In the mid ’90s, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails went on tour with David Bowie. While this sounds like an amazing pairing, as Bowie told it, the audiences were initially a “nightmare.”
In an MTV interview, Carson Daly mentioned the tour with Bowie. “One of the best shows I’ve ever seen was in 1995,” the VJ said. “It was in San Francisco, California, and it was yourself and Nine Inch Nails.”
Bowie responded by confessing, “That was a weird one for me.” Continuing, he said, “I was very flattered and really knocked out that Trent was quite a fan of a lot of my earlier stuff… We got on really well, and he said, ‘Come out and do this thing with me,’ and all that.”
Even though he was really excited about the tour, it turned out to be a “really hard” experience. “The first three or four gigs—they were all on the East Coast—were just a nightmare for me because I didn’t understand what we were doing,” Bowie said.
“It all felt different for me. I’d never done anything like that,” he continued. “I’d never gone out with another artist like that before. It was really weird.”
Bowie was a big fan of Reznor, but felt like NIN’s “audience wasn’t particularly taken with me.” He added, “It took me the entire tour through till, well, I don’t know… Maybe by the time we got to Chicago, and I found my balance, it was great. The whole rest of that tour was fabulous, and I really loved it.”
Nine Inch Nails co-headlined the Dissonance tour in 1995
The rock icon shared a little about the “worst” show of the tour. “Funnily enough, one of the worst gigs was in New Jersey,” he said. “It was awful, but we went there.”
When asked what went wrong with the show, Bowie replied, “What went wrong? I turned up!” He then quipped that only Reznor was “on the wings” cheering him on. Bowie joked that he returned the encouragement with a stiff, “Thanks a lot.”
In a Rolling Stone interview following Bowie’s January 2016 death, Reznor reflected on his time with the late rocker and their tour.
“It’s hard to express how validating and surreal the whole experience of the Outside tour was,” he said. “To actually meet this man in the flesh and find out, to my delight, that he passed any expectation I had. The fact that he was this graceful, charming, happy, fearless character became a new point of inspiration for me.”
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