David Bowie's wax figure at Madame Tussauds dressed as in the "Serious Moonlight Tour"In 1981, Bowie released "Under Pressure", co-written by and performed with Queen. The song was a hit and became Bowie's third number one single as well as one of Queen's all time classics. The song appears on the Queen album Hot Space. In the same year Bowie made a cameo appearance in the German movie Christiane F, wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, the real-life story of a 13 year-old girl in Berlin who becomes addicted to heroin and ends up prostituting herself. Bowie is credited with "special cooperation" in the credits and his music features prominently in the movie. The soundtrack was released in 1982 and contained a version of "Heroes" sung partially in German.
Bowie then scored his first truly commercial blockbuster with Let's Dance (1983), a slick dance album with co-production by Chic's Nile Rodgers. It was a departure from Scary Monsters for which Bowie received a bit of inside criticism; rather than revolting against 1980s dance music, he had definitely joined the scene. The title track went to number one in the United States and United Kingdom: due to its popularity, many now consider it a standard. The album also featured the singles "Modern Love" and "China Girl", the latter causing something of a stir due to its suggestive promotional video. "China Girl" a was remake of a song which Bowie co-wrote several years earlier with Iggy Pop, who recorded it for The Idiot. Let's Dance is also notable as a stepping stone for the career of the late Texan guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, who played on the album and was to have supported Bowie on his new world tour for the album The Serious Moonlight Tour. The tour was a huge success, and one concert actually scored Bowie a million dollars on its own. Vaughan, however, never joined the tour after a pay dispute between Bowie and Vaughan's manager at the time. Vaughan was replaced by Earl Slick.
The 1984 follow-up album Tonight was also dance-oriented, featuring collaborations with Tina Turner and a cover of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows". Critics slammed it as a lazy effort, dashed off by Bowie simply to recapture Let's Dance's chart success. Yet the album bore the transatlantic top ten hit "Blue Jean" whose complete video, a 22-minute short film directed by Julien Temple, reflected Bowie's long-standing interest in combining music with drama. It also featured the minor hit "Loving the Alien". The album also has a pair of dance version rewrites of "Neighbourhood Threat" and "Tonight", old songs Bowie wrote with Iggy Pop which had originally appeared on Lust for Life.
In 1985, Bowie performed several of his greatest hits in a memorable performance at the Wembley leg of Live Aid. At the end of his set, he introduced a film of the Ethiopian famine, for which the event was raising funds, which was set to the song "Drive" by the Cars. At the event, the video to a fundraising single was premiered – Bowie duetting with Mick Jagger on a version of "Dancing In The Street", which quickly went to Number 1 on release.
In 1986 Bowie contributed the theme song to the film Absolute Beginners. The movie was not well reviewed but Bowie maintained for many years that the song, a UK Number 2 hit, was one of the best and most professional he'd ever written. He also took a role in the 1986 Jim Henson film "Labyrinth" as Jareth, the Goblin King, who steals the baby brother of a girl named Sarah (played by Jennifer Connelly), in order to turn him into a goblin. Bowie wrote songs for the film, some of which became singles.
Bowie's final dance album was Never Let Me Down (1987), where he ditched the light dance of his two earlier albums, instead throwing himself into harder rock with a dance edge. The album, which 'only' scraped to a UK #6 peak, drew some of the harshest criticism of Bowie's career, condemned by critics as a faceless piece of product and ignored by the public—Bowie himself openly apologised in an interview for the album's quality; defenders of the album maintain that many of its songs are underrated and that Bowie at this time was simply facing the inevitable backlash of an overexposed superstar.
The Glass Spider World Tour sought to market the album; however, critics slammed it as being too silly, overproduced, and pandering in its special effects and dancers. However fans that saw the shows from that Glass Spider tour were treated to many of Bowie's classics.