Bowie's Outside: C or D?

Yep. And here's a link to said instructions. If I had to pick but one track from this album, it would probably be "A Small Plot Of Land".

For me, the most outstanding track would easily be Leon Takes Us Outside/Outside. Also, the Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette)/Hallo Spaceboy sequence.

1) It's been revived several times, despite a really lazy opening post by yours truly.

2) There exists virtually unanimous consensus that there are at least a few good songs on this.

3) There exists absolutely zero consensus as to which songs those good songs are.

Revive...again!

Eight years to the month later (it appears I spend a lot of time over holiday breaks on ILM), going thru a bit of an Eno phase and I still feel the same way about this record. But there are a few other things to note:

1. Of the many little bits of melody on this record, the coda to "The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)" (awesome title, fwiw)...the "Research is...etc....call it a day" part is a particularly great and overlooked one that hasn't yet been mentioned.

2. It's odd to me there aren't more people praising the hell out of "Thru' These Architects' Eyes" -- it's an unbelievable climax to the record and one of the most majestic and, er, heroic things he's ever done. Fairly monsterous dub bassline, too.

3. Of all the records in the Berlin Trilogy, it seems to me Outside hews closest to Lodger -- stuffed full of melodies, places and references that are individually impressive and, often, overwhelming.

4. "Strangers When We Meet" is one song I always everyone say they like. Other than the kind of hilarious "Gimme Some Lovin'" bass riff that starts it, the song's never struck me before (it's also from Buddha of Suburbia, IIRC). Am listening now -- enjoying it.

I may have said it before: "Strangers When We Meet" is top fifteen Bowie for me, the best example of his lyrical cut-up technique resulting in a beautiful, unsettling statement.

I still like it a lot (interludes included).
Probably overcooked, but still the best Bowie album since Scary Monsters.

Does anyone have a decent boot of the Outside sessions? Apparently, Reeves Gabrels talks about this "4-hour improvised opera" that ended up being used for the interludes on the record. I dl'd something the other night on slsk which sounds like it may be part of it, but whose sound quality is crap, has tons of rough edits, and of the 9 tracks or so, appears to replay the same one at least 3 or 4 times.

― Naive Teen Idol (Naive Teen Idol), Friday, July 15, 2005 12:35 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

I have this, a gift from a Bowie diehard.

Lucky.

"We Prick You" = my secret favorite.

I'll stand by this judgment of mine (nearly ten years on!). Who all saw the tour?

I DID. It was my first-ever concert that wasn't high school hardcore. I don't remember anything about the set list but was so impressed by Reeves Gabrels.

at the time the reviews were horrid for the most part

Really? I only read the review of the show I went to, in Toronto, and it was positive. They did note that the crowd thinned dramatically after NIN.

In LA the Forum crowd remained pretty strong through the end. He was still in his 'I'm not doing the back catalog the old way' phase so I remember the revamps of "The Man Who Sold the World" and "Andy Warhol" in particular. Great staging as well.

I saw the Bologna show and was GREAT.
I remember they started with Look Back In Anger and I almost fainted - just like Ned said, there were great versions of Man Who Sold The World (super icy), Andy Warhol and Nite Flights (Hello Spaceboy was also impressive).

Here in the States it was the NIN/Bowie set-bleed-over thing -- the collaborative tracks were Bowie emerging while Trent was doing some saxophone, Bowie and NIN doing "Scary Monsters," Bowie and NIN doing "Reptile," Bowie and his band *and* NIN doing "Hello Spaceboy," then "Hurt," then NIN bowing out. Pretty crazy great.

I saw this show, it was awesome. saw bowie on the reality tour again a few years later, also awesome. I don't remember any reviews of the outside tour being horrid. the glass spider tour, yes,

And so the Outside era begins.

:-D

Now that I no longer like things that make sense, I'll have to go listen to it again.

daria g OTM.

He correctly pointed out that "Strangers When We Meet" is the classic of his autumnal years.

Decided to put this on tonight... First words on the album are "2015...16".

think i'm at the point where this is my favorite bowie album but idk

just listening to this properly and it's even more 'early/mid 90s trip-hop' than i'd have guessed. some of it sounds like Madonna's Human Nature. The Motel for one.

*Erotica i mean

Baby Grace is the victim
she was fourteen years of age

this record is definitely divisive, I know people who just think it's the worst thing ever.

I like it a heck of a lot more than Black Tie White Noise, which I don't like much at all apart from Jump They Say (or at least I didn't last time I listened to it which was years ago. It's probably my favourite of his 90s albums.

I only saw Bowie live twice, in 1996 and 2000, and both times he played Hallo Spaceboy and both times it was awesome.

the Pet Shop Boys remix was a hit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjYHTCR0qBk

this record is definitely divisive, I know people who just think it's the worst thing ever.

― akm, Thursday, January 14, 2016 1:58 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean one can see why they'd think so! the whole vertigo-comics-at-its-worst nature of its aesthetic, the programming and guitar tones that register as dated in a bad way to a lot of ppl ...

i listened to the bootlegged 'leon' for the first time today. it's ... probably less cohesive than the '1. outside' version, even.

I remember being so bummed, this being a reunion of Eno and Bowie and Eno being on a real winning streak as a producer. He never really recovered. Outside is so weird and chaotic, and just about everything he's produced since has been boring and safe. Nu-U2, Coldplay ...

I really loved this record when it came out, well, "really" might be strong...I hadn't listened to it in yrs and tried the other night, I could not hang with it

this was my first real bowie purchase in 1995, and i loved it. I think it still holds up.

think i'm at the point where this is my favorite bowie album but idk

Same, pretty much. I wouldn't claim that it's his best, but I wore it out in high school and it's the one I've internalized the most.

I think Earthling remains my preferred listen, drawing on the band that toured Outside, but I admire the fact that Outside even exists. Following the demi-retrench of Black Tie and the formal exercise of Buddha of Suburbia this seemed to be a striking way forward. A lot of the songs still stand up and to quote myself again from 2002 on here: "We Prick You" = my secret favorite.

just listened to this again this morning minus the segues, I think it's still awfully good. certainly better than Earthling.

hey i would like to suggest black tie anticipates both this and buddha in subtle ways. it's kind of an avant garde sophistipop record

reeves is way more subdued on this than earthling so it's kinda automatically way better imo, but earthling has some of bowie's best tunes

earthling feels super perverse to me in that, according to bowiesongs, bowie wanted to capture the sound of his band, and the result sounds like everyone fed their instruments through a bank of effects and then triggered them with a synthesizer

I wasn't aware of Reeves Gabrels as menace until Earthling.

That Earthling tour is closer to that capture-the-sound-of-his-band ideal. Shit was fire, from what I've seen (I've told my story about missing his epic 3-hour-plus Ft Lauderdale show).

When Reeves joined the Cure I was all ugh. He has the worst guitar tone ever, like the guitar equivalent of a Simmons drum.

He follows me on Twitter, oddly enough. So when I saw him favoriting some of my Bowie tweets this week I was all 'That seems a little strange, somehow.' (Roger O'Donnell also follows me as well so I'm waiting for Simon Gallup to show up on my doorstep.)

i forgot reeves was in the cure now until the other day and then instantly felt less enthusiastic about the show this spring.

Reeves is just doing the job in the Cure. Took it down a notch from Porl, so you'll be fine.

This is the first Bowie album I heard: I was lent it by my English teacher. I lent him Screamadelica in return. Finally bought my own copy a few years ago. Right now it's in the loft though, so I can't revisit it despite a strong desire to (knackered knee = no ladder climbing).

When Reeves joined the Cure I was all ugh. He has the worst guitar tone ever, like the guitar equivalent of a Simmons drum.

Jason C00per has been in The Cure for two decades as of this year.

that is weird

This was noted on another Bowie thread recently, but Eno to the Beeb right after he passed:

"About a year ago we started talking about Outside - the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that."
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35279642

Hadn't realized that a decent quality Leon Tapes bootleg finally leaked last year. By no means an easy listen, but a real feast when combined with the outstanding PAotD analysis linked upthread. One unique angle pursued there is that Outside, for all its virtues, wasn't so much a comeback or a new direction for Bowie but rather a compromised "conceptual art project Eno and Bowie carried out in the press," the record itself merely a public record of the occasion before Bowie flitted onto new things. It's really an amazing piece that I'd recommend to anyone who found themselves fascinated by this era.

From my end, one interesting piece in this story is that for such an outsized project, it ended up being strongest as a set of songs. Where I saw there record as this incomplete masterpiece when I was younger, it seems so much more like Diamond Dogs (as PAotD notes) or even Young Americans in its earnest but failed pursuit of Philly Soul -- a product of massive but ultimately unrealized ambitions that ends working best as something else altogether.

BTW, the title track of this doesn't get enough love.

outsiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidddde