Never Let Me Down

Never Let Me Down
Studio album by David Bowie
Released	21 April 1987 (1987-04-21)
Recorded	September–November 1986
Studio	Mountain (Montreux, Switzerland) Power Station (New York City)
Genre	Pop rock art rock hard rock
Length	53:07 (CD) 48:06 (LP)
Label	EMI America
Producer	David Bowie David Richards
David Bowie chronology
Labyrinth (1986) Never Let Me Down (1987) Tin Machine (1989)
Singles from Never Let Me Down
"Day-In Day-Out" Released: 23 March 1987 "Time Will Crawl" Released: 15 June 1987 "Never Let Me Down" Released: 17 August 1987

Never Let Me Down is the seventeenth studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released on 21 April 1987 through EMI America Records. Co-produced by Bowie and David Richards and featuring guitarist Peter Frampton, the album was recorded in Switzerland and New York City from September to November 1986. Bowie's goal for the project was to record it differently following his disappointment with 1984's Tonight. Musically, Never Let Me Down has been characterised as pop rock, art rock and hard rock; Bowie himself considered the record a return to rock and roll music. The cover artwork features Bowie surrounded by numerous elements from the songs.

Released with different runtimes on vinyl and CD, Never Let Me Down was commercially successful, reaching the UK top 10; its three singles all reached the UK top 40. Despite this, the album was poorly received by fans and was met with negative reviews from critics, with most criticising the "overblown" production.^[1] Bowie supported it on the Glass Spider Tour, a world tour that was at that point the biggest, most theatrical and elaborate tour of his career. The tour, like the album, 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 rock band Tin Machine in 1989; he did not release another solo album until Black Tie White Noise in 1993.

In later decades, Never Let Me Down is generally regarded as one of Bowie's weakest releases. The track "Too Dizzy" has been deleted from subsequent reissues due to Bowie's dislike of it. Throughout his lifetime, Bowie was critical of Never Let Me Down, distancing himself from the arrangement and production of the finished album. He expressed a desire to remake it numerous times, eventually remixing "Time Will Crawl" for the career retrospective iSelect in 2008. Its remixer, Mario J. McNulty, brought Bowie's idea to remake the whole album to fruition in 2018. Released as part of the box set Loving the Alien (1983–1988), Never Let Me Down 2018 features new production and instrumentation over Bowie's original vocals. Reviewers consider the new version an improvement over the original album.