Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
People	mixed
Robert Christgau	C+
MusicHound	"woof!"
Rolling Stone	unfavourable
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin	favourable
Trouser Press	unfavourable

Never Let Me Down is the seventeenth studio album by David Bowie, released on 20 April 1987 on the label EMI America. Bowie conceived the album as the foundation for a theatrical world tour, writing and recording most of the songs in Switzerland. He considered the record a return to rock and roll music. Three singles were released from the album, "Day-In Day-Out", "Time Will Crawl" and "Never Let Me Down", which all reached the UK Top 40.

One of Bowie's better-selling albums, Never Let Me Down was certified Gold by the RIAA in early July 1987, less than three months after its release date, and charted in the top 10 in several European countries, although it only reached No. 34 on the US charts. Despite its commercial success, this album was poorly received by fans and critics, who often regard the mid-to-late 1980s as a low point of creativity and musical integrity for Bowie. Bowie later distanced himself from the arrangement and production of the finished album but also admitted a fondness for many of the songs, eventually remixing the track "Time Will Crawl" (one of his all-time favourites) for inclusion on his career retrospective release, iSelect (2008).

In support of this album, Bowie embarked on the Glass Spider Tour, a world tour that was at that point the biggest, most theatrical and most elaborate tour he had undertaken in his career. The tour, like the album it supported, was commercially successful but critically panned. The critical failure of the album and tour were factors that led Bowie to look for a new way to motivate himself creatively, leading him to create the band Tin Machine in 1989 and to retire his back catalogue from live performances during his 1990 Sound+Vision Tour. Bowie did not release another solo album until Black Tie White Noise in 1993.

Following the rise in fame and success from his 1983 album Let's Dance and its subsequent Serious Moonlight Tour, Bowie felt disconnected from his new found large fan base, and after the poor reception of Tonight (1984), he was looking to make the next album differently. As a result, Bowie said he wanted to return to recording with a small rock group like he had early in his career, and that he made the album as a "move back to rock 'n' roll music. Very directly." Bowie felt that the sound and style of his new album was reminiscent of his album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980) and was less like its immediate predecessors.

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