In the late Eighties, Bowie returned from semi-retirement to join a rock and roll ban, also  featuring the talents of Reeves Gabrels, and the Sales brothers (Tony and Hunt). Despite a formidable line-up, Tin Machine’s output was generally savaged by music critics, not to mention some Bowie fans. However your host, Stewart Steak, is labouring under the impression that Tin Machine wasn’t quite the failure that popular opinion suggests.

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So which is the most fantastic, or perhaps for the cynics, the least rubbish Tin Machine album?

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Please feel free to leave a Tin Machine-related comment.

Tags: Bowie discussion, Floating in a Tin Can, Gabrels, Machine, Sales, Tin Machine, Tin Machine of Stewing Steak

Who am I to criticise Bowie? Someone who has bought Tonight, Never Let me Down, and pre-Space Oddity compilations featuring numbers as poor as When I’m Five, and Love you till Tuesday. Anyone who has endured the anti-climatic Black Tie/White Noise and the half-arsed covers on Pin Ups, has a near-constitutional right to have his/her tuppence’ worth. Therefore…

The first halves of the albums Low and “Heroes” are truly magnificent; the second halves are a dreary, ambient drone. Imagine if you will, a single entity containing such classics as Breaking Glass, Sound and Vision, V-2 Schneider, “Heroes”, Speed of Life, Be my Wife, Beauty and the Beast, Blackout, and Always Crashing in the Same Car. Now consider over half an hour of grinding, funeral parlour music (albeit technically competent) including such plodding examples as Moss Garden, and that one about Warsaw, that starts off dull, then rapidly turns silly, with tribal chantings and the like.

Am I alone in my sense of doubt? Please feel free to leave a comment:

Tags: "Heroes", Album of two halves, Be my Wife, Berlin, Berlin Divided, Berlin Wall of Sound, Bowie discussion, Low, Prussia, Sense of Doubt, V-2 Schneider