Tonight (David Bowie album)
| Tonight | ||||
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| Studio album by David Bowie | ||||
| Released | 1 September 1984 | |||
| Recorded | May–June 1984 | |||
| Studio | Le Studio, Morin-Heights, Quebec, Canada | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 35:47 | |||
| Label | EMI America – DB 1 | |||
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| David Bowie chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Tonight | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Robert Christgau | C |
| MusicHound | 1/5 |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| Trouser Press | unfavourable |
Tonight is the sixteenth studio album by David Bowie. It was originally released in September 1984, on the label EMI America. It followed his most commercially successful album, Let's Dance. He described the album, released immediately after his previous album's tour wrapped up, as an effort to "keep my hand in, so to speak," and to retain the new audience that he had recently acquired. Although the album was another immediate commercial success, reaching number-one in the UK Albums Chart in October 1984, it has received mostly poor reviews from music critics and Bowie expressed dissatisfaction with it in later years.
David Bowie worked on Tonight after finishing up his Serious Moonlight Tour in support of his previous album Let's Dance. He did not have much luck writing while on tour, so he described the process of recording the album Tonight this way:
It was rushed. The process wasn't rushed; we actually took our time recording the thing; Let's Dance was done in three weeks, Tonight took five weeks or something, which for me is a really long time. I like to work fast in the studio. There wasn't much of my writing on it 'cause I can't write on tour and I hadn't assembled anything to put out. But I thought it a kind of violent effort at a kind of Pin Ups.
Bowie purposefully sought to keep the sound of the band he had used on the previous album and tour, feeling that the new fans he had accumulated would expect to hear the same thing on the new album that they'd heard before, hence the inclusion of the "Borneo Horns" players on the album.
Like Let's Dance, but unlike most previous Bowie albums, Bowie played no instruments on the record, and in fact he delegated almost all responsibility for the music played to his musicians, only occasionally offering critical input.
Bowie brought in Derek Bramble and Hugh Padgham to produce the record, the former receiving the nod from Bowie due to some of the demos he'd recently produced for English female singer Jaki Graham. As with Let's Dance, Bowie prepared for the album by recording some demos beforehand, this time showing up with 8 of the 9 songs that would appear on the album. This surprised collaborator Carlos Alomar, who said "it was the first time in the eleven years that I've been with the damn man that he's brought in anything."
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Wikipedia