Tonight by David Bowie

Tonight, David Bowie's studio album for 1984, arrived on EMI America that September as the follow-up to Let's Dance, the biggest seller of his career. He made it fast, writing and recording in mid-1984 at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Canada, straight off the Serious Moonlight Tour, co-producing with Derek Bramble and Hugh Padgham and bringing back much of the same crew. Bowie played no instruments himself, and the result is glossy, danceable pop with a blue-eyed soul sheen and flickers of reggae and R&B, built to hold on to the new fans he'd just won.

He wrote only two new songs on his own. Iggy Pop hung around the sessions and co-wrote two tracks, and three covers of older Bowie and Pop songs include the title track, sung as a duet with Tina Turner. "Blue Jean" is the keeper, a jaunty, strutting rocker, and "Loving the Alien" the ambitious one. It went to number one in the UK, but critics found it short on ideas, and Bowie himself later agreed it wasn't one of his stronger efforts.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.