experimental elements, a hallmark of Bowie's best work.

Never Let Me Down 2018

Bowie first floated the idea of redoing tracks from Never Let Me Down soon after he met guitarist Reeves Gabrels in the late 1980s, but Gabrels convinced him not to. He returned to the thought in the 1990s and again in 2008, when he had engineer Mario J. McNulty remix the song "Time Will Crawl" for his personal compilation iSelect. That same mix later turned up on the 2014 anthology Nothing Has Changed. Around that time, Bowie remarked, "Oh, to redo the rest of that album." After Bowie's death in 2016, the Parlophone label finally made it happen as part of a box set covering his 1980s work. In early 2018, musicians including Gabrels, David Torn, Sterling Campbell, Tim Lefebvre, Nico Muhly and Laurie Anderson began recording at New York's Electric Lady Studios from January through March. Bowie himself had selected Torn, Campbell, Lefebvre and Gabrels for the project before he died. In July 2018, the label announced a new version called Never Let Me Down 2018, released that October within the box set Loving the Alien (1983–1988). The album also featured newly remixed artwork and previously unseen photos from the original photo shoot.

McNulty drew on his experience with the "Time Will Crawl" remix to guide his production. He got the master tapes from the label and preserved all of Bowie's vocals, some original acoustic guitars, and any distinctive elements—like Carlos Alomar's rhythm guitar on the title track and Peter Frampton's sitar on "Zeroes." He sent rough mixes, or stems, to each musician as a starting point, along with suggestions for what to record. The musicians recorded their parts separately, rarely together in the studio, though Torn and Gabrels did share a session for one day. McNulty swapped out all the drum machines for live drumming by Sterling Campbell. For "Day-In Day-Out," he discovered that Bowie had originally recorded the Borneo Horns playing live but later replaced them with synthesized horns. McNulty restored the live horns in the new version, which he described as having "one foot in the past and another in the present." He noted the challenge: "Most of the lyrics are quite dark, but everything else about it is almost uplifting. ... I just thought, 'It makes sense to do something bright.'"