Bowie’s album track Something In The Air from Hours was remixed with the addition of Mike Garson’s piano for the movie American Psycho.
I was drawn back to the oft-neglected Bowie album Hours when this song popped up unexpectedly in the Day of the Jackal reboot last night. The music supervisor on that show excels at digging up forgotten tunes like this.
Something In The Air (no relation to the Thunderclap Newman song) was one of the album’s best, and later reappeared in remixed form in the film American Psycho, with the welcome addition of Mike Garson on piano.
It had first appeared in 1999 on Bowie’s 22nd studio album Hours, an eclectic and self-referential song-based collection in the style of Hunky Dory.
Critics gave it a lukewarm reception but I regarded it as a welcome return to form after the drum’n’bass experimentation of Earthling (interesting, but would I ever play it again?).
It was one of the first by a major artist to be released first on the internet, via his BowieNet portal, before Virgin gave it a full CD release a couple of weeks later. It was also (not that I knew this at the time) first released as the soundtrack to a video game called Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
More pertinently, it brought an end to Bowie’s decade-long collaboration with noisy Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels, an overbearing figure – physically and sonically – who was always trying to steal the limelight with his squealy guitar breaks, invariably to the detriment of the song.
He also bullied Bowie, who seemed to be bafflingly in awe of him, out of calling the album The Dreamers (surely a better title) and vetoed his plan to use TLC as backing singers, which I would have LOVED to hear, in favour of a friend of his.
Little wonder that their relationship came to an end after this, with Gabrels unwittingly putting his finger on the problem when he said after Bowie’s death: “I was running out of ideas for him.” Mate, no one ever bought a Bowie album to hear YOUR ideas.
Thankfully, he’s been dialled down on this album, to the point where his solos are brief and almost tasteful, and it’s all the better for that.