Q & A with DAVID BOWIE : ‘Music [ Has] Started to Become . . . Bold and Muscular Again’

David Bowie’s 1983 album “Let’s Dance” and its two successors brought the English singer his greatest commercial success, but their hollow craftsmanship left him artistically unfulfilled. Bowie became so disengaged that he virtually deserted music, turning to painting and other visual arts.

Now he has reunited with producer Brian Eno for his ambitious new album “Outside,” a multilayered drama involving ritual murder and the end of the millennium. In another high-profile collaboration, Bowie is on tour with Nine Inch Nails, whose Trent Reznor is one of many young rock artists to acknowledge Bowie’s influence . They’ll be at the Forum on Oct. 28-29.

During a recent interview, Bowie, 48, traced his return to the arena.

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Question: How did you respond during that time when your records were successful but you were creatively dissatisfied?

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Answer: I kind of enjoyed my life to an extent personally. I indulged a lot in what I like doing best I think, which is traveling. I went away a lot. I was ending up in places like Java and Bali and just taking a four-wheel drive. It’s almost like maybe I ran away from the situation to a certain extent.

Q: How did you get into the situation to begin with? Were you seduced by the success of “Let’s Dance”?

A: It’s very nice being liked that massively. I must admit that it was like, “Oh lord, I wonder what kind of thing [audiences] want to see,” and all that. So it kind of left me in a doldrum there. But again I think it’s a confluence of events. I mean it also wasn’t a very enterprising time generally for music, and I do find that I tend to work in a spirit of competitiveness. If there’s some kind of musical conversation going on out there, you can’t shut me up and I tend to want to be part of it and contribute to it. It seemed kind of flaccid in the mid-’80s.

Q: Does it feel different now?

A: Yeah, it feels very exciting now. Ever since the late ‘80s I think music started to become really bold and quite muscular again.

Q: Why do you think that’s the case?

A: It’s interesting. I think probably a new generation finding its own feet. I think confronted with the kind of chaotic scenario that this particular society reveals to a young generation, there’s almost a period where they were sort of standing rather on the outside looking at what they should do to survive in this particular place, and it’s almost as though they’re starting to pull their findings together and creating a culture for themselves and a way of entering the next century.

Q: Is touring with Nine Inch Nails providing validation for you with this generation?

A: I don’t know. The expectations are zero for me because I’m going in very much at the deep end on it. . . . For me this is as exciting as being involved in the album. I’m working with material that either I’ve never done on stage or material that has always been more obscure, lesser-known things, like “Joe the Lion,” “Teenage Wildlife,” which aren’t big-deal songs, but that work well within the context of the 10 or so pieces that I’m doing from “Outside.”

Trent and I have been working on a piece where we work together in the show, and it’s just great. It feels so good. He’s a very focused young guy, and he’s got a pretty keen intelligence. It feels like we’ve worked together quite a lot. I mean we work very comfortably together. . . . Trent kind of chose things of mine that he really likes, and I reciprocated likewise, and I think we’ve got something that we both feel incredibly comfortable with. It’s working out so well.

Q: The “Outside” album seems very attuned to current music and themes--alienation, psychological fragmentation, etc. Is there a fundamental idea behind it?

A: Really the idea was to develop a textural diary of these last five years [of the century]. It’s a pretty general landscape for lots of artists and lots of art forms at the moment. Pretty hard to avoid really, and I’m just in there somewhere.

Because I’m fairly passionate about the visual arts as well, it’s kind of been something that I’ve been quite aware of over the last 10 years or so--of the momentum toward ritualized art and body art. I’m really sort of extrapolating on that and taking it to--if we have murder as entertainment, which we most definitely do, whether it’s a court trial or whether it’s a cinema movie, it’s only a short step from that to art. . . . On the other hand the corpse itself could be the corpse of the 20th Century. I leave it way open for either allegorical or straight narrative understanding of what the thing’s about.

Q: You’ve described how you used a computer to randomize much of your writing--sort of a high-tech version of William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. Why is that suited to this work?

A: It’s incredible how pertinent Burroughs’ writing seems, and his way of layering spontaneous thought, one piece upon another. What he did back then in the ‘50s and ‘60s was incredibly prescient. . . . I always felt more comfortable in his scenarios and the way that he saw this untidiness of life, with no real meaning at all, where even the vague notion that we’re evolving seems somehow preposterous when we look at events. As though we’re going somewhere. Which I think is absolutely ludicrous. I think we just cope day by day.

Q: Why do you focus so much on the outsider elements of the culture?

A: I tended always to opt for the periphery of the mainstream, in anything. I think it has something to do with the idea of wanting to know the well-kept secrets. And I found as I got older that in fact looking at the outside elements of what makes our culture often gives a far truer picture than the iconic situation in the middle. Because it’s the pieces in the outside that actually come together and become what is the real culture.

I think the simplistic things in the middle are the absolutes that people want to move toward because they’re so secure-seeming--strongly defined things people find easy to understand. There’s no complications there, so they gravitate towards them. I don’t think it’s a reality. I think the reality is often all the mess on the outside.

Q: Are you subject to self-doubt at all? Do you wonder if there’s still a place for you?

A: Oh, frequently, yeah. One always has a vague notion of one’s transitory nature in this particular business, but so far, again, I’ve just been either extraordinarily lucky or there are enough people out there who still think that what I’m doing is sort of worth giving a listen to.