After the mega-platinum success of last year's serious moonlighting, Bowie has bounced back into the studio and come out with an album called Tonight. Philip Bashe spent a considerable amount of time in that studio speaking to the individual musicians working with him, the producers that put the sounds together and Ziggy Bowie himself

David Bowie's got something here. Know how to tell? It's when employees at his own record company sidle up to you after you've just sampled an advance cassette of the new Tonight and ask worriedly, "Well, what do you think?" Not the usual hyperbole ending with a predictable "best thing he's ever done," blah blah woof woof. The label sounds... concerned over its artist's latest direction — no Christmas bonuses this year, perhaps.

David Bowie's face would have registered a self-satisfied grin.

Bowie strayed from his customary trail-blazing on last year's "transitional" (read: wishy-washy) Let's Dance. That it yielded multiplatinum sales was probably due more to the frenzy that greeted Bowie's return to the front line than to its actual content. Bowie's always been a renovator of styles rather than an innovator, but Let's Dance merely reiterated his fascination with American Soul and R&B, a form he first essayed on 1975's Young Americans.

At times on Let's Dance, Bowie seemed like a quest at his own session, with much of the album's vitality supplied by Texas Blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, though it was Bowie's brainstorm to juxtapose Vaughan's seemingly disparate style with his own. And further credit goes to producer Nile Rodgers, if only for supplying the splendid rhythm section of bassist Carmine Rojas and drummer Tony Thompson, both of whom accompanied Bowie for the six-month Serious Moonlight 83 world tour. In general Bowie seemed to be easing his way back into music after three years spent on stage (in The Elephant Man) and in film (The Hunger and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence). Sone calculation also played a part in Bowie's tentativeness.

"He came into Let's Dance to give his new record company exactly what it wanted," asserts guitarist Carlos Alomar, Bowie's colleague since 1974. "EMI was a brand new company in America for him and they wanted to push him, and so he was determined to deliver a hit, to take his sound and pin it down. 'You want a hit? I'll bet you I can do it.' And he did it."

Now there's Tonight, the thin white Ziggy's 22nd LP: all sparse guitars and keyboards, a plethora of strings and brass, and marimba on four tracks. And four of the nine songs are Bowie-Iggy Pop collaborations. What's going on here?

Ask Bowie, who these days resides in Lucerne Switzerland, with his son Joey (formerly Zowie), now 13.

"Whereas Let's Dance was a stripped-down exercise to get away from synthesizers and such, Tonight is really a chance to write with Iggy again. We periodically get together and throw ideas around, and this was one of those occasions. I'm not sure that Rock & Roll features so very strongly on it. In fact, it is rhythmically an eclectic record, moving from Reggae through ballads to harder Rock.

"The arrangements," Bowie continues "are in fact the most conventional I have worked with. I guess they sound unusual in context against so many unconventional instrument uses that one hears today."

That's how Bowie generally worked in the past: relying on instinct and entering the studio with broad ideas and fragments of songs. But for Tonight, his approach was radically different.

"He did an unusal amount of preproduction this time," says Alomar, who's in charge of rehearsing and arranging the rhythm section. "We had excellent demos to work from. The only song that was totally conceived in the studio was Dancing With the Big Boys With that one it was, 'One, two, three, who knows what's going to happen here?"'

One of Bowie's talents is his intuition not only for determining which musical style to manipulate, but for picking personnel as well. For Tonight, recorded at Montreal's Le Studio, he tabbed Derek Bramble, an unproved 23-year-old British producer. (Hugh Padgham, praised by Bowie as "one of the great 'steady-as-a-rock' engineers I have had the pleasure of working with," also receives a co-production credit.)

"Let's Dance was a stripped down exercise to get away from synthesizers and such"

Bowie calls Bramble "a great instrument dabbler, plucking great little riffs out of the air and placing them on just the right line."

Though Tonight covers a range of styles, it's a balanced by a discernible conceptual thread: tuneful melodies backed by powerful, danceable rhythms and topped with exotic instrumentation. That Bowie was ready to record so soon after the tour's end took the band members by complete surprise; he'd mentioned nothing when the tour finished up in the Far East last February. Bassist Carmine Rojas was about to fly to Germany for some studio work when "out of the blue came this call: 'David Bowie needs you in Montreal in two weeks.'

"I said, "Shee-it, "laughs Rojas, who had to cancel several sessions. But, as you'll find with most musicians offered the opportunity to work with Bowie, it was a sacrifice he was more than willing to make.

It's an honour working with the man," says the bassist, whose lengthy list of credits includes Stevie Wonder, Carly Simon, Mick Jagger and currently John Waite. "He has a certain way of working that's great. For instance, he'll say, 'let's go into this Brazilian thing,' and we'll all be Brazilian. Then he'll come back and do something like Eskimo Folk music over it! It's very much art, like Dadaism or Surrealism; like, the way that when you first hear Let's Dance, you think it's a dance cut, when in fact it's really a political song."

Bowie, born David Robert Jones 37 years ago in Brixton, was introduced to the concepts of Dada during his tenure with the Lindsay Kemp mime troupe in 1967, and he's held on to those ideals throughout his career. What could be more Dada than the pallid Bowie with his Cockney accent affecting the deep, husky croon of Jerry Butler on his album of what he jokingly called "white plastic Soul," Young Americans?

"I encapsulate things very quickly," Bowie has said. "And generally my policy has been that as soon as a system or process works, it's out of date. And I move on to another area."

Bowie's refusal to be bound to a particular genre is another attraction for the musicians on his albums, for he bestows on them as much freedom as he allots himself, particularly on Tonight.

"Keeping in mind my original instructions, everybody was then given the chance to improvise for his own instrument, and all the musicians jumped at that chance. I found myself in the very unusual position of sitting down and letting everybody get on with it. It was sort of frightening in a way to relinquish my usual very tight control over who plays what and how. But I really wanted to try it out, so I just sang a lot and enjoyed the process as an enthusiastic listener."

"Once David gave an instruction," says Rojas "we'd go to it like termites to wood. There was nothing written in front of you, so you got to play and create more — whatever you wanted, within the format of the song."

Rojas recorded his parts with a 1968 Fender Telecaster bass with DiMarzio and EMG pickups, plus two ESP basses, also fitted with EMG's. Rojas was recorded both direct and through a Yamaha bass amp for an ambient sound.

Drummer Omar Hakim, who participated on the Let's Dance sessions and most recently played with Weather Report, had his Yamaha kit recorded exceptionally hot.

"We put the drums through some very old compressors," explains Bramble, who used two Studer 24-track A800 tape machines, "and just compressed the hell out of the high end to make it sizzle. If you'd taken out the drums and just played the track with the compressors up, you'd have thought you were listening to eggs frying."

Carlos Alomar used an array of guitars: Alembic stereo electric, Steinberger prototype, acoustic, Spanish and 12-string. Amplification consisted of two Roland JC-120s and for effects, he employed two Yamaha E-1010 digital delays, Ibanez UE-400 and UE-405 multi-effects units, and two Electro Harmonix 230 guitar synthesizers. In this era of guitars that sound like every instrument but, Alomar opted for a fairly traditional and lightly textured sound.

"I didn't want too much of a synthesized sound," he explains. "I wanted to keep it balanced because of the horns on the album. And I didn't use the real heavy-duty power, because David's always screaming, 'No Heavy Metal!'"

Alomar played virtually all of the guitars on Tonight and details his unorthodox method of devising parts.

"I'll start off with the Alembic guitar and play one very complicated part, and from that I'll break it down into three parts and then play them all separately. This way you have your stereo placement: one guitar on the right, the other guitar answering on the left, and one guitar playing everything in the middle of the mix. It keeps the sound very interesting."

Co-producer Bramble contributed the guitar solo on I Keep Forgetting, an update of a 1962 Chuck Jackson hit.

"I put my guitar through one of those little toy speakers, miked it up, and it had such a tacky sound that it was definitely what we wanted."

Bramble also played bass (on Loving the Alien) and, with the exception of the Fairlight CMI, all keyboards: Yamaha DX7, Oberheim OB8, Roland Jupiter-8 and PPG Wave 2.2. In a typical Bowie break from convention, real strings were used in lieu of synthesized simulations, Arif Mardin conducting a 20-piece section made up of members of the Montreal Philharmonic.

In all, the sessions took just four and a half weeks, including the guest appearance by Tina Turner on the title track. That too, says Alomar, was a model of expediency.

"She came in and sang, and I said, 'Honey, you sound great.' We went out to dinner, figuring it was just a reference vocal and that we'd put down the real thing when we got back. But it sounded so good, we left it."

Is this the same man who sang about the inevitability of George Orwell's predictions in 1984? Tonight, like Let's Dance, is an uncharacteristically buoyant Bowie album. Ironically, after such bleak records as 1974's Diamond Dogs, which envisaged a world bent on self-destruction, Bowie's newfound optimism comes at a time when his earlier prophecy seems truer than ever.

"I have always found it more interesting to work in an area that was being ignored or abandoned by other bands and writers," says Bowie about his changed perspective. Of his earlier, bleaker works he says in retrospect, "It often looked like an intelligent overview, but it just remains what it is, a mixture of artistic conceit and contrariness."

On his duet with Turner, so bracing is the music, that Bowie turns Iggy Pop's macabre pledge of devotion by a deathbed into a silly love song. And on Neighbourhood Threat which sounds as if the band was whisked directly off stage and into the studio, Bowie, often accused of iciness, discards his polished delivery in favour of a sweaty Rock & Roll leer. After years of shielding his emotions behind stage personas and layers of make-up, this Bowie can sing convincingly of passion, apparently reinvigorated by last year's tour.

"Very much so," says Rojas, to which Alomar adds, "I'd never seen him so happy on a tour."

"Years ago," Rojas reveals sheepishly, "I used to think he was a wimp vocally." He laughs. "But he was so desperate at times on the tour. He had a kick-ass band behind him, and he just grabbed the mike and sang like he was on fire."

Both conjecture that Bowie's having ancillary careers has preserved the challenge of making records. Bowie says simply: "Firstly, I have to make records; I am first and foremost a writer, singer and musician. The record making process is euphoric, depressing and utterly fascinating all at the same time. When I'm doing it, I want out. When I'm not, I am looking for any chance to get back in the studio.

"It's bewildering."

Bowie, usually self-deprecating about his role as a musician, may shrug off the impact of his records, once saying, "I have no message whatsoever; all I do is suggest some ideas that will keep people listening a little bit longer." But those statements are probably just some more of his shock tactics. And a few listens to the quietly adventurous Tonight will tell you:

David Bowie's got something here.