Stephen Holland - Multimedia Journalist

  The Bowie Project – Back Tie White Noise (1993) In 1990, David Bowie met Iman Abdulmajid on a blind date set up by their mutual hairdresser Teddy Antolin, Bowie stated that it was love at first sight and his attraction to her “was immediate and all-encompassing” adding “I couldn’t sleep for the excitement of our first date. That she would be my wife, in my head, it was a done deal. I’d never gone after anything with such passion in all my life.” At the time Bowie was finishing up work on his band Tin Machine’s second album. That record was released to crickets and apathy, the band toured the album and then due to numerous factors including drug addiction within the group, they split up for good. On April 24, 1992 Bowie married Iman in a private ceremony in Lausanne, Switzerland. Later that month the newlyweds witness the 1992 Los Angeles Riots after a jury acquits four police officers from LAPD charged with excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. This would all ...

The Bowie Project #21 - Tin Machine II (1991) Tin Machine was a band formed by David Bowie in 1988 at a point when he felt he was at a creative low and wanted to revitalise himself artistically. In 1989, they released their first album to mixed reviews but many critics have since stated the band were exploring a grunge influenced sound before that style had reached a mainstream audience. In 1990, the went on a hiatus while Bowie went on his Sound+Vision world tour which he said he was contractually obliged by his record label EMI to do. This was a greatest hits tour featuring almost all of his biggest songs and he said that once it was over he would retire those tracks and focus on performing new music, hoping to shed his past and no longer have to rely on his biggest successes. Many of the songs performed on the tour were decided by a telephone poll and mail-in ballot where fans would call the number 1-900-2-BOWIE-90 to request songs. Money earned from these calls were donated to ...

The Bowie Project #20 – Tin Machine (1989) In 1987, David Bowie’s latest album, Never Left Me Down , and the subsequent elaborate Glass Spider Tour that promoted it, left critics unimpressed and in the court of public opinion the enigmatic artist, who just a few short years before could do no wrong, was now decidedly in danger of becoming uncool, a throwback to an earlier era, desperately trying to fit in amongst the zeitgeist of the late 1980s. Even Bowie himself was admitting that he had started making music with an imagined audience in mind, he was no longer producing for himself but instead to try appeasing the masses. This was no good, Bowie had long made a reputation for himself as someone who pushed the boundaries, who never stood still, who was constantly changing and transforming. But now, he was feeling a creative deficit, he knew he needed to do something to kick start his passion once again, and to do this he wanted to collaborate, to take a step out of the limelight and ...

The Bowie Project #19 – Never Let Me Down (1987) Never Let Me Down is David Bowie’s 17th studio album, it was released on April 20th, 1987, and is widely regarded as one of the weakest releases in Bowie’s entire catalogue. It sheds the reggae influence of his last album, Tonight , and instead focuses on a mix of pop art and hard rock sounds. In terms of being dated it is firmly a product of its time, it sounds just like it came out in 1987, and in later years Bowie expressed serious disappointment with the production and sound of the record. After a couple of years of floundering this was intended to a return to form for the former Ziggy Stardust, instead of a collection of repurposed content and cover songs like his last album Bowie really was giving it his all again in terms of songwriter and a genuine desire for experimentation, but unfortunately all that valour gets lost amid an overly produced record. It’s like hidden underneath the surface there is a really great album here bu...

The Bowie Project #18 – Labyrinth (1986) In the midst of David Bowie’s 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour the enigmatic rock star had a meeting with legendary American puppeteer and inventor of the Muppets Jim Henson. To understand why we must first understand what it is the Muppet mastermind was working on. Henson had been collaborating with conceptual designer Brian Froud on a children’s movie idea, initially the only thing they were sure about was that they wanted it to feature goblins and a baby. Before too long a script was developed which featured a main antagonist, Jared the Goblin King, an unusual shape shifting villain with a long layered blonde mullet who dresses in outlandish outfits and wears sparkly eye makeup. The character exudes charisma and unusually for kids film aggressive sexuality. This movie is definitely a strange one that warrants a full psychoanalytic analysis because there is a lot to unpack here. Henson decided that the character needed to be played by a beguiling...