88 • UNCUT• JULY 2019
Though the band made their
official live bow a few weeks later,
at the International Music Awards
in New York, the Nassau gig was a
perfect illustration of the Tin
Machine aesthetic – free-flying,
spontaneous, unexpected. Their
debut album, released that same
month, similarly favoured raw
noise over studio polish.
Tin Machine was a radical shift
for Bowie in the ’80s. The decade
hadn’t quite panned out as he’d
imagined. Willingly or otherwise,
the huge success of 1983’s Let’s
Dance, and its attendant Serious
Moonlight Tour, afforded him a
status he wrestled with for the
next five years. Feeling trapped
by megastardom, he needed an
escape route.
“Tin Machine was a garage
band with a budget,” says Tony
Sales. “Pinstripes and ‘Purple
Haze’. When David and I first got
together he said to me, ‘Let’s put
an end to rock’n’roll. I really want
to fuck with it.’ I went, ‘Sounds
good, let’s do it!”
Having begun the album
sessions at Switzerland’s
Mountain Studios, Tin Machine
recorded 35 songs in six weeks.
“It wasn’t about fine-tuning
things, it was about the spirit,”
explains Tim Palmer. “And it
was exciting.”F
OR Reeves Gabrels, his
relationship with David
Bowie was significantly
more than just that of a musical
collaborator. “David was 10 years
older than me,” he says. “I have no
siblings, so he functioned like an
older brother for me. When I
started working with him, I was
in my late twenties, early thirties.
He showed me how the music
industry worked.”
In 1987, the New York-born
Gabrels was performing live around his adopted
home of Boston. He was introduced to Bowie by his
then wife, Sara Terry, during the Glass Spider Tour,
on which she worked as US publicist. “A lot of Tin
Machine grew out of a reaction to Never Let Me
DownandTonight,” Gabrelsexplains.“Westarted
talkingaboutthisstuffalmostfromthefirsttime
I methim.I originallywentovertoDavid’shouse
inSwitzerland,toworkonanextendedversionof
‘LookBackInAnger’foranICAshow.”
ThistookplaceinJuly 1988 atLondon’s
DominionTheatre,whereBowieunveiledanavant-
gardereworkingoftheLodgertrackjoinedby
Gabrels,KevinArmstrong,bassistErdalKizilcayand
MontrealdancetroupeLaLaLaHumanSteps.After
thehighfalutinambitionoftheGlassSpidertour,
thiseight-minuteoverhaul– loud,corrosiveand
impressionistic– suggesteda wayoutofBowie’s
artisticmalaise.“Afterwedidthat,Davidaskedme
tocomebacktoSwitzerlandandstartworking
together,”saysGabrels.“Iendedupstayingathislace for couple of months, watching Fa wlt y Tower s,
aying obscure records for each other and writing
ongs at Mountain Studios.”
Inspired by the ICA show, these new songs were
efiantly uncommercial, reliant instead on
xploratory zeal. “I was listening to Sonic Youth and
e was listening to Glenn Branca,” says Gabrels.
And we were both into the Pixies. Plus I was
stening to Coltrane and Miles and he was listening
o Charlie Parker, so there was a real amalgam of
nfluences. I wanted to return David to the stuff that
I thought was cool about him, and for him to
remember that he was the dog, not the tail.”
As Bowie told Uncut in 1999: “Success was rather
immaterial. I needed the process, to acclimatise myself
again to why I wrote, why I did what I did... I had to
kickstart my engine again.”
When his host asked who he might like as a rhythm
section, Gabrels talked about bringing in bassist Percy
Jones, known for his work with Brand X and Brian Eno,
CeSAR and sometime Frank Zappa drummer Terry Bozzio.
VeRA;
BRIAN
RASIC/GeTTY
IMAGeS “davidliked
leTTing
peopledo
TheirThing”
timpaLmer
That’s motivation:
Tin Machine film a
nine-song medley,
directed by Julien
Temple, at the New
York Ritz, 1989To o d i z zy:
Bowie’s
Glass Spider
To u r, 1987