Outside (David Bowie album)

Did You Know?

• Bowie formalised his marriage to model Iman in a June 1992 ceremony that featured Brian Eno, who expressed interest in working with Bowie again after hearing a tape of styles Bowie would explore on Black Tie White Noise.
• The Leon recordings, described by Gabrels as a three-hour improvised opus, are available through bootlegs in three separate suites, each between 22 and 27 minutes long.

Recording and production

Recording for Outside began in March 1994 at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. Production was handled by Bowie, Eno and David Richards, the co-producer of Never Let Me Down and The Buddha of Suburbia. Bowie and Eno were adamant about creating something different from the Berlin albums; Eno stated they did not want to make another record of a bunch of songs but rather a bigger landscape. Returning collaborators included Gabrels on guitar, Erdal Kızılçay on bass, and Mike Garson on piano, along with drummer Sterling Campbell. Departing from Bowie's recent works, most tracks were composed on the spot in the studio, some entirely improvised. Bowie and Eno used experimental techniques from the Berlin Trilogy sessions, such as Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, which contained written characters intended to spark creative ideas. Bowie elaborated that the cards set the tone for each day, taking the music into obscure directions. Garson and Gabrels responded favourably to the cards, but Kızılçay was opposed at first, finding them confusing and useless.

Concept and story

The foundation for Outside was laid on March 12, 1994, during a recording session Bowie described as "blindingly orgiastic." While the band improvised, he invented multiple characters on the fly, acting each one out for short bursts. He later said nearly the entire concept for the album came from those three and a half hours. Bowie called the result a "non-linear Gothic drama hyper-cycle" set in a society where "art crimes"—murder and mutilation performed for public entertainment—are common, and "concept muggings" have their own police unit funded by the "Arts Protectorate of London." In late 1994, Q magazine asked Bowie to keep a ten-day diary. Worried a straightforward account would be dull, he reworked his earlier Leon concept into the story that became the basis for the album: The Diary of Nathan Adler or the Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Belew. Influenced by Twin Peaks, the narrative takes place in the fictional Oxford Town, New Jersey, and features characters such as detective Nathan Adler, jeweler Ramona A. Stone, fourteen-year-old Baby Grace Blue, loner Algeria Touchshriek, outsider Leon Blank, informant Paddy, and the Artist/Minotaur. Bowie played every role, basing each one on himself.

Release

Without a label for the third time in three years, Outside's release was delayed while Bowie sought an American distributor. In June 1995, he signed with Virgin America Records, who allowed full creative control. Virgin also acquired rights to Bowie's work from Let's Dance to Tin Machine. In Britain, Bowie entered a new deal with BMG, affiliated with RCA Records. The lead single "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" was released on 11 September 1995, accompanied by a music video directed by Samuel Bayer that was initially banned from MTV due to provocative imagery; it peaked at number 35 in the UK and number 92 in the US. Outside was released on 25 September 1995 by Virgin America in the US and Arista, BMG and RCA in other territories on LP and CD. The CD release was the full 75-minute album; the LP was an abridged version titled Excerpts From 1. Outside. The Japanese CD included the outtake "Get Real". The cover artwork is a 1995 painting by Bowie called Head of DB. Commercially, Outside peaked at number 8 in the UK and number 21 in the US, becoming Bowie's fastest-selling album since Tonight due to advance orders.

Legacy

The story of Outside ends on a cliffhanger with a to be continued tagline. Bowie initially envisioned the album as the first in a series of records released each year until the end of the millennium, stating it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to chronicle the final five years of the millennium. He considered releasing a companion album and later revealed the follow-up would be called 2. Contamination, with sketched characters including some 17th-century people, and mentioned the possibility of an album called Inside about the making of Outside. None of these projects came to fruition; in 1999 The Onion posted a letter-writing campaign asking Bowie to complete the storyline. Following the Outside Tour, Bowie used musical ideas from Outside to create Earthling. In 2016, one day after Bowie's death, Eno recalled they had started talking about revisiting Outside about a year earlier. Later reviewers continue praising the music as challenging and innovative but find the story self-indulgent; Perone argues its nonlinear narrative makes for a hard-to-follow listening experience.