Will David Bowie Let Us Down?

The cover photograph of David Bowie's new album, Never Let Me Down, shows the musician frantically jumping forward. Flying a few feet above the floor overtaken by some strange circus scene, Bowie’s dry brown pompadour tumbles to the side as his arms reach out to you... desperately.

The record is Bowie’s first since 1984’s ill-received Tonight, and he now seems somewhat anxious to grab back that egosatisfying mass adulation he experienced after releasing the multi-million-seller Let’s Dance. But it’s difficult to produce the kind of commercial sounds that make hit singles, while also remaining substantial enough to get your picture on the cover of Time. So Bowie, whose long career has helped define such genres as glam rock, blue-eyed soul and moody synthesized pop, dug into his past for this new album.

It’s not the first time he has glanced back. In 1980, Bowie took a hard look at what he’s done with the hard-edged album Scary Monsters, which included the song “Ashes To Ashes” and exposed the astronaut of his early hit, “Space Oddity,” as a spaced-out drug addict. "We know Major Tom’s a junky,” he sang. “Strung out in heaven’s high, hitting an all-time low. . .”

Like his last two albums, Never Let Me Down is much more upbeat than that nearly angry reminiscence. One reason for this is the relentless dance beat that takes hold of virtually all the songs! Add to this the fact that Bowie has apparently abandoned the different characters that he would act out on stage, like the glitzy Ziggy Stardust and the coolly decadent Thin White Duke of the 1970s. (In 1978, Bowie told CREEM, “My persona, dear, is so confused it even confuses me...”) For the past several years he has been simply a well-dressed Mr. Clean romantic. And it appears as if he’ll be staying that way, changing into other characters only during his occasional film roles, like last year’s muppet-type movie, Labyrinth.

To record the new album, Bowie gathered together some of his long-time friends and associates. Carlos Alomar, who has played rhythm guitar on and cowrote several Bowie compositions, returns, as does guitarist Peter Frampton, quite a star himself. Frampton, who scored a million-selling album of his own in the mid-1970s with Frampton Comes Alive, has never before appeared on a Bowie record, but they know each other well: Owen Frampton, Peter’s father, was Bowie’s art teacher in England.

And producing the record with Bowie was David Richards. The two of them formed the team that helped Iggy Pop record his recent Top 40 success, Blah Blah Blah.

Although the record is selling like hotcakes, and the singles “Day-In Day-Out” and “Time Will Crawl” are pouring out of radios everywhere, many critics are unhappy with it. Several have complained that the disc is nearly void of any new ideas, merely cannibalizing successful old ones.

Bowie’s best defense will be his latest world tour. Backed by a killer band featuring guitarists Frampton and Alomar (who has just released an album of his own), Bowie has promised a much more theatrical show than his last tour, more in the direction of his extravagant Diamond Dogs performances of years past. In concert, he’s sure to supplement his new songs with favorites like “Fame,” “Golden Years,” “Suffragette City” and “China Girl.” With this major tour, Bowie will once again prove that he is still an essential rock artist. Bowie is back!