Outside (stylised as 1.Outside and subtitled The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper Cycle) is the twentieth studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released on 25 September 1995 through Virgin Records in the United States and Arista Records, BMG and RCA Records in other territories. Reuniting Bowie with the musician Brian Eno following the late 1970s Berlin Trilogy, the two were inspired by concepts "outside" the mainstream, such as various outsider and performance artists. Recorded throughout 1994, the experimental sessions saw Bowie conceive a world where "art crimes", such as murder, pervade society. The resulting Leon project initially faced resistance from labels due to its uncommercial nature. The project's bootlegging led to additional sessions in 1995 to revise the concept and record more commercial material, inspired by a diary Bowie wrote for Q magazine.
Influenced by the television series Twin Peaks, the nonlinear narrative of Outside concerns the residents of the fictional Oxford Town, New Jersey, and follows the detective Nathan Adler as he investigates the murder of a 14-year-old girl. The tracks show perspectives of specific characters, while spoken word between-song segues convey more character ideals; the story and Adler's diary entries were presented in the album's CD booklet. Musically, Outside displays styles from art rock, industrial rock and jazz, to electronica and ambient. The album cover is a self-portrait of Bowie.
Released at the height of Britpop in the UK, Outside received mixed reviews from critics. While most praised the music, others found the concept pretentious and hard to follow. Nevertheless, many considered it Bowie's finest record since 1980's Scary Monsters. Outside peaked at number 8 in the UK and number 21 in the US. The lead single, "The Hearts Filthy Lesson", performed poorly but the following singles, "Strangers When We Meet" and a remix of "Hallo Spaceboy" featuring Pet Shop Boys, performed well in the UK.
Bowie supported the album through the Outside Tour, but was criticised for not playing older hits. Multiple planned sequels to Outside never came to fruition, leaving the album's story on a cliffhanger. Instead, Bowie used musical ideas from the album and tour for his next record, Earthling (1997). Retrospectively, Outside has received more positive assessments, with most continuing to praise the music but criticising the story and length. The album was reissued in 2003 and remastered in 2021 as part of the box set Brilliant Adventure (1992–2001).
Background and inspiration
David Bowie formalised his marriage to the model Iman in a June 1992 ceremony that featured numerous celebrity guests, including the multi-instrumentalist Brian Eno, whom Bowie previously worked with on his late-1970s Berlin Trilogy. Primarily known for his work in the ambient genre at that time, by 1992, Eno was a highly respected producer, working with bands such as U2 on Achtung Baby (1991). The BBC's radio presenter John Peel commented: "He's one of those people...who has drifted into a kind of elder statesman media role where people take everything he says terribly seriously." At the wedding, Eno expressed interest in working with Bowie again after he gave him a tape that showcased the styles Bowie would explore on his then-upcoming album Black Tie White Noise (1993). After Eno listened to Bowie's The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), the two agreed to collaborate.
Bowie and Eno prepared for the new project in late 1993, which included sending each other ideas. The former's Tin Machine bandmate Reeves Gabrels recalled that one was the equivalent of "a mathematical problem". According to the author Paul Trynka, the ideas formed "harked back" to Bowie's musical findings during his first trip to America in early 1971. Looking for inspiration, the pair visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna, Austria, in January 1994, which contained a wing whose patients were well known for their "outsider art". Bowie later told Interview magazine: "Some of them don't even do [their art] as an expression of themselves; they do it because their work is them." The experience gave the upcoming album its title.
Recording and production
Initial sessions
thumb|upright|alt=An older bald man with glasses|Bowie's primary collaborator for Outside was the producer [[Brian Eno (pictured in 2015), who previously worked with Bowie on his late-1970s Berlin Trilogy.]]
Recording for Outside began in March 1994 at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. Production was handled by Bowie, Eno and David Richards, the co-producer of Never Let Me Down (1987) and The Buddha of Suburbia. Bowie and Eno were adamant about creating something different from the Berlin albums. The latter explained: "We don't want to make another record of a bunch of songs. There's got to be a bigger landscape in play than that." Returning Bowie collaborators included Gabrels on guitar, Erdal Kızılçay on bass, and Mike Garson on piano. Also returning from Black Tie was Soul Asylum drummer Sterling Campbell, whom Bowie described as "spontaneous and extremely inventive. [He] plays a song differently every time; there are different shades of his teacher, Dennis Davis."
Departing from the process of Bowie's most recent works, the majority of the tracks were composed on the spot in the studio; Eno stated that this was done as a way for the musicians to "free you from being yourself". Garson and Gabrels responded favourably to the cards, but Kızılçay was opposed at first, finding them confusing and useless. He later complained about Eno's methods to the biographer Marc Spitz, stating "he cannot even play four bars...[nor] play two harmonies together. [...] I don't know how he became so famous."
Bowie primarily painted during the sessions. According to Eno, he "almost sat out on the first few days of that record. [...] We were creating musical situations and occasionally he would join in if it became interesting." In his diary entry dated 3 March 1994, Bowie wrote that he was happy with the current musical direction and had plans to remake the Buddha track "Dead Against It", although this never came to fruition. To compose the lyrics, Bowie ran words through an Apple Macintosh program, which mirrored the William S. Burroughs-inspired cut-up technique he had previously used for albums such as Diamond Dogs (1974). Bowie described Adler, the protagonist, as an individual who uses nostalgia to look back on simpler times: "He's really rather despondent that things are broken into this fragmented chaotic kind of state." O'Leary considers the character "more terse" on Outside than in Leon. Adler's perspective is shown in "The Hearts Filthy Lesson", "No Control" and two segues. Adam Trainer of PopMatters similarly described the music as "chiefly industrial and trip hop, as filtered through the lens of art rock". Other styles recognised by Bowie's biographers include dark ambient ("Leon Takes Us Outside"), acid jazz ("The Hearts Filthy Lesson"), funk ("I Have Not Been to Oxford Town", "The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty)"), avant-garde jazz and classical ("The Motel", "A Small Plot of Land"), and conventional pop ("I Have Not Been to Oxford Town", "Strangers When We Meet"). Certain tracks, such as "The Hearts Filthy Lesson", "I'm Deranged" and "We Prick You", combine elements of jungle and drum and bass, genres Bowie fully explored on his next studio album, Earthling (1997).
Buckley says the album's overall sound is "dense and textural, underpinned by a booming rhythm section". Writing for Rock and Roll Globe, Lee Zimmerman stated: "The music flow[s] in a continuous surge of sound and expression, a forward thrust that left little room for melody, but shared an intriguing atmospheric ambiance instead." The author James E. Perone finds many tracks act as "mood pieces" for the entire album rather than as standalone tracks. According to the writer Alan Franks: "The songs have a slow, careful build into the pay-off line but they're absolutely not written as pop songs and they're not particularly written as rock songs. It's almost like what Jacques Brel would be going now if he'd gone heavy." Biographers have also compared certain sounds on Outside to Bowie's previous albums, such as Diamond Dogs, Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters (1980), and Tonight (1984). Nicholas Pegg characterises the segues' musical styles as mostly ambient, with guitar, piano and synthesiser backings. Trainer commented that they "speak to the role of the Leon suites in the development of Outside". Additionally, Virgin acquired the rights to Bowie's work from Let's Dance (1983) to Tin Machine, reissuing them throughout the rest of the year with bonus tracks. In Britain, Bowie entered a new deal with BMG, who issued Black Tie and Buddha in the country. BMG were now affiliated with RCA Records, Bowie's label throughout the 1970s and whom he had departed in 1982.
"The Hearts Filthy Lesson" was released as the lead single on 11 September 1995. It was accompanied by a music video directed by Samuel Bayer that was initially banned from MTV due to provocative imagery. Commercially, the single performed poorly, peaking at number 35 on the UK Singles Chart and number 92 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Pegg and Trynka state that Bowie desired to display a video of "artistic merit" rather than for chart appeal.
Outside, stylised as 1. Outside – The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle, was released on 25 September 1995 by Virgin America in the US and Arista, BMG and RCA in other territories on LP and CD formats. Commercially, Outside peaked at number 8 on the UK Albums Chart and number 21 on the US Billboard 200; Bowie's profile in America had been raised through the popularity of Nirvana's MTV Unplugged version of "The Man Who Sold the World", as well as artists who cited Bowie's influence such as Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson. Due to advance orders, Outside became Bowie's fastest-selling album since Tonight.
thumb|upright=1.1|alt=Two older men, one bald and one wearing a silver hat and sunglasses|For its release as a single, "Hallo Spaceboy" was issued in [[remixed form featuring the English duo Pet Shop Boys (pictured in 2013).]]
Bowie promoted Outside through various television appearances. "Strangers When We Meet" was issued as a double A-side single with a new recording of "The Man Who Sold the World" mixed by Eno on 20 November 1995. It reached number 39 in the UK and was supported by a music video, again directed by Bayer. Bowie performed the song at the European MTV Awards the same month. "Hallo Spaceboy" was released as the third and final single on 19 February 1996 in a new remix featuring the English duo Pet Shop Boys. The idea originated from Neil Tennant, who added lines referencing Major Tom from "Space Oddity" (1969). Pet Shop Boys subsequently appeared in the song's video, directed by longtime Bowie director David Mallet, and performed the song with Bowie at the Brit Awards in February and on Top of the Pops in March. The single itself performed well commercially, peaking at number 12 in the UK. The remix later replaced "Wishful Beginnings" on the March 1996 European reissue of Outside titled 1. Outside Version 2.
Art-Crime Comic
Anticipating that the narrative of the album might be inaccessible to fans when it was released, one of the record executives in Mexico, Arturo López Gavito, commissioned a comic to clarify the story. The comic, a one-off called Art-Crime, was created by two young illustrators, Victor "Pico" Covarrubias and Jotavé (Jazmin Velasco-Moore). It was given away with the CD.
Context
In 1995, the UK music scene was dominated by Britpop bands such as Suede, Blur, Pulp and Oasis, all of whom were indebted to Bowie's 1970s works. In his book The Last Party, the British journalist John Harris states, "David Bowie was a far greater influence on Britpop than any artist of the '60s." Pegg writes that while older artists such as Paul Weller and Adam Ant were releasing successful Britpop records in 1995, Bowie stood in tangent with industrial rock artists like Nine Inch Nails and techno artists such as Tricky, Goldie and the Chemical Brothers. Buckley says that the only record that was stylistically similar to Outside at the time was Scott Walker's Tilt, released four months prior.
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Critical reviews of Outside were mixed on release. While the majority praised the music as challenging, many felt the overarching concept was hard to follow, Among positive reviews, critics considered Outside Bowie's best record since Scary Monsters. A writer for Time Out magazine elaborated: "[The] edifice of sounds, cultures, rhythms, samples and textures, with randomised lyrics that don't much tell a story as create word-moods, regards the open-minded listener with Bowie's best album for 15 years." In The Daily Telegraph, Charles Shaar Murray welcomed "an excellent David Bowie album, a genuine creative rebirth. Threatening and murky... His gift for the charismatically disturbing seems to have reasserted itself." Later on in Mojo magazine, Murray considered it Bowie's "official" comeback album, praising the music as a callback to the Berlin Trilogy and concluded: "[It's] a mad, bad, dangerous album – by turns, chilling, pretty, ugly, scary, gripping and vastly intriguing."
Some reviewers found the music among Bowie's most innovative; a writer for Melody Maker announced that Bowie "is poised to be a healthy influence once more on a fifth generation of glamorous chameleons." An NME reviewer stated, "Bowie's scalpel is certainly closer to the pulse than for years." Other publications, such as Today, considered Bowie's vocal performances throughout the record some of his finest. David Fricke of Rolling Stone appreciated the lyrics as "smart", "effective" and "sly", especially on "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town" and "A Small Plot of Land".
Other reviewers expressed more mixed assessments. Entertainment Weeklys David Browne found the majority of the record sounding like "fodder" and felt that it would benefit from a visual aid, such as through tour performances. The American leg concluded at the end of October. The tour's partnership between Bowie and Reznor facilitated the latter's undertaking of numerous Outside and Earthling remixes, as well as his appearance in the music video for "I'm Afraid of Americans" (1997). as part of the series Brilliant Live Adventures (2020–2021).
Legacy
Proposed sequels
The story of Outside ends on a cliffhanger,
Having recorded hours of extra material during the sessions, he considered releasing a companion album to Outside before revealing in early 1997 that the follow-up would be called 2. Contamination, and had sketched out characters for the project (including some "17th-century people"). He also mentioned the possibility of releasing an album called Inside which would have been a making-of about Outside: "Our working method [will be] detailed on it, a couple of jams and more of those voices." However, none of these projects came to fruition; in 1999 the satirical newspaper The Onion posted a series of letter-writing campaigns to celebrities and one of them was addressed to Bowie, asking him to complete the Outside storyline. Following his experience on the Outside Tour, Bowie took musical ideas and themes from Outside and utilised them to create Earthling.
In 2016, one day after Bowie's death, Eno recalled: "About a year ago we started talking about Outside—the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that."