Since Bowie’s old label EMI wasn’t interested in releasing the record, the band wound up going with Victory, an ill-fated Japanese startup label whose collapse in 1994 began TMII‘s long sojourn in the wilderness.
Tin Machine II was the work of a four-person partnership: each band member owning a piece of it. Instead an album that he released in 1991 fell out of his hands, and he didn’t seem too bothered by it. You’d think if securing Tin Machine II had been important to him, he would’ve put his financial adviser Bill Zysblat on the case at some point. Was Bowie, in his later years, okay with its twilight existence as a used record store CD staple and unauthorized YouTube upload? After all, he did a massive securitization deal in the ’90s to buy out Tony Defries’ share of his music, and after the MainMan debacles of the mid-’70s, he’d watched his finances and copyrights like a hawk. And TMII remains a fugitive from the streaming age-it’s not on Spotify nor anywhere else, I believe. The fact that a Dutch label was apparently able to do a legitimate reissue last year without Reeves Gabrels or even the Bowie estate knowing beforehand speaks volumes. Part of its oddness is the album’s quasi-bootleg status for much of the 21st Century-it was out of print for well over a decade and who actually controls the rights to it at present remains rather mysterious.
Time hasn’t been much kinder to it, though I have seen reappraisals here and there, and more of late. You may recall that it got little respect at the time of its release (its legendary Melody Maker pan ended with telling Bowie to “sit down man: you’re a fucking disgrace”). Tin Machine II, released thirty years ago today, is a strange thing to commemorate.