“Full establishment acceptance meant that I started to strangle myself artistically.”
The massive success of Let’s Dance turned David Bowie into a global superstar. As a songwriter and performer, Bowie had repeatedly proved himself to be a supremely adaptable creature. But he found this transformation to be the most difficult of all to manage.
“Before Let’s Dance I had always felt quite happily balanced on the edge of mainstream popular music,” Bowie told journalist Robin Eggar in 1991. “But full establishment acceptance meant that I started to strangle myself artistically.
“I really liked the money I was making from touring, and it seemed obvious that the way that you make money is give people what they wanted, and the downside of that is that it just dried me up as
