David Bowie | Space Oddity | The Man Who Sold the World | Hunky Dory
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars | Aladdin Sane | Pin Ups | Diamond Dogs | Young Americans
Station to Station | Low | "Heroes" | Lodger | Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) | Let's Dance | Tonight | Never Let Me Down
Tin Machine | Black Tie White Noise | The Buddha of Suburbia | Outside | Earthling | 'hours...' | Heathen | Reality | 'hours...'
The Next Day | ★ | Changesonebowie
- Backed by the Pentagon: The battering ram tanks at the end of the "Day-In Day-Out" music video were provided by the Los Angeles Police Department; Bowie only told them that they were going to demonstrate how foreclosed houses were demolished without giving away that it was a Take That! towards that very policy.
- Better Export for You: With the sole exception of the 2018 remix, almost all Japanese releases include a Japanese-language version of "Girls" as a bonus track, slotted between "Zeroes" and "Glass Spider".
- Bury Your Art: While Bowie expressed open regret for much of his output during the '80s, he reserved his strongest, yet least-vocalized vitriol for "Too Dizzy", banning it from ever seeing the light of day again after the album's original 1987 release. This had the effect of ruling out any attempts to improve the song on the 2018 Remix Album, which redid the songs' instrumentation to fulfill Bowie's years-old desire to redo the record. Bowie's labels and his estate have adhered to his request to this day, not even including it in the otherwise comprehensive Boxed Set Loving the Alien (1983-1988), which includes both the original version of the album and the Remix Album, the latter of which was specifically made for the boxed set. Bowie himself dismissed "Too Dizzy" as a throwaway song and described it as his least favorite track on his least favorite album, while biographer Nicholas Pegg attributes the self-imposed ban to the song's unintentionally creepy lyrics, being a jealousy song that accidentally came off as a stalker anthem.
- Creator Backlash: Like Tonight before it, Bowie had hardly a kind word to say about Never Let Me Down in the years following its release. Songs from it were left off of Changesbowie (though they would appear on later Greatest Hits Albums), none of its material was performed live after the Glass Spider Tour wrapped up, and even his official website initially omitted it from his discography. In particular, Bowie's distaste for the album's penultimate track, "Too Dizzy", has become the stuff of legends among his fans, to the point where he banned it from reissues.
- Executive Meddling: The album's severe overproduction can be attributed to EMI still wanting to cash in on the 80's pop rock sound that made Let's Dance a success, despite that same pressure being a major factor in the poor quality of Tonight. Because Bowie took an "indifferent" approach to the album's production, the executives and co-producer David Richards were free to stuff it with as much synthesizers and gated reverb as they pleased.
- Extremely Lengthy Creation: Bowie wanted to "redo" the album ever since the supporting tour for it wrapped up at the end of that year, but the idea was put on hold for over three decades. Reeves Gabrels encouraged him to hold off on the idea in '87 because it had been too soon since the original album released, and a second attempt at a redo in 1996 never got past the planning phase. Eventually, Bowie hand-picked several musicians for the project shortly before his death in 2016, and they put together a Remix Album two years later that replaced almost all the instrumental tracks with ones more in line with Bowie's original intention for a Revisiting the Roots album.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: "Too Dizzy", the album's penultimate track, was removed from all reissues at Bowie's request. As a result, the only way to hear it without entering the realm of piracy is to obtain an original 1987 vinyl/CD pressing. Bowie himself described the song as a throwaway piece that he was surprised got included on Never Let Me Down in the first place, and reportedly stormed out the first time he heard the finished song. Some have also speculated that Bowie grew uncomfortable with the album's lyrics over time; the song is meant to be sung from the point of view of someone hopelessly in love with a person already dating a guy, but certain lines (i.e. "it's me or no other" and "you can't have no lover") make the narrator come off more as a yandere.
- Rarely Performed Song: Bowie never performed anything off of this album again after the conclusion of the Glass Spider Tour in 1987, owed to the immense Creator Backlash he held towards the record.
- Refitted for Sequel: Of a sort. During the original album's production, Bowie got the Borneo Horns to record a part for "Day-In Day-Out", only for their work to later be replaced with synthesized horns for the final release. For the 2018 version, Mario McNulty was able to find and restore the Borneo Horns' recording for the new version of the same track.
- Similarly Named Works: Despite sharing a release year and having similar titles, the album and title track are unrelated to the Depeche Mode song "Never Let Me Down Again".
- What Could Have Been:
- The original tracklist of the album, as devised in 1986, was considerably different from the final release, the two biggest differences being the absence of the Title Track (which had yet to be recorded) and the inclusion of the extended version of "Girls". By 1987, "Girls" was relegated to B-side status, being replaced by the title track; a Japanese-language version of the song would be included on the Japanese release, though. The song order is also considerably different as well; the full 1986 tracklist is as follows:1. "Beat of Your Drum"
2. "Day-In Day-Out"
3. "Time Will Crawl"
4. "New York's in Love"
5. "Bang Bang"
6. "Shining Star (Makin' My Love)"
7. "Glass Spider"
8. "Too Dizzy"
9. "'87 and Cry"
10. "Girls (Extended Edit)"
11. "Zeroes" - Shortly after Never Let Me Down's 1987 release, Bowie publicly expressed his excitement to return to the studio immediately after the then-upcoming Glass Spider Tour, aiming to create a more musically experimental follow-up in the vein of the Berlin Trilogy. However, the disastrous critical and fan reception of both Never Let Me Down and the tour affected Bowie to such a degree that he dropped his plans for the follow-up album and instead formed Tin Machine as a means of artistically rejuvenating himself. Supposedly, the tracks "Lucy Can't Dance" & "Pretty Pink Rose" and a cover of "Like a Rolling Stone" were originally planned for inclusion on this aborted album, but were eventually repurposed in different forms on later projects.note Bowie would eventually make a Creator-Driven Successor to the Berlin trilogy in the form of 1993's The Buddha of Suburbia, but the one that was intended to follow Never Let Me Down never really came to fruition.
- "Shining Star (Makin' My Love)" and "Too Dizzy" were both considered for single releases (with Bowie suggesting the former and EMI considering the latter), only for both ideas to be dropped. EMI did, however, give "Too Dizzy" a promo release in the United States.
- The original tracklist of the album, as devised in 1986, was considerably different from the final release, the two biggest differences being the absence of the Title Track (which had yet to be recorded) and the inclusion of the extended version of "Girls". By 1987, "Girls" was relegated to B-side status, being replaced by the title track; a Japanese-language version of the song would be included on the Japanese release, though. The song order is also considerably different as well; the full 1986 tracklist is as follows:
- Working Title: "Time Will Crawl" was originally written as "How We War". The title track was also originally written as "Isolation".
