Tin Machine was David Bowie’s imperfect, individual indie revolution — the moment when he became truly free through making music.

★★★★☆

By December 1987, David Bowie was a wreck. The man once known as the Thin White Duke had become noticeably thinner throughout the course of the Glass Spider Tour he had begun at the end of May that year, a tour which became a byword for overblown pretentiousness. It left the singer, someone who had always walked the tightrope between commercial success and highbrow artistry, at a creative nadir. Carlos Alomar, Bowie’s long-time collaborator since the two had met in early 1974, reminisced about the Glass Spider Tour with laconic disdain: “I hated all that dancing and shit.”

Perhaps Bowie could justify the luridness of the previous six months or so to himself by pointing to his background in avant-garde dance but this preoccupation with choreographed, theatrical pop music led to numerous mishaps and controversies.

On 9th June 1987, one engineer for the tour fell to his death from the scaffolding in Florence’s Stadio Comunale whilst constructing the elaborate lighting for a show the following day. Another engineer was injured whilst building the set for a stadium show in Milan.

Bowie sang through a fog of tear gas to adoring fans in Rome as many were arrested and injured amidst rioting. Alomar himself was a casualty, tearing a ligament in his leg, forcing him onto a crutch and precipitating the change of his on-stage character to ‘a mad, limping Mad Max reject with spiky hair.’ Adding to the bizarreness, whilst rain-soaked punters threw cans of beer at each other at the Roker Park gig in Sunderland, royalty even showed up in the shape of the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson. The Berlin Trilogy this was not.

To top it all off, adding to the sleazy tenor of this annus horribilis was the accusation from a thirty-year-old woman that Bowie had raped her at a Dallas hotel on 9th October 1987. Photographs of bite marks were produced which were then splashed on the front covers of the British tabloids, as were the woman’s allegations that Bowie had deliberately infected her with AIDS, all this at the height of the AIDS scare, and after Bowie had publicly spoken (quite hypocritically, one might say) of the dangers of promiscuous, unprotected sex. Bowie admitted he had had sex with the woman in question but denied the allegations and agreed to an AIDS test — six weeks later a grand jury in Dallas threw out the woman’s case due to a lack of evidence. 1988 would be the first year since 1971 in which no David Bowie singles featured in the UK Top 40.

Into this crucible of self-parody, violence and uninhibited excess walked Reeves Gabrels, a guitarist from Staten Island. Bowie met Gabrels through the latter’s then-wife Sara Terry, who had worked on the press team for the North American leg of the ill-fated Glass Spider Tour. Initially, Bowie and Gabrels only had a social relationship through shared interests, with Gabrels later stating that he had felt it inappropriate to bring up his own musical career when talking to his wife’s boss. At the end of Glass Spider, Bowie asked Terry if there was anything he could do for her, so she sent him a tape of Gabrels’s guitar work to listen to. A few months went by, and after listening to the tape, Bowie contacted Gabrels and proposed the two collaborate.

The next stage in the genesis of a band came when Bowie remembered an old friend he had bumped into at a Glass Spider Tour wrap party in LA. By the late ‘80s, Cleveland-born bassist Tony Sales had a pretty impressive CV, having worked with Todd Rundgren, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, Bob Welch of Fleetwood Mac fame, and founding member of Free, Andy Fraser among others.

Bowie and Sales had crossed paths in 1977 during sessions for Iggy Pop’s most commercially successful record to date, Lust for Life. Tony’s brother Hunt Sales had drummed for Pop on this album and the two brothers were regular collaborators, providing a killer rhythm section which many readers will have heard from Lust for Life’s eponymous opening track, with its Morse code intro as drums and then bass fade in. Maybe this chance encounter reminded Bowie of the dizzying artistic heights he had reached in Berlin working with such esteemed company as Iggy Pop, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. Whatever the reason, Bowie got in touch with Tony Sales and persuaded him to get his brother on board for a new project with the then-unknown Reeves Gabrels.

“Their attitude was kind of ‘He’s David Bowie, we’re the Sales brothers, who the fuck are you?’” is how Gabrels summed up the initial meeting of the band that would become Tin Machine. Though the guitarist said he was unconstrained by his lack of commercial success, there was surely at least some trepidation. After all, this was a man who had been traipsing around Oxford Circus offering guitar lessons until a phone call one evening from David Bowie, who Gabrels initially thought was a friend pranking him. Gabrels was against the idea of a permanent band anyway, having little desire to be in close quarters with the ‘crazy and wild’ Sales brothers who were known for smashing up hotel rooms and the like. Bowie himself didn’t expect the band to gel quite so well as it eventually did, particularly given he had never wanted to be in a democratic band format, having always been a solo artist with a rotating cast of backing musicians. As for the Sales brothers, they weren’t in the market to be anyone’s backing band. 

One day, early in the formation of the band, Bowie came into the studio and said, “I think this has got to be a band. Everybody’s got input. Everybody’s writing. You guys don’t listen to me anyway.” Profits and interviews were to be split four ways, no one had a salary and each member had to pay their own expenses. “Inspired guesswork” is how the singer described his choice of band members and the ease with which they clicked. Gabrels had it down to the others treating him as an equal regardless of his lack of commercial success: “They realised that they could push me to the limit and I could give that shit right back to them. And for me, that’s when it became a band.” When mooting a band name, some truly strange candidates were floated, including ‘Leather Weasel’, ‘Alimony Inc.’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘White Noise’, before they finally settled on Tin Machine, for lack of a better name. 

The band’s self-titled debut album was recorded in a frenetic audio verité style, in a series of sessions in Mountain Studios, Switzerland and Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas throughout late 1988 and early 1989. This breakneck pace set by the band, organised ably by producer Tim Palmer, led to 35 songs being recorded over the course of six weeks. The improvisational garage-style favoured by the Sales brothers had the effect of breaking Bowie out of the straitjacket of commercial and artistic perfectionism. Tracks were laid down with as few overdubs as possible, and Bowie’s bandmates insisted he did not re-write lyrics, a decision which would prove to be something of a double-edged sword.

The opening track, Heaven’s in Here, was the first track the band wrote and recorded, laying the finished product down in 30 hours. Opening with a jangly guitar riff and driven by the harsh drumming of Hunt Sales and jazzy bass of Tony Sales, Bowie delivers his suggestive vocals with a lithe worldliness before bursting into the climax of the song: “You’ll dance to my tongue / We’ll dance on the sun / We’re the twilight and stars / There’s heaven in here.” Bowie’s voice is transformed into something much more aggressive and this is far more in line with the cacophonous, organised mayhem his bandmates produce. As an opening statement, the track sets the tone for any listener that the days of the Glass Spider Tour are long gone.

In a brutal iteration of the band theme song concept, track two, Tin Machine, is like listening to Hey Hey We’re The Monkees, if The Monkees had been depressed, middle-aged guys with drug habits. Into the maelstrom of wailing guitars and repetitive crashing noise provided by Gabrels and the Saleses respectively, Bowie hurls a collage of raging imagery: “Working whores humping Tories / Spittle on their chins / Carving up my children’s future / Read ‘em pal and grin.” This isn’t his finest hour lyrically but then it’s difficult enough to make out what the words actually are anyway.

Prisoner of Love, the record’s third offering, is a steep improvement upon the previous track. Bowie bemoans how he is “a victim of my own self-persecution” but there are still unedited lines that catch in the ear like “don’t be fooled by fools who promise you…” The music is a solid rhythmic platform upon which to give a tour-de-force of what Reeves Gabrels is capable of. Bluesy verses bloom into bridges and choruses through which the guitarist meanders and showcases a real virtuosity – the frequent comparisons to Hendrix are entirely warranted, but this track has the air more of Thurston Moore. The bluesiness is coupled with Gabrels’s use of discordant waves of sound, a style his friends jokingly called “modal chromaticism, which is ‘any note you want as long as you end on a right note’.”

Track four, Crack City, is a dark musing on the effects of drugs and it’s something of a low point for the first half of the album. The words aren’t in any way clever, and the music is pedestrian, but one can only hope Bowie used tracks like this as a form of catharsis after the previous few years of stagnation. It’s almost difficult to believe the band picked this as one of the best out of the thirty-odd songs recorded, and as another of the singer’s forays into political commentary it has little subtlety. In any case, if this is one of the weakest tracks on the album, it sets up the following as one of the strongest.

A snarling, dissonant and unsettling track, I Can’t Read is the album’s grim apotheosis. Bowie half-laments, half-deadpans ‘I can’t read and I can’t write down’ autobiographically as a washed-up musician with writer’s block and sounds truly exhausted with pop stardom when he quotes Warhol rhetorically: “Andy where’s my fifteen minutes?” Musically, the song is a jarring and disorientating cauldron of noise. Throughout the verses, Gabrels draws wailing, stricken cries of anguish out of his guitar, bursting into major chord fruition in the choruses. Tony Sales peppers the track with twinkles of incongruous notes played near the bridge of his bass guitar whilst his brother drives the beat like a forlorn death march. Bowie sounds like a broken man – the unexpected shift from minor to major key in the chorus (a theme throughout the album) gives the vocals a sense of sarcastic self-loathing and as the track fades, he lets out a series of disturbing screams. This song sounds like the man at rock bottom, yet Bowie describes it as his favourite from the album, reworking it for later tours and keeping it to minor key throughout.

Under the God, the sixth track on the album is a raucous, foot-stomping political commentary of late ‘80s America. Bowie decrying skinheads “beating on blacks with a baseball bat” must be seen in the context of his cocaine-fuelled descent into stupidity in the mid-seventies, in which he made statements in praise of fascism. Such comments were among those made by major artists (including Eric Clapton) which precipitated the advent of Rock Against Racism in 1976, when the National Front was on the march in the UK, attacking ethnic minorities. Given this background, Under the God feels preachy and disingenuous, and the catchy riff sounds very similar to I Wish You Would by The Yardbirds, a song Bowie had covered on 1973’s Pin-Ups. Nevertheless, it’s still very listenable and one of the better attempts at straight rock music on the record.

Amazing, the most overtly melody-driven song on Tin Machine, is a welcome respite from some of the half-baked lyrics on the first side. A love song with much-needed nuance, given the declarative songs it rubs shoulders with, Bowie sings of a woman who fills his life with joy, but at the same time, he worries she’ll leave him for someone who she can have a deeper emotional connection with. Gabrels makes the track his own, adding some stunning guitar licks which he improvises from an ascending E major scale played on the low strings of the guitar; giving a thick, uplifting effect to balance the distortion. A standout song, even if it defies the noise-rock, audio verité leitmotiv of the album, Amazing shows a multi-faceted edge to Tin Machine that should have been coaxed out a little more.

An interesting fact about this album is that one of the personalities who stuck around during recording was a young Sean Lennon. Presumably familiar through Bowie’s friendship with his late father, Lennon could be found taking guitar lessons from Reeves Gabrels during sessions and was present at the first private listening of the record given to the press, where he was noticed by a journalist as ‘an oriental youth’ whom Bowie would step out to play pool with.

One of Bowie’s favourite John Lennon tracks lyrically speaking was Working Class Hero from 1970’s Plastic Ono Band. On Tin Machine, Bowie and his comrades take what was a dreary, bitter rant which Lennon inexplicably claimed he didn’t write for ‘tarts and fags’ and galvanise it into an angry and defiant indictment of classism. The Saleses militaristic, gut-busting rhythm is a stark improvement on the flat acoustic sound of the original, Gabrels’s searing guitar carves through the song like El Lissitzky’s Red Wedge and Bowie croons, growls and cries out his vocals with the air of a man plucked from working-class Brixton who’s somehow found his way to international fame and isn’t always sure he likes it. The immediate comparison is to early Gang of Four and The Clash, and for readers not entirely sold on noise and garage rock, this cover is an excellent place to get into Tin Machine.

Unfortunately, the album makes a sharp decline after this high point. Bus Stop is a slice of music hall-accented throwaway nonsense that recalls the worst of Bowie’s earliest music. Pretty Thing is a one-dimensional hard rock track with gauche, Red Hot Chilli Peppers lyrics: “Oh you pretty thing / Feel that pretty thing / Suck that pretty thing.” The music makes the song listenable if you don’t listen to the words too closely. Video Crimes sounds like some more work could elevate it beyond the demo purgatory it sounds as though it has been frozen in; the open-ended lyrics suit the collage of sound which acts as a canvas for the vocals but there is a distinct lack of dynamism and melody. Run features some gorgeous lines like the opening verse: “Wish I were a sailor / Crossing an azure sea / Under leaden skies / Under your eyes.” There’s some light and dark in terms of a crescendo at the end of the track as Bowie sounds increasingly desperate in his vocals but there’s a strong sense that the album is running out of steam by this point.

Sacrifice Yourself, the penultimate track, epitomises this feeling. What more is there to say about a track with the lyrics: “Some days he feels so empty / Just a talking head / Married to a Klingon / Who would cream him in the press” and which is rushed through in just over two minutes? The final track, Baby Can Dance, is the logical conclusion to the album’s overextension. Where Sacrifice Yourself feels throwaway at two minutes, Baby Can Dance feels bloated at five. By this point, the music sounds stale and Bowie often barely utters the asinine lyrics which, when one considers the vocal ability of a man who can climb a full octave in a single three-syllable word on Giorgio Moroder’s arrangement of Cat People, feels an abject case of profligacy.

So, what can one say about this experiment in unadulterated artistry over commercialism? Contemporary reception was hesitantly encouraging, with critics praising Bowie’s bandmates as equalling or even surpassing the star singer and positive comparisons being made to his earlier work. Commercially, the album was quite successful, outdoing Bowie’s last solo album Never Let Me Down by hitting Number 3 in the UK and Number 28 in the US. This is all the more impressive when one considers that the album was a deliberate attempt to eschew commercial success and was released by EMI with no suggestion that it was a Bowie album. Press interviews were conducted as a band, Bowie’s name being featured alongside the other band members in the album notes, and the singer features as just another guy in a suit on the cover art, a picture of the foursome that looks like a shot from the as yet unmade Reservoir Dogs. Bowie even sported an uncharacteristic beard at the time, presumably as yet another attempt to disguise and distance himself from the past. The result was like seeing a young Clint Eastwood in a rock band.

The first thing to be said about Tin Machine musically is that the album explores territory which was still terra nullius in 1989. Much of the album sounds far ahead of its time, anticipating the grunge wave of the early to mid-‘90s. Tin Machine were in rare company indeed in this sense – the influence of acts like Green River, the Pixies, Sonic Youth and Neil Young on what became known as grunge are well documented but Tin Machine’s place in this pantheon is not mentioned nearly as often. On the one hand, lacking the punk tenor of Green River, the dynamism of the Pixies, the frantic pace of late ‘80s Sonic Youth or the songwriter pedigree of Neil Young, Tin Machine were a different beast, with their musical genealogy traceable to the blues, albeit barely discernibly. That said, Amazing could conceivably have been written by Neil Young, I Can’t Read wouldn’t sound out of place on a Sonic Youth record, and the Sales brothers’ rhythmic instincts (when not reined in by Gabrels and Bowie) have much in common with the energy of Green River and the shift from loud mayhem to quiet contemplation which is the Pixies’ hallmark. 

Perhaps the best proof of Tin Machine’s influence on nineties rock music can be found in how it was received by its peers. Brian Eno’s quip that, “Whilst The Velvet Underground and Nico only sold 30,000 copies, everyone who bought one started a band” is seen as a yardstick for that album’s success. While the same cannot necessarily be said of Tin Machine, it is significant that Tim Palmer, the album’s producer, was among those first approached by Nirvana to produce what became their 1991 hit album Nevermind. Whilst that collaboration never materialised, Palmer did mix Pearl Jam’s debut Ten, as well as several other grunge and indie albums by Mother Love Bone, The Cure, Sponge, Wire Train, James, Catherine Wheel and many more throughout the nineties. According to Gabrels, Palmer walked into the studio one day during sessions for Ten, and Pearl Jam were playing Heaven’s In Here.

With his muse gradually reasserting itself, Bowie went on his Sound + Vision tour in 1990, promising to retire his back catalogue, though this didn’t come to pass. Gabrels took over as interim creative lead for Tin Machine and the band released one more album, Tin Machine II, to far more negative reception than its predecessor. Tours followed, as did the horrifically named Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby, before the band dissolved in 1992 as suddenly as it had coalesced, having run its course. Gabrels remembers Bowie had a rejection letter for his now-acclaimed 1977 album Low from RCA Records on his wall, claiming that “They might hate this band now, but in twenty years they’re going to love it!” This prediction about the shifting sands of critical and commercial appreciation is difficult to apply to Tin Machine, with Blender magazine rating the band among the Top 50 Worst Artists in Music back in 2004, whilst many critics, fans and musicians have come to reappraise the band more favourably.

The most salient point about the artistic laboratory that was Tin Machine is that none of it would’ve happened had Bowie not become so enmeshed within the constraints of the ‘pop musician’ label. In danger of fading into the middle of the road comfort blanket arguably embraced by some of his contemporaries (Rod Stewart, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and Phil Collins have all been branded with the dreaded MOR label, with varying degrees of fairness), Bowie was rejuvenated by the Tin Machine experiment, crediting it with saving his career as it wiped the slate clean in terms of expectations. Gabrels went on to collaborate with Bowie on the latter’s solo work as guitarist and co-producer for the rest of the nineties, wading through genres as diverse as acid jazz, art rock, electronic, industrial, and soul before the two parted ways.

Tin Machine, then, is a rare thing – it is a record made by a musician with all the experience of commercial success, without any of the restraints of that status. By no means perfect, yet at the same time compelling to listen to, it symbolises the drive within a musician to follow one’s artistic vision when the addictive Pandora’s box of financial success has already been opened. It is one of those precious few records that can be found lurking in the back catalogues of successful ‘pop’ musicians which, in its deliberate attempt to ignore mainstream success and willingness to experiment with words and sounds (rightly or wrongly), embodies the spirit of indie music in its marshalling of the massive resources of the musical-industrial complex and completely subverting the rationale behind that industry. For that alone, Tin Machine should be compulsory listening, as it is the work of an artist who became truly free again through making music.