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.
Bowie also found captivation with the Minotaur, a mythical figure from classical antiquity. He painted the figure throughout the early 1990s and, after seeing a New York Times article discussing it, incorporated it as a motif for Outside. By 1994, Bowie's interest in contemporary art grew to the point where he joined the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine. His interest in performance artists such as Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Ron Athey, Chris Burden, and Damien Hirst all influenced the new album's concept. Regarding the concept of death as art, Bowie told Vox magazine:
Recording and production
Initial sessions
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; some were entirely improvised. During the sessions, Bowie and Eno used experimental techniques previously utilised during the Berlin Trilogy sessions, such as the latter's Oblique Strategies cards – "part-fortune cookie, part-Monopoly 'Chance' cards" intended to spark creative ideas. Each one contained a written character, such as "You are the disgruntled member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that were suppressed." Bowie elaborated that the cards set the tone for each day, taking the music into "obscure" directions: "And it would very rarely lapse into the cliché." 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 Bowie biographer Marc Spitz: "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). He explained: "I used bits of poems and articles out of magazines and newspapers, and I retyped them out and put them into the computer...it spews it all back out again, and I make of it what I will." Each musician received their own corner of the studio, which Trynka states contributed to the overall arrangement "as an art happening". Discussing the studio atmosphere, Garson told biographer David Buckley: "It was one of the most creative environments I have ever been in. We would just start playing. There was no key given, no tonal centre, no form, no nothing." The sessions were also filmed by a camera crew; Garson commented that "[the crew] knew it was special on some level."
The backing tracks were completed in 10 days, while overdubs continued on and off until November 1994. Roughly 25 to 30 hours of material was recorded, which was initially edited down to two CDs worth of content: an "improvised opera" titled Leon. The material was mixed at Westside Studios in London. Eno initially wanted to release the work with black cover artwork and no name attached. Gabrels elaborated: "Let it leak that it was David Bowie but put it out as a completely separate entity, like Prince's The Black Album . Use it as a work of art and lapse something that creates interest for the next project." According to the biographer Chris O'Leary, the contents were bootlegged and resulted in Bowie's dismissal of the Leon concept. Gabrels commented on his website in 2003 that Leon "would have been a very serious musical statement, and maybe pissed off more people than Tin Machine".
Later sessions Bowie initially faced opposition from record labels due to the uncommercial nature of the Leon recordings. Gabrels told Buckley: "It was never said to me that it had been rejected for want of commercial material. I just thought the decision was made that [Leon] would have been insane to put out from a commercial point of view…and that we needed to rerecord some more songs." Bowie elected to record some more conventional tracks, for which sessions took place at the Hit Factory in New York City from January to February 1995. Songs recorded in New York included "Outside", "Thru These Architects Eyes", "We Prick You", "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town", "No Control", a rerecording of the Buddha track "Strangers When We Meet", and reworkings of "Hallo Spaceboy" and "I'm Deranged".
New personnel additions included the guitarist Carlos Alomar, Bowie's former bandleader who was fired following the 1987 Glass Spider Tour; Tin Machine contributor Kevin Armstrong on "Thru These Architects Eyes"; and the jazz drummer Joey Baron, whom Bowie felt was "so steady" that "metronomes shake in fear". Armstrong's song "Now", first attempted by Tin Machine during the sessions for their 1989 debut album, was adapted into the title track. Armstrong recorded his contributions at Westside.
Concept and story
The concept of Outside originated on 12 March 1994, during what Bowie called a "blindingly orgiastic" recording session. As the band improvised, he conceived numerous characters on the spot, playing each out "for maybe five minutes at a time". He later revealed that "almost the entire genesis for [Outside] is contained in those three and a half hours". In what Bowie labelled a "non-linear Gothic drama hyper-cycle", he developed a world where "art crimes", which Jason Draper of Dig! magazine described as "murder and mutilation for public consumption", pervade society, and "concept muggings" merit their own police division funded by the "Arts Protectorate of London".