9 Later Day Musical Crimes Perpetuated By Great Artists

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs; similarly, you can’t reinvent yourself every couple of years without coming up with a few duds. David Bowie has torn through personas more or less successful, but in the mid-’80s found himself in a creative quagmire from which he couldn’t wrest himself for the best part of a decade.

Bowie’s 1970s run is probably the greatest any artist has ever enjoyed. Classic albums follow one another with ruthless efficiency; he shifted styles time and again and pulled each one of them off, all the while producing albums for Iggy Pop and Mott The Hoople. The wheels were bound to come off eventually, and they did so in a big way with 1984’s Tonight.

Bowie went from setting trends to following, and then chasing them. Disappointing solo albums would be followed by Tin Machine, a hard rock project that sounded more fun to make than it was to listen to.

It wasn’t until his reunion with Brian Eno for 1995’s Outside that he righted his course. This daring, occasionally impenetrable electronic music set him up for the final two albums of his career (and life) - he ended on a high with some of the best stuff he’d ever done.