Moments on the first of the two TM albums are amongst Bowie's very best - and are certainly head and shoulders above anything he'd done since Scary Monsters (with the possible exception of the Absolute Beginners and Cat People 12" singles).

Jazz/Rap album Mingus. A few of the tracks were OK as standalone pieces* but, overall, the experiment failed.

(* I'm thinking Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, Goodbye Pork Pie, God Must Be A Boogie Man)

A bonkers move, commercially, after The River. He had the world at his feet and simply kicked it away. Hat-tippage.

I haven't had the opportunity to post the cover of Kevin Rowland's "My Beauty" for months and here you are, practically daring me to do it...

Terrence Trent D'Arby - Neither Fish Nor Flesh
Paul Weller in a way you could argue the Style Council were a big step away from The Jam, certainly the early french/piano stuff
The Visitors by Abba, though that worked in my opinion, not so much chartwise.

Almost Blue, a record of country songs at a time when country was anything but cool. I quite liked it but the recent EC critique thread on here showed me to be in the minority.

Leonard Cohen - Death of a Ladies Man, lose the acoustic guitar and stripped back sound and get Phil Spector in as producer, it worked in parts but that was due to the words more than the music or style.

Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive, see Almost Blue but substitute "country" for "big band".

From proto-boyband popster, to left-field chansonnier, to what can only be described as...well, Tilt.

in more ways than one...

he played with Bono and the pope I think in a band called Passengers. Actually might not have been the pope but he was Italian.
They did one good track then some instrumentals.. bit disapointing really.

Did Bowie also offer the same excuse after Labyrinth?

apologise for nuffink

greatest pop star that ever was

Mind you, if it hadn't worked out I doubt that Paul McCartney would have owned up to it.

...I would have to nominate Talk Talk's shift from this

to this

(warning: starts with 18 secs of silence, do not adjust your set)

Few artists have been sued for releasing uncommercial albums, but TT are one of them.

Mark Hollis claims to have been been aiming for this all along, but could only do it when given unlimited studio time for what was to become Spirit of Eden.

get round the fact, no I did not (similar to the majority) like Tin Machine, that the Tin Machine band were the same bunch that played on Lust For Life and The Idiot, possible the two finest Bowie non-official-Bowie records.

Gary Numan actually did crash his and he did walk away.

Shame he couldn't do that with "No More Lies", the second(!)single he released with Shakatak's groovemeister general, Bill Sharpe.

went being the "Enola Gay" hitmakers to releasing Dazzleships, a quite frankly bizarre but very interesting album featuring Eastern bloc radio recordings, samples from Japanese TV adverts, Speak and Spell machines and submarine sonar. Naturally it bombed so in revenge Andy McCluskey foisted Atomic Kitten on the world.

Here's the title track

Nick Lowe, John Hiatt, Jim Keltner and Ry Cooder.

That line-up had already made perhaps Hiatt's greatest album 1987’s Bring The Family so on paper it should have been a monster.

In reality it was, if not a disaster, then a damp squib at best. To be fair I have several live shows from the 1992 US/European tour they did and the songs work much better live. But the solitary Little Village album languishes in the bargain bins these days.

All of them came back strongly from the experience though, especially Cooder.

Pink Floyd-Ummagumma (sides 3 and 4)

Cabaret Voltaire-Three Mantras (something of a 40 minute ambient dirge; they soon went back to shorter tracks)

Fiery Furnaces-Rehearsing My Choir (great pop band lurch into concept-album folly)

Goldie-Saturnz Return (jungle pioneer gets carried away; included a 60 minute track)

Wire-154 (debatable one this, as it has admirers, but I find this hard-going after the great song-based work of the previous albums)

Architects may walk away from their crashed plane, but the rest of us end up having to live with it.

"as an artist you can crash your plane and walk away..."

A mighty inappropriate turn of phrase if you don't mind me saying...I knew I never liked Eno.

In the spirit of the OP, though I'd nominate Weller. From the behemoth of punk n rock n r & b selling by the bucketload in The Gift, putting out an experimental french jazz odyssey LP with Cafe Bleu but survived and prospered.

Without Googling, who was the huge country star who revinented himself as a rocker who looked like a mutant Stephen King and thereby blew it?

XTC have a top ten single, a top 5 album, are touring the world to ecstatic mass audiences, and are generally seen as one of the best live bands in the country. Shortly, everyone assumes, they'll break into the big leagues, along with the Police, U2, etc...

Whereupon, Andy Partridge promptly has a nervous breakdown, runs off stage at a French gig, retreats to his home in Swindon, and refuses to play live ever again. Their drummer - always an "uncomplicated" chap - quits in disgust, moves to Oz and becomes a builder.

The band wait a year before releasing "Mummer", one of the most wilfully uncommercial sidesteps imaginable. One or two of the songs ("Me and the Wind", anyone?) are virtually avant garde music. The others are, variously, pastoral acoustics (a couple of decades before it was cool), reggae pastiche, Indian music, cod-psychedelia.. you name it, and if it was off the commercial radar, Andy Partridge wanted to try it. Guess what? It tanks.

XTC never have another top 20 hit in Britain again. By 1986, their spoof psychedelic side project is outselling the album they've made under their own names. It takes an accidental blasphemy controversy - concerning an unregarded B-side of the 12-inch version of a single - in the USA, before their most commercial/together album for years ("Skylarking") starts to sell anything.

Now *that's* what I call a plane crash...