the future?

UPDATE 000202
EVEN MORE GOOD NEWS!!!!!!!!!

Rupert asks: What is the one thing your most looking forward to this year?

David:...Going back into the studio with Tony Visconti, number 2 would be rerecording lots of the didgy songs I wrote in the 60’s, 3 trying to piece together
'2. Contamination' the follow up to Outisde.
Live Chat with David Bowie,
Wed., Fenruary 2nd, 2000, Eden Chat.

UPDATE 991121
MORE GOOD NEWS!?
Q: ...We got a glimpse of these talents on "1.Outside"
and I, for one, would love to see more.

David Bowie: I am taking quite a bit of time off in the oncoming years
specifically for the purpose of writing up any number of ideas
that I have been picking over for the last while, including some straight prose.
And I'll also be slowly sifting through the '2. Contamination' tapes to see what is there (over 20 hrs!!!) and look at the possibilities for the next in the series.
Plus I'll be working throughout the year with Tony Visconti on a project that has 'no name' at the moment. So basically I'll be putting in a hell of a lot of creative time over the next while and, frankly, I'm very excited about it.

Information from Bowie Discourse, Q&A.
Thanks to Jane Gilmartin and BowieNet

UPDATE 991017
GOOD NEWS, OUTSIDERS?
Q: Will there ever be a follow up to 1. Outside?

David Bowie: Yes! Brian Eno and I recorded over 24 hrs of material.
Problem is to find the time to sift thru. 
We´e workaholics always have many projects going at the same time.

 Live Chat with David Bowie,
Sunday, October 17th, 1999, Zurich Switzerland

UPDATE 991014
"In the ensuing press conference to promote 'hours...'
and Bowie's performance later that night at Elysée Montmartre,
an interesting question were posed:

Q:(about followup to 1. Outside)
David Bowie: The follow up to Outside was indeed planned,
but Eno and I can't keep up schedules.
If you listened to the 25 hours of music we'd laid down for Outside
you'd be amazed: it's definitely great.
I'll be working on the Ziggy piece and another project that
I'm very excited with in the next 18 months.
The opera with Wilson is still in the air but Robert and
I will work on it when we know we can do it right with enough time ahead.

Information from teeanagewildlife.com

UPDATE 990720
Don't go holding your breath for the oft-mentioned rock opera based on the 1. Outside album. Gerard Mortier, director of the Salzburg Festival, who had been negotiating with Bowie and theatre director Robert Wilson over the past couple of years to bring the production to fruition is quoted this weekend as saying the project is effectively dead.
The interview in the Belgian magazine Humo reports Mortier as being very disappointed in Bowie. Apparently, after a few interesting talks on the direction for the play, Bowie failed to keep in contact with Mortier. Mortier is quoted as saying:

"Even my good friend Bianca Jagger tried to negotiate
but it seemed to be impossible to get Bowie to work for me for three weeks,
even for half a million dollars."

Information from Erik and teenagewildlife.com

BAD NEWS, OUTSIDERS!
There's a new album enititled 'hours ...' due for release in October. Although you'd have to honest and say the world is hardly holding its breath for it. He's just finished mixing but he underplays it as "yet another crop of shots." But it's not a sequel to the 1.Outside album which appeared in 1995, the first of an intended trilogy with rock boffin Brian Eno and ending in 2000, if we were to believe the publicity back then. "I can't even get started doing the next stuff on it. All together we have 25, maybe 26, hours of recorded music from that period. I keep moving on too fast. Nobody would take Outside when we first recorded it. It was held back for a year until we could find somebody to distribute it in America and by that time my enthusiasm was pretty thin on the ground. By the time it did come out I'd already started writing for Earthling [his 97 album]. My attention span is incredibly short."
He doesn't discount the trilogy being completed but ...

 from The New Zealand Herald
special thanx to Evan Torrie at teenagewildlife.com
UPDATE 990305
Hope you didn't ingest too much of that mountain of salt on the 2. Contamination track listing story. (see below) As indicated in the original story, we were awaiting a followup from the source to verify their authenticity. Based on our followups, we can now say that while the source may believe what they reported, there is no reliable basis for believing any of the information posted in that report. Apologies for the interruption in your rumour milling.
UPDATE 990304
This story needs to be taken with a mountain of salt rather than the proverbial grain, but an anonymous email message came into Teenage Wildlife's mailbox last night claiming to have the tentative track-listing of 2. Contamination, the followup album to 1. Outside. Claiming that the CD will be out by the end of the summer, the correspondent listed the following tracks:

  • (segue) A Brief Inquisition

  • Contamination

  • Ebola Jazz

  • A Fragmented Line

  • The Hive Of No Desire

  • (segue) The Mad Ramblings of Long Beard

  • Ill Refute

  • A Tribe From The Ghost Plains

  • Drawing A Blank

  • Mausoleum

  • Serengetti Song

  • (segue) The Fever Is Still

  • Dream Child

  • Crazed In The Hot Zone

  • Wiredlife

  • Verona No More

  • The Only Part Of My Days

these are fake!

fake1.jpg (97248 bytes)    fake2.jpg (218463 bytes)

 read the fake "contamination diary"
here!
special thanx to
oval
&
andrew broad

Some of these track names sound plausible given Bowie's claim in the past that one of the followup albums to Outside would be based on 17th century pirates. (Trivia: The CD will be released in a neon-green jewel case!) However we've never been contacted before by this particular source (so they have no history), and the message came from an inscrutable hotmail account. We're asking for more supporting details, but until then, you be the judge...
Information from Anonymous
special thanx to Dan Gallo and

Teenage Wildlife

UPDATE 981001
Q & A from BowieNet has a lot of interesting info!
Check this one item out for all you who keep asking me "What's up with Contamination??"

Q: Charlie Magnusson from skara, Sweden asks:
Hi David! The album that you and Visconti are working on,is it the follow-up to the Outside album? I'm getting quite desperate by now. Thank you for everything!

A: No, the proposed Visconti album is a quite separate thing to the
due-anytime-but-probably-not-for-a-while follow up to Outside.
It will still be called Contamination though. Reeves and I have sort of started writing a number of new ideas down, in batches of styles so I think we'll pick on one or another batch and that will become the basis for the Visconti project.
from David Bowie Newsletter #122 for the "Lazy and Web-Impaired"
UPDATE 980812
The director of the Salzburg Festival, Gerard Mortier, is quoted in the Austrian press today as saying that the work with David Bowie and Robert Wilson for the planned rock opera adaptation of the Outside album concept is "stagnating". Mortier said he wouldn't be willing to have the Festival finance Bowie's proposed stage design, and as a consequence progress on the development of the play has reached somewhat of an impasse.
Information from Doris 
UPDATE 980216
David Bowie 2. Contamination. (Virgin), the follow up to 1. Outside, this release will see Trent Reznor co-writing songs with David Bowie.
From theUnOfficial Nothing Records Web site 
UPDATE 980113
The third album will be called 'AFRIKAAN', according to the messageboard at davidbowie.com
special thanks to
ANDREW BROAD
WELL, WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE? WHO CAN TELL! WHEN I (YES, ME, ZIG DUST®) ASKED BOWIE AT THE NORWEGIAN INTERNET INTERVIEW WHEN THE NEW ALBUM WAS DUE, HE ANSWERED THAT IT
"HAVE TO BE OUT NEXT (1998) SPRING."
Obviously NOT (Zig Dust®)
THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THE ALBUM IS BASED ON A MADLY-LINGERING NARRATIVE TRACED BACK TO
17TH CENTURY INDONESIAN PIRATES:

"Brian and I formulated the story and decided to do the album with no other musicians, and not to meet while doing it. The music is going to be so very avant-garde that I didn't want to lay it on my band! We're still a couple of numbers short, but the theme is going to be incurable diseases. Diseases from 'the Hot Zone area' like Ebola, Aids and that new Tuberculosis that nobody knows what to do about. Those are our greatest enemies right now."

AND OUR FAVOURITE CHEERFUL CHAPPIE HAS ONE FURTHER WARNING:
"We're going to get even more esoteric. Art with a capital A!"

THE COMPLETED SERIES OF BOWIE'S MILLENIUM CHRONICLES COULD BE COLLECTIVELY PACKAGED WITH EXCLUSIVE MATERIAL IN THREE YEARS' TIME. THERE ARE SEVERAL HOURS' WORTH OF MATERIAL FROM THE OUTSIDE SESSIONS IN THE VAULTS, AND NOT ALL OF IT WOULD REQUIRE SIGNIFICANT COSMIC SURGERY BEFORE BEING DEEMED RELEASABLE, BUT ONLY 'NOTHING TO BE DISERED', 'GET REAL' AND THE ORIGINAL SHOWGIRLS FILM SOUNDTRACK VERSIONS OF 'I'M AFRAID OF AMERICANS' HAVE SURFACED SO FAR.

Also planned is a full Nathan Adler stage production, which Bowie hopes to put together with the American avant-garde director Robert Wilson. The Australian Cultural Chamber have asked the pair to unveil their 'piece of musical theatre' at the opening of the Salzburg Festival 2000.