Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

make and didn’t feel like his audience would be
ready for it if it were sold to them as a David Bowie
album.
“I argued with David that I didn’t think it was a
good idea to make it a band,” Gabrels says. “But he
needed to make something that would fall on the
barbed wire of expectation. Fall on it and absorb the
shock so that if all else failed he could run up the
back of it. If the band didn’t make it through the
barbed wire at least he’d have the opportunity to run
up its back and jump over.”
As work began on the Tin Machine record in
Mountain Studios with producer Tim Palmer, it
became clear to all involved that a band was a band,
no matter who is singing lead. An authentic gang-offour
dynamic began to take shape. “He wanted to
get back to that sweaty vibe,” says Hunt Sales today.
“Four guys in a basement.” Forget that the basement
was an expensive studio in a gorgeous lakeside
town in Switzerland. This was, again, art and
commerce, Bowie’s eternal pendulum rhythm. “One
for them, one for me.” Only it had been “Three for
them, none for me” since Let’s Dance.
“Heaven’s in Here,” the lead of the album’s
fourteen tracks, serves to formally announce the
return of a star to newly sharp focus. It’s a hard,
unadorned retro blues that calls to mind the early
Rolling Stones, while Hunt Sales’s live, kit-abusing
drums are nothing if not the antithesis of all that
awful, canned eighties percussion. On the title track,
a chugging rocker with a Sun Studios rockabilly