I’ve noted it before and I’ll repeat it here: David Bowie, for me, is my personal favorite musician.  His albums, almost all of them, hold a special magic to my ears, and I love just about all of them.

With one notable exception.

Released in April 27, 1987, Mr. Bowie’s album Never Let Me Down has to have the most ironic title of any of his albums for there are many, including myself and, reportedly, Mr. Bowie himself, who consider it his worst album.

Never Let Me Down?  How about: A complete let down, amiright?

Well… not so fast.

While I stand by my statement and do feel that, as released, Never Let Me Down is Mr. Bowie’s “worst” album, there is nonetheless plenty on it to like.  The problem I had with it back when it was released and the problem I have with it today is that the album feels… wonky.

It’s like Mr. Bowie, after the mega-success of 1983’s Let’s Dance and decent reception/sales of 1984’s Tonight, an album some critics felt Mr. Bowie was “coasting” on with too many cover songs, felt he needed to re-establish himself -as he was wont to do- and create something truly great and more personal.

Never Let Me Down featured 10 songs and all but one of them were original to the album (the song Bang Bang was a cover of an Iggy Pop song).  Compare that to Let’s Dance which had 8 songs and of those, 3 were remakes/covers and especially Tonight, which had 9 songs but of those a whopping 5 songs were covers/remakes.

Clearly Mr. Bowie was trying to do something great and more fully “Bowie” at the time but, ironically, the end result felt like he was trying a little too hard.  The album was all over the place -overproduced and, IMHO, overcooked.

And yet… and yet… it fascinates me.

I felt there was a good album hidden in the clutter and buried under the production.  Curiously, in subsequent interviews before his passing Mr. Bowie himself noted the same thing and, further, his desire to one day go back to the album and rework/reproduce it.

A few years back, the possibility that something good could be made of something considered so bad was made clear when Mr. Bowie released a remake/reworking of one of my favorite songs from the album, Time Will Crawl.  This is the original version of the song (and music video!) from the Never Let Me Down album:

And here’s the reworked version from 2008 and released on the iSelect album…

I find the later version an incredible upgrade from the original and, having heard it, any doubts that Never Let Me Down could be a more successful album were gone.

Which brings us back to what I wanted to talk about here: The fourth David Bowie Box Set album, titled Loving the Alien, will feature a -surprise, surprise!- re-working of Never Let Me Down!

That’s right, folks, not only will we get remastered versions of Let’s Dance, Tonight, and the original release of Never Let Me Down, along with two live shows and a bunch of b-sides/singles, we’ll also get a complete re-working of that much maligned album.

If it winds up sounding like the Time Will Crawl re-working, I’m so there.

But a word of caution:  The re-working of the album was created, it is stated, in 2018, which is obviously following Mr. Bowie’s passing.  Clearly Mr. Bowie wanted to do this but one has to wonder how much -if any!- of the album’s re-working was done and approved of by him before his passing.

Still, of the now four boxed sets of Bowie’s work released, this is the one that has me the most curious.

Perhaps something many consider very bad might just get another critical look… and prove itself better than it originally was.

October, the boxed set’s release date, can’t come soon enough.

If you want to read more about the boxed set, including what exactly will be on it, here’s a link to an article by Daniel Kreps and found on RollingStone.com:

David Bowie’s Mid-Eighties work collected in massive Loving the Alien boxed set

P.S. UPDATE:

Interestingly enough, I realized -belatedly and after originally posting- that the Never Let Me Down album, both as originally released and the 2018 version in the upcoming box set, does NOT include the song Too Dizzy, which was on the original album’s release.

Why?

It’s been said that of the songs on Never Let Me Down, Mr. Bowie really, really hated Too Dizzy and decided, after originally releasing the album, that it would be banished from any future re-issues.

So what does the song that Mr. Bowie hated enough to strike from Never Let Me Down album sound like?

Glad you asked:

Yup.  I can see why he wouldn’t want it back.  Pretty generic pop and certainly not up to the level of other Bowie works.