“I had become Musical Director, which I always hate. But I took the money and took the title and did the job!”: The Cure’s Reeves Gabrels on the time he became David Bowie’s touring MD
· louderBy Niall Doherty
( Classic Rock )
published 22 September 2024
Bowie needed someone to be his first lieutenant in the 90s, and his ex-Tin Machine bandmate was the person he turned to
Guitarist extraordinaire Reeves Gabrels has quite the decent CV. The New York native has long been a member of The Cure, joining the goth-pop, alt-rock titans in 2012, but in another life he was in David Bowie’s band too. Speaking to this writer a few years ago, Gabrels talked about his promotion in 1996 to Bowie’s Musical Director, a role he said he begrudgingly accepted.
“I had become Musical Director for the touring band, and I always hate that,” he comically explained. “It’s fine if you’re Mariah Carey and you’re playing in Las Vegas to have a Musical Director, but I don’t think rock bands should have one.” But David Bowie did have one, and it was he, so he made sure to put his stamp on it. One of the things I always wanted to keep with David was a bandness for the touring ensemble and not have it feel big budget or corporate or whatever it becomes when you start playing the enormodomes around the world. But I took the title and took the money and did the job!”
What that job entailed, he said, was making sure the music side of things was hunky dory, giving the Dame one less thing to worry about. “David, because he’s the guy at the top of the pyramid, has got other things to do. He’s got to do interviews. He’s got to get his picture taken for Vogue, he’s got all this other stuff to do and there’s only so many hours in a day so someone has to organise soundcheck,” Gabrels said, going on to explain that he was joining an illustrious lineage. “Mick Ronson did it for the years and then when the vacuum was created by Mick’s departure, Carlos Alomar did it. The thing David was doing when I met him was the Glass Spider tour and Carlos was the MD. By a bizarre chain of events, instead of doing another David Bowie thing, we did Tin Machine and because I was more involved in the production and co-writing, when Tony (Fox Sales, bassist) and Hunt (Sales, drummer) came in, I assumed what would’ve been a First Lieutenant role.”
Gabrels’ time in The Cure, too, can be traced back to his time as Bowie’s band: as he recalled here, he met Robert Smith for the first time when overseeing rehearsals for Bowie’s 50th birthday bash at Madison Square Garden. The Cure currently have no forthcoming shows in the calendar, but something is stirring: recently the band have been dropping hints that their long-awaited Songs Of A Lost World album is finally nearing release.
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Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.
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