David Bowie’s 1. Outside at 31

Last week, the 31st anniversary of the release of 1. Outside quietly passed on September 25th. On that day, friend of the blog Marc Lowe released the new piece of music embedded above, “Minotaur (Still Lost in His Lair).” I thought I’d use the occasion to re-post some of my past interviews related to 1. Outside, which you can link to below.

Marc and I have had an ongoing fascination with the album. He has recorded some straight-up covers, but has also used the album, and its antecedent, The Leon Suites, as inspiration for an ongoing series of musical pieces that take the handoff from Bowie. “Minotaur” is such a work.

I’m deliberately not calling “Minotaur” a song, though the word would accurately apply. I think of some of Marc’s more esoteric music more like a book, or perhaps like a performance piece, than what I normally think of as a song, let alone a pop song. The music of Marc that has the most Marc in it demands concentration. If that’s how you approach this, you’ll find a Byzantine web of references, characters, and evocative, if partially articulated scenarios.

1. Outside itself is very much an artifact of the mid-1990s. I didn’t quite appreciate that at the time, and I fear that the further we get from its contextual time, the less obvious that aspect of the album becomes. Time permeates the album, and a key moment is during a segue, when the character of Nathan Adler mutters:

A person who loses a name
Feels anxiety descending
Left at the crossroads, between the centuries
A millennium fetish

One of the things the album captures, which is difficult to articulate these days, is the smoldering sense of dread, that something “horrid” (as Baby Grace might say) was about to happen at the turn of the century. The very word, “millennium,” carries with it an outsized set of implications, not the least of which being the thousand-year period of Christ’s reign on Earth prophesized in the Book of Revelation. That comes after the end of the world as we know it, so, ya know, anxiety descending.

Bowie’s world of Outside is already dystopian. In this respect, it is similar to that of Diamond Dogs, which is not about the world of 1984, but more like 1983. That album ends with the masses calling for Big Brother. Big Brother hadn’t taken the stage yet. The chaotic world seemed so intolerable that a sensible end of a date was to jump in the river holding hands. 1. Outside is like that in that it murkily conjures up a nightmare world of murder as art and ape men with metal parts. But things seemed to be on the verge of change, and change is not always good.

Marc Lowe is making his art from the other side, from that changed world. All the concern about what was going to happen on January 1, 2000 was off by about one year, nine months, and 11 days. But the world did turn upside down, and the sequence of events that has since unfolded has brought us to a dystopia made real. Characters like Elon Musk, with his plans to abandon Earth for Mars and abandon humans for a new breed of cyborgs, were, perhaps, too unbelievable even for Bowie. (Actually, Musk and his ilk benefit from seeming unbelievable even today.) Marc has latched on to an unclear reference from the character of Baby Grace to “brain patches” — she might not even be saying that— and has connected that to his original, recurring character of Elias Mouse, a stand-in for Musk. Bowie’s 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman, in which he called the then-nascent internet “an alien life form” that was going to change all aspects of life, has seemed in retrospect to be prophecy. Marc Lowe’s Minotaur is about that alien life form running amok.

To be clear, that’s not just what Minotaur is about, and it might even be a mistake to say it is about anything in particular. It is a very atmospheric work. Its words are certainly coherent, but they are not all equally easy to pick up. In that respect, Marc is like Bowie on 1. Outside (and more so on Leon).

1. Outside continues to be an album that inspires a mixed reaction. It is one of Bowie’s albums that I listen to most, but certainly a lot of people don’t like it. I’m pretty sure I have had more episodes of my interview show about this one album than any other (Ansalam Muhammad’s Album to Album is more a show about Bowie’s albums anyway). But if it was too easy, and too universally likable, it wouldn’t be doing what it does. And it wouldn’t have left as much for the artists to work with, and the writers to write about.

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Below are some great interviews, in alphabetical ordfer of my guests last names, that focused on 1. Outside. Check them out if you missed them:

Jennifer Elster, May 31, 2025

I visited conceptual artist Jennifer Elster at her exhibition The Classics at the Development Gallery in Manhattan for an on-site interview about her work designing the looks of the characters Bowie portrayed on 1. Outside while she was still a college student. We explored how her clothing and visual designs helped Bowie transform himself into figures including Baby Grace, Ramona, Algeria Touchshriek, and Nathan Adler, making the album’s imagery and characters integral to its larger conceptual world. Our conversation also considered the connections between 1. Outside and Elster’s subsequent multimedia art, particularly their shared engagement with dystopia, protection, war, uncertainty, and the increasingly blurred boundary between imagined futures and lived reality.

Prof. Nicolas Greco, May 2, 2026

I spoke with Dr. Nicholas Greco, Provost and Professor of Communications and Media at Providence University College and author of David Bowie in Darkness: A Study of 1. Outside and the Late Career. We discussed his interpretation of 1. Outside as a response to the cultural anxiety of the 1990s, including its themes of violence, body modification, ritual, uncertainty, and the blurring of reality and artifice. Our conversation also explored Greco’s use of semiotics to understand Bowie as a constructed and continually reinterpreted figure, along with Bowie’s fluid identity, relationship with his audience, and tendency to create meaning through ambiguity and liminal spaces.

Marc Lowe, June 21, 2025

In this interview, Marc and I discuss Bowie and dystopia, the subject of a course he was teaching at the time in Japan. We explore dystopia as a recurring theme in Bowie’s work, particularly Diamond Dogs and 1. Outside, and how Bowie drew on influences including George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs, and Weimar-era German expressionism to engage with disturbing tendencies already present in contemporary society. We also consider Marc’s own approach to adapting Bowie’s music and how dark art can make familiar realities newly visible, drawing attention to conditions that might otherwise become normalized without necessarily offering solutions to them.

Alex Storer, August 22, 2026

I spoke with Alex about his book Inside Outside: The Deconstruction of David Bowie’s Gothic Hypercycle, which traces the development, making, touring, and legacy of 1. Outside from its origins in the Leon project and Bowie’s early-1990s creative resurgence. We discussed the album’s nonlinear narrative, characters, pre-millennial anxiety, and unusual combination of music, spoken passages, fiction, and theatrical ambition, as well as The Buddha of Suburbia’s role in the creative path that led to it. Alex also discussed the Outside tour, Bowie’s determination to resist becoming a legacy act, and his own research and design process for creating a book that reflects the album’s dark and fragmented aesthetic.