by the end of the 20th century, bowie looked back at his time with the band as invaluable, saying "i had to kick-start my engine again in music. there’d been a wobbly moment where i could quite easily have gone reclusive and just worked on visual stuff, paint and sculpt and all that. i had made a lot of money: i thought, well, i could just bugger off and do my gauguin in tahiti bit now. but then what do you do — re-emerge at 60 somewhere? so i look back on the tin machine years with great fondness. they charged me up. i can’t tell you how much."