Tonight

by

David Bowie

Edit

This is my favorite cd out of the ones bowie did in the 80's. Even though it has a bunch of remakes of older songs and it doesn't break any new ground, most of it has a nice feeling too it. It does have some tracks that don't really meet his standard but it is worth it for the remake of god only knows. P.s. Bowie released a statement over a year before these reissues were released asking that they don't have the bonus tracks because it takes away from the original work. SO THERE WERE NO PROMISES MADE ON BONUS TRACKS. That reviewer made up those promises in his own mind.

It's interesting to see what rumours can do to an album. It's only a few years since I got in touch with Bowie, and have been a fan ever since, virtually running out the house to buy all the albums in his amazing, colorful and quite often brilliant discography. I heard them all, but in all those years, I kept ignoring 1984's "Tonight" (and I still haven't heard it's 1987 follow-up, "Never Let Me Down"). With only very few positive reviews to back this album up, yet a truckload of negative ones to break it down to pieces, I was expecting awful drivel, an album so incredibly bad you don't know how fast to run to your stereo to turn the damn thing off.

So I got "Tonight" and gave it a spin. The only song I knew was the title-track, and ok, I always hated it. But the rest really isn't bad at all. To be quite frank, there's not one 100% awful track on it, with the exception of the cheap, tacky cover of The Beach Boys "God Only Knows". Bowie knows his way with covers, always picking either obscure songs to give them an improved re-working, or better-known songs and respectfully cover them. In case of this song, it's just a big riddle what Bowie's intention was. It's bad, and it's cheap. And yes, a mistake.

Once we get past "God Only Knows", there's a lot of nice stuff to be found on "Tonight". Opening-track "Loving The Alien" is an atmospheric and dramatic track, that doesn't have anything remotely bad about it. "Don't Look Down" is lite-reggae, which isn't all too exhilerating, but fits well into the context of the album and is enjoyable. But from "Neighbourhood Threat" to the closer "Dancing With The Big Boys", there's no reason why this album shouldn't be a worthy follow-up to "Let's Dance". They're all catchy, decent tracks, which remain enjoyable after tons of listens.

Bowie has a serious catalog of great music AND a reputation of constantly changing his sound, and possibly break some ground too, please. What, do people expect him to keep that reputation up forever? "Tonight" was clearly conceived in a lesser-inspired period in Bowie's career, but to call the album absolutely worthless or even 'unlistenable' goes way too far and absolutely doesn't make any sense. It's really very eighties, even more eighties than "Let's Dance". And that's a sound you have to like. I personally love that sound; as it reminds me of a great time. Maybe it's just personal, but "Tonight" is very far from being a bad Bowie-album.

If you're considering to buy this to complete your Bowie-collection (it's not that good that it should be your introduction to Bowie or something) you really should track down the Rykodisk-edition which offers you three really good bonus-tracks, including "This Is Not America"; hands down one of his most beautiful singles ever.