“A GARAGE BAND WITH A BUDGET!”
At first, the clientele in an unassuming downtown bar in the Bahamian capital of Nassau might not have paid much attention to the musicians who took to the stage one night in May 1989. They certainly wouldn’t have recognised the band’s name. “We’re Tin Machine and we’ve being writing a lot of songs,” says the bearded singer, by way of an introduction. “We’re gonna road test a handful of new ones.” As it transpired, the freshly minted Tin Machine are finishing their debut album at Compass Studios, just down the road, and have decided to road test a handful of new songs. “We just literally stole the equipment from some American covers band and went, ‘We’ve got David Bowie here,’” recalls rhythm guitarist Kevin Armstrong. “Then we played to a room of dumbfounded American tourists.” Space is at a premium. There’s so little room that producer Tim Palmer, wedged between Bowie and lead guitarist Reeves Gabrels, has to mix the live sound from the stage. Bassist Tony Sales, who formed the rhythm section with his brother, Hunt, remembers it as “a real small place, really tiny. There were maybe 25 people there, no more than 30. You could see people nudging each other: ‘Is that David Bowie ?’”
Though the band made their official live bow a few weeks later, at the International Music Awards in New York, the Nassau gig was a perfect illustration of the Tin Machine aesthetic – free-flying, spontaneous, unexpected. Their debut album, released that same month, similarly favoured raw noise over studio polish.
Tin Machine was a radical shift for Bowie in the ’80s. The decade hadn’t quite panned out as he’d imagined. Willingly or otherwise, the huge success of 1983’s Let’s Dance, and its attendant Serious Moonlight Tour, afforded him a status he wrestled with for the next five years. Feeling trapped by megastardom, he needed an escape route.
“Tin Machine was a garage band with a budget,” says Tony Sales. “Pinstripes and ‘Purple Haze’.
