In the mid '80s, by his own admission, David Bowie hit a creative wall. Having revitalised his career with assistance from Chic's Nile Rodgers on 1983's ten-million-selling Let's Dance, the chameleonic English artist seemed uninterested, or unwilling, in pushing forward to break new ground, and the listless Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987) were greeted with either critical derision or - worse - apathy. In his own words, Bowie had "lost his vision" and needed a creative re-boot.
"I could quite easily have gone reclusive and just worked on visual stuff, paint and sculpt and all that," he acknowledged in a career-spanning interview with Uncut magazine in 1999. "I had made a lot of money: I thought, well, I could just bugger off and do my Gauguin in Tahiti bit now. But then what do you do – re-emerge at 60 somewhere?"
