Product Description

Following the enormous success of the vibrant and upbeat LET'S DANCE, David Bowie's follow-up TONIGHT was a slicker yetmore enigmatic-sounding collection. Full of synthesizers and polite Arif Mardin arrangements, this record allowed Bowieto indulge himself, even if that meant not putting out LET'S DANCE II. Three songs were resurrected from the '70s Iggy Pop catalogue and another newer one was co-written with Pop ("Dancing With The Big Boys".) A 1977 Pop song was used as the title track, on which Bowie duetted with Tina Turner (whowas in the middle of a comeback herself) and turned it intoa reggae-flavoured love song. Elsewhere, the Thin White Duke paid tribute to the Beach Boys by covering "God Only Knows" and scored a hit with "Blue Jean", which was turned into athen-radical mini-film/music video.

Track Listing

1. Loving the Alien
2. Don't Look Down
3. God Only Knows
4. Tonight
5. Neighborhood Threat
6. Blue Jean
7. Tumble and Twirl
8. I Keep Forgettin'
9. Dancing With the Big Boys

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12278 in Music
• Released on: 1999-09-20
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Bowie loses the plot
Official - this is Bowie's worst album. Blue Jean and Loving The Alien are superb, but these tracks can be listened to on numerous Bowie compilations. The rest of the album comprises of past Iggy Pop/Bowie collaborations and a couple of truly awful cover versions - God Only Knows indeed! Even Bowie distances himself from this album and the follow-up Never Let Me Down.

Tonight: What Ed thinks
If this was graded as an exam paper, it would get a D+ or maybe a C-. What we get is a lot of filler (more cover versions that any other Bowie album since PinUps). Three tracks are all you need take from this: the one true good song on the album, 'Loving the alien', and the other 2 singles: Tonight (Iggy Pop) and 'Blue Jean', which is OK as far as mid '80s pap goes. Overall I'm with the other reviewers who don't rate this collection that highley. To be honest, go and listen to something better.

Life's too short to bother listening to the 23rd best David Bowie album....
Rating: 2.5/10

Best songs: "Blue Jean", "Loving the Alien"

Urgh, what happened? I can't even say that Tonight is worth purchasing on the strength of its best songs, as they are easily available on many a Bowie retrospective. Okay, so Let's Dance was the weakest Bowie album for over a decade, but it was still pretty good (its first side was terrific in fact), while Tonight was tragic evidence that the 1970's brightest artistic light had well and truly run out of ideas and was seriously slumming it. Tonight is the first album of Bowie's that doesn't feel like a proper album at all, more a sloppy compilation of half-hearted recordings, too many of which are sub-par covers.

Of course, the presence of a genuinely sparkling cover version on a Bowie album was the norm on most of his 1970's output (although tellingly, his most creative period from 1977-1979 featured no cover versions at all) and he even recorded a whole album of them with 1973's Pin-Ups, but I get the feeling that the decision to work with other people's (including his own on two Bowie/Iggy Pop-penned examples) material on Tonight was less to do with the desire to re-interpret than the fact that he just didn't have enough fresh material of his own.

Still, at least opening song "Loving the Alien" at least keeps any fear at bay - it's very much of its time (and Bowie seemed to acknowledge this, performing an almost apologetic stripped-down acoustic version on his Reality tour back in 2003), but it made for a fine, dramatic single - however, it's the shorter single mix which I find more effective than the slightly overlong version here, but I'm not going to rip too much into it - compared to most of what else is here, "Loving the Alien" in any version is positively glorious. "Don't Look Down" is, on one level, thoroughly depressing - Bowie appears to have lost all identity, content to become another past-it rock star happy to let fashion and expensive studios do all the work for him....it's all just so OKAY, professionally performed, sleek, slick, ever-so-slightly sterile, but taken on its own, I suppose it's reasonably enjoyable reggae-lite fare, with some nice synthesisers here and there.

The ghastly, insincere cover of The Beach Boys' superlative "God Only Knows", which has some rent-an-orchestra showering bathos over a sub-par karaoke vocal (one of Bowie`s worst ever), has rightfully been dismissed as one of lousiest tracks on any Bowie album ever. Only slightly less painful but pretty damn awful is the title track, which is a cover of the astonishingly powerful song of the same name from Iggy Pop's Lust for Life album, and all the drama, tension, fear, horror, beauty and impact of the original has been entirely obliterated in a wretched wave of dull faux-reggae and pointless guest vocals from Tina Turner. Oh yes, and there's horns. Tonight is definitely Bowie's `horniest' album, and the horns don't just blow here, they suck too. A slightly better Pop cover arrives next with "Neighbourhood Threat", which was also on Lust for Life - it's not up to the original, but at least it's got some punch, especially with that guitar hook.

"Blue Jean" is the kind of the song that Tonight needed much, much more of. It's so good you feel sorry for its presence, surrounded by so much trash. This is one of Bowie's most overlooked singles, precisely because it's so throwaway, it's a brilliant bit of bubblegum, it sounds great, has a fun verse, an even more fun chorus, and at three perfect minutes, it doesn't outstay its welcome. Top stuff! The last three tracks are all filler- you wonder what Bowie was thinking, cruising his way through such empty, anonymous, forgettable material.

Now, on a closing note, I know that it's very fa-fa-fa-fashionable to deride everything Bowie gave us after Scary Monsters - after all, it was after that album that he essentially ceased to be a force to be truly reckoned with. However, some of his post-1980 work stands up very well; he's done some great albums and songs since 1980 - it's up to you to appreciate the likes of Outside, Earthling, Heathen, etc, for what they are in themselves, not in comparison to what's come before. I guess what I'm trying to say is - the main reason Tonight is a failure is less to do with the fact that it doesn't match up to Bowie's golden years period, but mainly because most of the songs are crap. Simple as that.