Nine Inch Nails with David Bowie - Back In Anger [2CD Set] (2016)

RADIO BROADCASTS FROM THE 1995 OUTSIDE TOUR The concert featured on this remarkable 2CD set finds the entourage playing at The Riverport Amphitheatre in St Louis, Missouri, on 11th October 1995. With the entire gig broadcast by local FM radio, the sound quality is second to none and the performance - by both artists - among the finest of the whole tour. Not previously released, this rare recording is finally available and will prove an enormously attractive release, allowing fans to relive an essential event in the careers of both artists.

By 1995, Bowie didn t want to tour again. Each of the last three times had been unhappy in its own way. However, Virgin Records believed Bowie finally had something with Outside and urged him to re-consider, at least doing a short promotional tour. So in May 95 he began rehearsing for a provisional half-dozen shows. He retained the core Outside group of Reeves Gabrels, Carlos Alomar and Mike Garson and hired a new rhythm section. Pleased with his band and intrigued to play his new material, Bowie agreed to expand the tour: six weeks in America and another four months, off and on, in the UK and Europe. Bowie crafted a radical set; over half of the songs were from a record that, for the first few weeks of the tour, hadn t been released. Bowie claimed his revived songs were obscure even to my oldest fans. Bowie mainly harvested from his late 70s works, an acknowledgement that the Berlin records had become the hippest Bowie albums of the Nineties and that he was bored with glam-era standards. Bowie s gambit was choosing Nine Inch Nails as his opening act for the US leg. He risked being blown off the stage and being made to look old, but he needed to upgrade the brand again. His management team had commissioned a survey of teenagers in the summer of 1995 and found the kids had a brutal disregard for history and legacies. By the summer of 1995, Nine Inch Nails had become the most popular industrial band in the US; The Downward Spiral and Pretty Hate Machine were both certified platinum, Closer was a constant on MTV and NIN had been touring almost non-stop for a year. Furthermore, Bowie had been flattered to read that Trent Reznor had praised him, saying he d listened to Low daily while making Downward Spiral. Although he was exhausted from touring, Reznor agreed to support Bowie. He later said he was terrified of the man at first, that he would inwardly recoil when seeing him backstage, not wanting to talk to him. Their lives had parallels though: both had been suburban misfits and dreamers, and both had done time in the minor leagues. Bowie s journeyman Sixties were similar to Reznor s Eighties, where he bounced between bands, got bit parts in movies and worked as a janitor/engineer at a Cleveland studio. Reznor in 1995 was where Bowie had been two decades earlier: famous, controversial, cracking up and hooked on cocaine. They soon bonded. On the Outside tour, Bowie quietly served as a grounding point for Reznor; he offered, in his music and his performances, the potential of a future. His main vice now was chain-smoking Gitanes. He seemed comfortable in himself, but he wasn t self-satisfied; he wanted a new audience, and was willing to work for them. He was confident enough, or unhinged enough, to risk embarrassing himself by howling about Ramona A. Stone on stage, instead of playing Changes again. Bowie and Reznor designed an interim sequence to bridge their sets. There would be no NIN encore. Instead Bowie, then his band, would join NIN on stage, then NIN would depart, leaving Reznor singing with Bowie s band.