Outside Tour

The Outside Tour, with David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails co-headlining, opened on 14 September 1995 at Meadows Music Theatre - Hartford, CT with Prick as support band. On selected dates Reeves Gabrels performed songs from his album, The Sacred Squall of Now in addition to performing with Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie. The opening of the concert tour preceded the release of the 1. Outside album which was released on 25 September 1995.

In a 2012 Rolling Stone reader's poll, the tour (pairing Nine Inch Nails with Bowie) was named one of the top 10 opening acts in rock history.^[1]

Tour history

This tour was Bowie's first since he retired his hits with his previous Sound+Vision Tour (1990). Bowie said, "We're going to play some older material, sure, but not obvious things. I found, while rehearsing for the [Outside] tour, that older songs I haven't played for years suddenly fit in with this new material quite well - things like ... "Joe the Lion." So I'm quite looking forward to it."^[2] Other songs from Bowie's back catalog that he performed during the tour include "Scary Monsters", "Look Back in Anger", "Andy Warhol" and "Breaking Glass".^[3]

Bowie spoke on why he chose to tour with Nine Inch Nails:

I personally did like the combination of NIN and me, but my fans didn't. Bad luck!! It also was an extremely young audience, between about 12 and 17 years old. My starting point was simply: I've just made an adventurous album, what can I do now to turn the concerts as adventurous. Looking at it in that way, it seemed logic to confront myself with the NIN audience. I knew it would be hard to captivate them by music they never heard, by an artist whose name was the only familiar thing.^[4]

Trent Reznor has gone on record numerous times as being heavily influenced by David Bowie,^[5] and further collaborated with Bowie by remixing "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" and later on 1997's "I'm Afraid of Americans" single. When asked in 1995 if his album Outside was influenced by Nine Inch Nails, Bowie answered, "the band that I was actually quite taken with was three guys from Switzerland call The Young Gods ... I’d been aware of them previous to knowing about Nine Inch Nails."^[6]

Set design

For the tour, Bowie went with a modest stage design ("some banners, some mannequins") and avoided the theatrical presentation like his previous Glass Spider Tour in 1987 and Sound+Vision Tour in 1990.^[3]

Performance notes

Bowie opened an interview for the tour with USA Today on the opening day of the tour, on 14 September 1995 with the question "How do you commit commercial suicide? Well, you do this: play songs from an album that hasn't been released yet, and complement it with obscure songs from the past that you've never done on stage."^[7]

During the tour, as Nine Inch Nails reached the conclusion of their performance, the two bands played together with both Nine Inch Nails and Bowie and his band performing "Subterraneans", "Hallo Spaceboy" and "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)", followed by two Nine Inch Nails songs "Reptile" and "Hurt" after which Bowie continued with his own set alone.^[5]

Early in the tour, the "almost 100% Nails audience" provided a challenge to Bowie, who said "In those first weeks, we had to adjust emotionally to the fact that we were going to be challenged every night to get in sync with what people were coming to the show for. But then you start to recognize that if you're going to continue, you'd better enjoy what you're doing. The more we did that, the more it communicated to the audience. That's how it went from survival to being a good tour."^[8]

Other opening acts

For the European leg of the tour, Morrissey was enlisted to provide support until his disappearance before the Aberdeen Exhibition Centre performance on 29 November 1995.^[9] The support slot was filled on later dates by The Gyres, Echobelly, Placebo and a variety of local bands.

Live recordings

The 13 December 1995 performance at the National Exhibition Centre (Hall 5) - Birmingham, England, billed as the Big Twix Mix Show with Alanis Morissette, Lightning Seeds and Echobelly supporting was filmed by BBC TV with excerpts broadcast at a later date.

Tour band

• David Bowie - vocals
• Reeves Gabrels - guitar
• Carlos Alomar - guitar
• Gail Ann Dorsey - bass guitar, vocals
• Zack Alford - drums
• Mike Garson - piano
• Peter Schwartz - synthesizer, musical director
• George Simms - backing vocals, keyboards

Tour dates

Songs

Notes

References

• David Buckley, Strange Fascination: The Definitive Biography of David Bowie, Virgin Books, 1999, ISBN 1-85227-784-X