Fantastic voyage: why David Bowie had such a brilliant 1990s

Nearly five years after his death, a mammoth new box set reminds us why David Bowie had such a spectacular nineties. Alan Corr listens to David Bowie 5. Brilliant Adventure (1992 - 2001)

Since his passing in January 2016, the world has been in a perpetual state of mourning for David Bowie.

But when we think about the great man, we tend to celebrate and listen to his imperial phase, that run of albums from 1970's The Man Who Sold The World to 1980’s Scary Monsters and Super Creeps and his 2016 swansong, Black Star, a farewell album that saw Bowie turn his own death into a work of art.

A chance to re-evaluate an overlooked era in a long and magical career

A polite veil is drawn over his eighties work following the commercial high of 1983’s Let’s Dance. Back then the critical consensus was that Bowie, a man who was once very much the future, was a has-been and that his best work was behind him. This was largely down to his critically mauled band Tin Machine, the big-haired Glass Spider Tour, which came to Slane Castle in 1987, and the misfiring album Never Let Me Down that same year. Even Bowie himself dismissed this era as his "Phil Collins years".

However, as the nineties dawned, Bowie, still a relatively young man of 43, entered into one of his most creative and adventurous phases, releasing some of his most experimental and genre-bending music. But it is a decade that has been overlooked and even if the world didn’t sit up and notice as much as they used to, he had an incredibly active and productive decade.

Apart from music, the nineties were also quite an era for David. He got married to supermodel Iman and floated the Bowie brand on the stock market to sell Bowie Bonds, which netted him £30m overnight. He also earned an additional $28.5m by selling his back catalogue to EMI and in a remarkable interview with Jeremy Paxman in 1999 on BBC’s Newsnight, he predicted the central role, both in good and bad ways, the internet would have in our lives.

Dublin would play a major role in Bowie’s nineties. After playing a secret gig in the Baggott Inn in 1991, he was back to play hush hush gigs at Factory Studios in Ringsend in 1991 and 1997, and in 1999 at The HQ Club (now The Academy). He also performed in 1997 at The Olympia Theatre, and in 1995 at The Point Theatre with Morrissey.

So, Bowie began the nineties as a curio left over from the gaudy eighties and ended the decade with his godhead reconfirmed with a second coronation as a Glastonbury headliner in 2000. He was back zapping the zeitgeist and finding relevance once again just as the new millennium was dawning.

It really is a decade ripe for a reappraisal and David Bowie 5. Brilliant Adventure (1992 - 2001) is an embarrassment of riches. It features 131 songs (that’s five hours and seven seconds of music) and it brings together some of Bowie's most underrated and experimental material, from 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, and The Buddha Of Suburbia, 1995’s 1.Outside, 1997’s Earthling and 1999’s 'hours…’ along with an expanded live album recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre in 2000, and the non-album/alternative version/B-sides and soundtrack compilation RE:CALL 5.

The physical box set also comes with a coffee table book featuring rarely seen and previously unpublished photos, as well as memorabilia, technical notes about the albums from producers and engineers including Brian Eno and Nile Rodgers.

However, the real prize for many Bowie fans will be the first official release of the previously unreleased 2001 album Toy, which saw Bowie re-record many of his pre-fame sixties songs.

Bowie’s nineties really began to take off after he disbanded Tin Machine and released Black Tie White Noise, an album that is generally accepted to be his return to form. The title is a reference to his recent marriage to supermodel Iman (in fact he declared the whole album was "a wedding present" to her), and his love of both black music and white music.

We need your consent to load this YouTube contentWe use YouTube to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

It is an album of strutting jazz/funk full of streamlined futuristic synths and sky-scaping brass that saw Bowie reunited with pianist Mike Garson, who appeared with Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour of 1972 to 73 and who did such amazing avant garde work on Aladdin Sane (1973), guitarist Mick Ronson (who he hadn’t worked with since his ‘70s peak) and his Let’s Dance collaborator Nile Rodgers of Chic.

Thematically the album addresses the racial tensions of the time and in fact Bowie and Iman arrived in LA the day the riots of 1992 broke out and were forced to watch the chaos from their hotel room. As he sings on the title track, "Getting my facts from a Benetton ad, I'm looking through African eyes, Lit by the glare of an L.A. fire".

The superb lead single Jump They Say reflected on Bowie's feelings about his schizophrenic half-brother Terry, who had died by suicide in 1985. But this is a celebratory album bursting with joy, especially on the single Miracle Tonight, a playful charmer of a song with perky horns and a spoken word interlude. Or the swooning, moonlit romanticism of Don’t Let Me Down & Down which features a thrilling trumpet solo by the late American jazz great Lester Bowie.

The only clunker here is a swinging industrial funk cover of I Feel Free by Cream and there’s also a cover of Morrissey’s I Know It’s Gonna Happen Some Day on which Bowie really amps up the mellow drama.

In 2003, Bowie himself described his soundtrack to the BBC’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s satirical coming of age novel The Buddha Of Suburbia as his favourite of all his albums. Released in 1993, it went under the radar. Which is a real shame because it is rather beautiful and in places recalls the ambient drift of side two of Bowie’s 1977 album, Low. As you’d expect from a soundtrack, there is incidental music (like the gorgeous piano on the seven-minute The Mysteries) but also some great song writing that draws from his own ‘70s work and T. Rex, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk.

And then in 1995, Bowie released one of his most curious and divisive albums. As Britpop was sweeping the UK and grunge was sounding its death rattle in the US, Bowie unleashed the extraordinary art-rock concept album, 1.Outside. Teeming with premillennial paranoia and cinematic ambition, the album centres on fictional detective Nathan Adler as he investigates the murder of a teenage girl in an underworld of "art crimes".

On an album of distorted industrial rock, he reunited with Brian Eno for the first time since his ‘70s Berlin trilogy for a challenging set of songs which saw Bowie go all William Gibson cyberpunk. Always heavily influenced by William Burroughs, 1. Outside has all the luridness of The Naked Lunch. Bowie himself compared the aggressive nature of the album to Scary Monsters and it does have that album's mercurial wildness and atonal sonic assault.

Back dividing fans and critics alike, 1997's Earthling saw Bowie embracing the then very hot genre of drum and bass. Critics moaned that he was desperately trying to stay relevant by bandwagon jumping but Bowie, always a master of refining mainstream versions of underground music, was moving ever forward.

Released a month after his 50th birthday (which he celebrated by playing Madison Square Gardens in front of 15,000 close personal friends), he said at the time that he wanted to juxtapose all the dance styles that he'd been working with live and Earthling is a delirious psychodrama of the an album. On the joyful racket of Little Wonder, a bug-eyed Bowie, at his most sinister, sings over an energised clatter of drum and bass.

And then in 1999, he changed direction again with the album ‘hours…', a far more mellow, melancholic, and poignant affair after the abrasive madness of Earthling. Bowie wanted a slick and polished sound and there is something fragile and dreamy about these songs, which are full of intimations of his own mortality. Indeed, the cover art depicts the short-haired Bowie persona from the intensely energetic Earthling album exhausted and cradled a long-haired, more youthful version of Bowie, while the back cover sees three Bowies dressed in black looking very serious with a large black snake coiled at their feet.

It is stately and reflective piece of work and is perhaps the most overlooked album of this era. And ahead of the curve again, it was the first complete album by a major artist available to download over the Internet, preceding the physical release by two weeks.

The first official release of the shelved 2001 album Toy will be the ace in this new box set for many people. He entered the studio with his band, including Dubliner Gerry Leonard, to record new interpretations of songs he’d first recorded from 1964 to 1971 with the intention of doing a ‘surprise drop’ release. However, the technology necessary was still quite a few years off and the album was put on ice only to emerge as a bootleg soon after.

So here is Toy now in all its glory with twelve new recordings of sixties tracks, from I Dig Everything to You've Got A Habit Of Leaving and Toy (Your Turn to Drive) to a new take on London Boys, a high point of Bowie’s baroque pop period in 1966. Toy is a fascinating document of where Bowie was at both in 2001 and in his pre-fame sixties but even then, he was showing signs of later genius.

David Bowie 5. Brilliant Adventure (1992 - 2001) also includes another exclusive - Bowie’s 2000 performance at the BBC Theatre in London in front of 500 lucky fans. Recorded two days after that famous Glastonbury performance, the full concert has never before been available on vinyl and it features some great readings of classics such as Wild Is the Wind, Always Crashing in the Same Car, Ashes to Ashes, and The Man Who Sold The World and more recent songs such as Seven and Hallo Spaceboy.

The box set also includes RE:CALL 5, which features 39 non-album/alternative version/b-sides and soundtrack songs over three CDs and four LPs of his nineties output, which has some real treats including Bowie singing Don’t Let Me Down and Down in Indonesian. What a man!

This is the fifth in a series of box sets since Bowie’s death and as you’d expect, it’s quite a package and beautifully curated. It is a chance to re-evaluate an overlooked era in a long and magical career and reminds us that only a fool would ever write David Bowie off.

Alan Corr @CorrAlan

Fantastic voyage: why David Bowie had such a brilliant 1990s

More stories on

Read Next

More stories on

Remembering David Bowie: A New Career in a New Town

Read Next