The Outside Tour, with David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails co-headlining, opened on 14 September 1995 at Meadows Music Theatre in Hartford, CT, with Prick as support band. On selected dates Reeves Gabrels performed songs from his album, The Sacred Squall of Now in addition to performing with Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie. The opening of the concert tour preceded the release of the 1. Outside album which was released on 25 September ‘95.
In a 2012 Rolling Stone reader’s poll, the tour (pairing Nine Inch Nails with Bowie) was named one of the top 10 opening acts in rock history.
The tour was Bowie’s first since he retired his hits with his previous Sound+Vision Tour (1990). He said at the time, “We’re going to play some older material, sure, but not obvious things. I found, while rehearsing for the [Outside] tour, that older songs I haven’t played for years suddenly fit in with this new material quite well – things like … ‘Joe the Lion.’ So, I’m quite looking forward to it.” Other songs from Bowie’s back catalogue that he performed during the tour include ‘Scary Monsters’, ‘Look Back in Anger’, ‘Andy Warhol’ and ‘Breaking Glass’.
Bowie discussed later why he chose to tour with Nine Inch Nails:
“I personally did like the combination of NIN and me, but my fans didn’t. Bad luck!! It also was an extremely young audience, between about 12 and 17 years old. My starting point was simply: I’ve just made an adventurous album, what can I do now to turn the concerts as adventurous. Looking at it in that way, it seemed logic to confront myself with the NIN audience. I knew it would be hard to captivate them by music they never heard, by an artist whose name was the only familiar thing.”