David Bowie's Art-Crime Epic: The Sequel That Never Was! Let's Go 2. Downtown

David Bowie doesn't do small. Big plans, big gestures, big everything. So, when he decided to work with Brian Eno again and cut an arty album inspired by his 'Berlin trilogy' in 1994 (after a return to ambinet textures in his excellent The Buddha Of Suburbia quasi-soundtrack album), he gathered musical partners from all kinds of eras, including Reeves Gabrels, Mick Garson and Erdal Kizilcay and got going. Encouraged by Eno's Oblique Techniques with signs giving instructions such as “Your are the last survivor of a catastrophic event and you will endeavour to play in such a way as to prevent feelings of loneliness developing within yourself”, Bowie and the band convened in Mountain Studios in Montreux and put hours and hours of material on tape.

Additional recordings to make the upcoming record more conventional saw Bowie add a couple of numbers to what was to become 1. Outside, the first in a proposed series of connected albums, detailling the story of private eye Nathan Adler and his investigations into an art-crime involving mutilation, cybernetics and what have you. The story itself was rudimentary and never made much sense, but it also was never the point in the slightest. As usual, Bowie used a concept as a launching pad, then cheerfully ignored questions of continuity or coherence. The essay included in 1. Outside probably explained the story better than the music did, and even then the whole thing was fragmentary at best. Bowie's original plan was to bring out the Leon/Outside material in yearly album installments, bringing him all the way up to the new millenium. Like we said: big plans, big gestures, big everything...

Alas. 1. Outside was the first episode of the on-going adventures of Nathan Adler in Oxford Town that unfortunately never were on-going and stopped after that very first episode. Admittedly, the whole an-album-a-year-plan was wishful thinking and never feasible, not in the classic distribution model of 1990s record companies. And Bowie of course never was in this thing for the long run, having been inspired by some of the 1995 material to dig deeper into jungle and drum'n'bass music, leading to 1997's Earthling, then zig-zagged to a relatively classic retro sound for 1999's hours. Forgotten in all this, or almost, were the further adventures of Nathan Adler, his suspects Leon Blank and Ramona A. Stone, and other unsavory characters populating Oxford Town. In 2002 Bowie returned to the Montreux material and started to prep it, hoping to turn it into a belated follow-up tentatively titled 2. Contamination.

As with so many other interesting projects, and especially from this time period (see: the unreleased Toy album), 2. Contamination never came to be, and the rest of the Montreux material stayed in whatever vault it was put. Then, after a 2003 leak of material called 'The Leon Tape' gave some fascinating insight into some of the wayward material and extremely odd nature of most of the Montreux sessions' music, something confirmed by the 2015 leak of The Leon Suites, three suites that were mixed as proof of concept for record companies when Bowie & Co. were looking in vain for a record deal for the original, almost entirely abstract project. Truthfully, it's no wonder that no record company wanted to touch what Bowie proposed without making substantial changes. The Leon Suites are completely uncompromising, extremely fragmentary and fragmented, often more talked than sung by Bowie in one of his often extremely theatrical character voices, with musical sections often only a minute or two long. But it also included a number of beautiful moments that deserved to be heard, preferrably in a slightly less abrasive setting. Which is where this alternative album comes in.

So, this isn't 2. Contamination, because no one knows what that woud have looked and sounded like. Technically, this album didn't even start as an 1. Outside-related project. The idea to do it came when I listened to hours b-sides “We Shall Go To Town” and “No One Calls”, a couple of cold, arty, angsty numbers that seem to have nothing in common with the rest of the nostalgic glow of hours, thus, the relegation to b-side status. They did, however, inevitably bring to mind the art-song atmosphere of 1. Outside. This got me thinking. What if Bowie doesnt bring these songs out as little-to-not-heard b-sides in 1999, but uses them to kickstart a sequel to 1. Outside, integrating them into some of the Montreux material to finally offer a follow-up to Nathan Adler's adventures?

2. Downtown is a follow-up/partner album to 1. Outside that has two goals: Continue, or at least expand, as well as possible, the story, while integrating some of the best unissued material from The Leon Suites, genuinely beautiful stuff like the track I titled “Chrome Foretold”, or “We'll Creep Together”. The middle of the first album side (so to speak) is designed as the arrest (“Round Up The Usual Suspect”) and interrogation of Leon (“Something Really Fishy”) who proclaims his innocence (via an alternative mix of “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town”, the only number also on 1. Outside), before turning its attention to suspect Ramona A. Stone and her vision of things.

The rest of the album further follows Adler down various rabbit holes, drops in on murderer/artist The Minotaur (“Into The Labyrinth”), then mirrors its predecessor by mimicking it: 1. Outside concluded its opressive, atonal and arty drama with a pure slice of pop, as Bowie somewhat inexplicably chose to re-record Buddha Of Suburbia's “Strangers When We Meet” as the closing number. 2. Downtown does a comparable gambit, using Bowie's 1. Outside b-side “Get Real” (a pop number certainly cut with the more conventional numbers in spring 1995 in New York) as its pop song closer, with Nathan Adler (possibly?) urging people to step out of cyberspace and 'get real'. But careful, the Minotaur is still lurking somewhere out there...

Listeners will also hear a familiar refrain, literally. I decided to use the ultra-catchy “Toll the bells, hail the private eye / All's well, the Twentieth Century dies” from “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town” as a leitmotiv throughout the album, incorporating it into a couple of numbers, as a kind of theme song for Nathan Adler going through his investigation.

So, 2. Downtown. This is, even if I focused on the bits that are more linear and melodic, still arty and not an easy “let it run in the background” kind of listen. It really demands your attention, while still being way more listenable than The Leon Suites. It also is proof for those who gave up on him during the mid-to-late 80s that he still had some of that arthouse juice that fueled the 'Berlin Trilogy' and Scary Monsters. (Also, if you haven't yet, check out my alt album version of Never Let Me Down which, if nothing else, beats the tar out of the released version.)

I'll let Nathan Adler take it from here...