David Bowie spent a year in Switzerland writing and recording this diverse and casual collection of styles and themes. ‘Never Let Me Down’ was his attempt to get back to a guitar rock sound. Bowie says he worked with Iggy Pop as a way to pass the time: “He and his wife come over a lot, we go skiing together. So we thought it's be a good idea to occupy our time in the evenings. I took up a 4-track and some guitars, a drum machine, and we started writing up in the mountains. It just worked really well. I wrote all through last ski season.” Bowie recorded demos with Turkish multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kızılçay before going into Queen’s the Mountain Studios in Montreux with producer David Richards. Carlos Alomar and Peter Frampton were brought in later. Bowie did not want to focus on any one particular sound: “That was the intention. The album is a reflection of all the styles of writing I've used over the last few years. I had a lot more material than I used. I could have presented a whole surreal album, one with a sort of scrambled-egg theme, or one that was very direct, with each song being very personal; it all sounded like overload on one particular thematic device. I wanted an overall feeling of how I'm writing these days, and it seems to be in all those areas. It's quite stimulating to go from one very personalized interior kind of song, and become more expansive and objective and a little more surreal on another. I'm, not much good at cohesiveness! Something always breaks down somewhere. In this particular album the breakdown is that there is no continuity of style. I guess that reflects my musical tastes. I like all kinds of music.”
‘Day-In Day-Out’ was a commentary on the treatment of the homeless in America. The video was banned in many places. Bowie says: “We asked the LA police to work with us and they did very happily. We wanted to indicate how some of the houses for the homeless are removed, so we asked them to bring along the kind of contraption they use... it's kind of like a tank with a big battering ram on the end of it. And on the end of the battering ram they've made a little joke. As it goes through the windows it goes ‘Have a nice day.’ And I pointed out that it would be in the video and they said they were only too pleased to keep it on, so they kept it on. Is that controversial? I don't know."
‘Time Will Crawl’ was inspired by the Chernobyl accident: “It was a beautiful day and we were outside on a small piece of lawn facing the Alps and the lake. Our engineer, who had been listening to the radio, shot out of the studio and shouted: ‘There’s a whole lot of shit going on in Russia.' The Swiss news had picked up a Norwegian radio station that was screaming—to anyone who would listen—that huge billowing clouds were moving over from the Motherland and they weren’t rain clouds.”
‘Never Let Me Down’ was a last-minute addition to the album with Bowie asking Carlos Alomar to see what he could do with the “funeral” piece. Alomar used chords from his own song ‘I’m Tired’ to revitalize the song.
Bowie saw ‘Zeroes’ as “stripping away all the meanness of rock and coming back to the spirit with which one entered the thing. It’s the ultimate happy-go-lucky rock tune, based in the nonsensical period of psychedelia. So it’s a naivete song about rock, using a lot of cliches.”
The theatrical ‘Glass Spider’ evokes the whimsical Bowie of yore: “I was fascinated by the fact that the black widow spider does lay out its victims' skeletons on a web. I found that out a few months ago; it came up in some documentary on television. I just took it from there. I have this thing about spiders representing motherhood-play around with that one! I always saw spiders as being a maternal thing, and I wanted to have an all-encompassing motherhood song: How one is released from the mother and then left on one' sown, and you have to get by on your instincts. I wanted to develop the fable of the black widow spider, transform it. The reference to glass is obviously fitted. Putting the two together, "glass spider" reminds me of castles and something almost Chinese. Imagine this layer of webs like a castle; it moves from room to room and had a kind of altar at the top. It's fabricating a mock mythology. The subtext for that one was motherhood: being abandoned by one's mother, which is inevitable.”
‘Shining Star (Makin' My Love)’ features a rap by Mickey Rourke. Bowie says it’s about “how people are trying to get together in the face of so many disasters and catastrophes, socially around them, never knowing if they’re going to survive it themselves. The one thing they have got to cling on to is each other.”
‘Bang Bang’ was written years before by Iggy Pop with Ivan Kral, who said it was “about the emancipation of women.”
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