Ok, I love Bowie's 80's music. Who else does on here?

Cat people, the retread iggy China Girl, Modern Love, Scary Monsters and the Hunter work

Bowie was certainly healthier
MTv was too easy a vehicle to lay on the charm with some danceable songs, hot girls, his incredible capturing stage presence and bleach blonde shimmering persona

Opening the Serious Moonlight tour with Station to Station was great

The new converts were going to get some avant garde art rock thrown at them

 

TMII was 1991, these songs don't qualify.

 

GREAT song.

I think that's the thing: Bowie did release some good material during the '80s, it just wasn't all on the same albums. Scary Monsters is a great album, Let's Dance is good, but after that, there's a lot of picking and choosing to be done.

 

Scary Monsters is great, of course, and I also really like Let's Dance. I think that was his last great album before hitting a slump for the rest of the decade and some of the 90's. Tin Machine was cool too. I also really dig "This Is Not America" that's a rather cool collaboration with Pat Methaney.

 

I "discovered" Bowie in the 80's and I do have time for Never Let Me Down as an album. No it's not adventurous, avant garde or really anything I love Bowie for, however it is a great sounding 80's album that I like in it's own right! Reading this thread has just inspired me to put on my Glass Spider (copied from the Laserdisc) CD, lacks a bit of bass but is from the true stereo soundtrack unlike the DVD.

 

I am not a big Bowie fan but I think his 80s music was more in tune with his abilities.
He also worked with some good musicians then, as he did early on. Pop singers always benefit from having rock guitarists playing in their bands.
Guys like Ronson and Gabriels did him a lot of good.
Bowie is excellent at putting a working team together for his projects.

I have a Bowie CD here that I like, it is called Reality. It doesn't blow me away but it is very listenable.
I don't know much about it or when it was made, it sounds like late 80s or 90s.
I got it for a quarter at a yard sale, just the CD in a thin jewel case, no artwork or liner notes of any kind, so I don't know much about it.
Is it one of the more popular Bowie albums?

 

Like the Peter Frampton one and a few singles. Bowie's decade was the seventies.

 

Scary Monsters and Let's Dance are great.
Of course I think Bowie released two great albums in 1973 alone.

 

Scary Monsters is a masterpiece, but that's more a 70s album.

The songs he released as singles is the strongest material, with the albums very uneven - Absolute Beginners, Cat People, Not America, Blue Jean, Loving The Alien etc. Have recently enjoyed Day In Day Out b-side Julie. Good tune.

 

True. But Tin Machine II was mostly recorded in 1989, and for me Bowie's 1980s began after Scary Monsters in 1981, so I have no problem keeping that decade open till 91... Thematically TM2 fits far better with the other stuff he was doing at the end of the 80s than it does with the 90s.

 

Apart from half of both Tonight and Never Let Me Down, you can count me among the great fans of 80s Bowie

 

classic forum moving of the goalposts! if it's ok to include things released two years outside the decade we're supposed to be discussing (i.e. 1980-89), then Stage and Lodger can be included too. and as it was released in Feb 1980 i'd like to give a vote to the essential Alabama Song/Space Oddity (acoustic) single, recorded in '78 and '79. so that's 1978-1991 for "Eighties Bowie" in the SH.tv world

 

Nice to see some love for Tin Machine II, Baby Universal is classic Bowie.

 

Loving The Alien is a good song from him from those days.

 

Love all of it with a high level of sentimental attachment.
Tonight and NLMD particularly. Labyrinth too. Tin Machine less so.
Many other strong singles and soundtrack work from the decade and the Moroder/Queen/Iggy collaborations.
Special mention to a few that have yet to be listed:

Day In Day Out
Cat People
Don't Look Down
Without You
Isolation
Amazing
Under the God
The Drowned Girl
Shades
Dancing With the Big Boys
87 & Cry
Girls

 

Yes, absolutely!

I'm all for moving goalposts when those posts make little sense where they are. Trying to force a bunch of song releases into an arbitrary 10 year timeline seems pointless to me.

As far as I can see, musically, Scary Monsters is a direct result of the Berlin trilogy and has far closer ties to that than anything that came after. Barring a couple of collaborations, Bowie effectively took a couple of years off from music prior to Let's Dance, and that, to me at least is really where his 80s sound begins.
Likewise at the end of the decade he was heavily immersed in Tin Machine recording the second album swiftly after the first, but holding it back until 1991 (after he'd done the contractual Sound+Vision tour of 1990). Again after the TM2 tour he took a bit of a break, got married etc before returning with a very different sound on Black Tie White Noise, so for me, that's a natural break point again. No it doesn't conform precisely to the strict decade - the 1980s - but that's life!

 

The first TM album does have some great songs - Prisoner of Love, Amazing, Heaven's In Here. It's like Bowie only made half good albums in the 80s after Monsters.
Don't forget Iggy's Blah Blah Blah, which also has half an album of good Bowie/Pop songs.

 

I admit I'm biased as a result of having grown up with it, but labyrinth has some brilliant material.

your eyes can be so cruel
just as I can be so cruel
and I do believe in you
I can't live within you...
​

Trevor Jones' synthy score cues on the record are pretty great, too.

 

Scary Monsters, brilliant, Let's Dance mostly good. The aforesaid stray singles generally excellent, but that still feels patchy when I think of the period.

 

Absolute Beginners is definitely underrated.

 

Chilly down? Sends a nasty shiver down my spine even mentioning the turd!

 

To me "80s Bowie" (or whatever people want to call it) was Let's Dance, Tonight, Never Let Me Down, Blah Blah Blah and Black Tie White Noise mixed in with some of the soundtrack stuff.

 

This