A Year With Bowie [Part 6]

In 1975, Bowie was a mess. The recording sessions for “Station to Station” saw him suffering from severe bouts of psychosis, not helped by his excessive drug use. Aborted attempts to produce a soundtrack album for the film “The Man Who Fell to Earth” did not help his situation, and so in an attempt to recover, Bowie retreated to the Swiss Alps to a large house at Clos-des-Mesanges. Here, unable to relax, he threw himself head-first into the 5,000 book library, obsessed with the development of his intellect. By the end of June, Bowie was climbing the walls, but salvation arrived in the form of a visiting Iggy Pop. Together, the two decamped to nearby French studio Chateau D’Herouville, where as the mood took them they recorded “The Idiot”. Recording at night, Bowie was musically in control whilst Iggy sat writing lyrics on the studio floor. It was out of this free-form approach that Bowie started preparing his own masterpiece – Low.

It was also around this time that Bowie started meeting with Brian Eno. Both at the time found themselves heavily inspired by the sounds of Neu! and Kraftwerk coming out of Germany, and whilst Low does not resemble musically the sound of Berlin, it certainly does in approach – treating music as a soundscape, rather than structured pieces, seeing the blank page as a challenge rather than an obstacle. When Tony VIsconti arrived to work on the completion of The Idiot at Hansa Studios in Berlin, the nucleus of the Low team was formed.

Hansa Studios, situated in West Germany, is adjacent to the Berlin Wall. Visconti remembers that from the control room, he could see over the Wall, spying red guards in their gun turrets. The guards would sit there with powerful binoculars, as star-struck as anyone to see who was working that day. Once The Idiot was mixed, Bowie returned to Switzerland, soon joined by Eno. Before long, a call had been put out to Visconti, asking if he wished to be involved in a very different album – short, conceptual songs, with a flip side of ambient music. Visconti: “the three of us agreed to record with no promise that Low would ever be released. David had asked me if I didn’t mind wasting a month of my life on this experiment if it didn’t go well”. Did it go well? Need you even ask.

In his wonderful book (which I really should credit given how much I have pinched from it), Hugo Wilcken likens the intro to “Speed of Life” to “as if you’d arrived late, and arrived on a band in session”. Huge confidence is displayed in this instrumental (Bowie’s first), with its heavily treated drums, fading just at the point where you were expecting the vocals to kick in. “Breaking Glass” is even shorter, lyrically abnormal (“don’t look at the carpet, I drew something awful on it”) with harsh sonic bursts. Again, the song fades leaving you wishing there was more. Straight from the get-go this is radically different to anything Bowie had produced before, despite the hints seen in “Station to Station”.

And the moment of sheer genius. For what it counts, in my opinion “Sound and Vision” is pure, unadulterated perfection, an effortless celebration of the beauty of music, one of the reasons I would give Bowie a big kiss on those thin lips should I ever meet him. Wilcken again calls it a “pop song with quotation marks”, but I would argue that despite the doo-wops and jingly guitars, it is far from an ironic piece. Instead, it is three minutes and three seconds of pure joy, heaven-sent keyboards and a tight, repetitive riff of blissful delight. The quality remains throughout side one, the Neu! themed “A New Career in a New Town” taking us into the ambience of side two.

Where can you begin to describe Warszawa? It is the only piece where Eno shares a writing credit, laying down a track with 430 metronome clicks as an improvised pulse. On another track, Visconti would call out the click numbers, chords and sections coming in at randomly picked clicked intervals. Over this comes the music – early Roland and Yamaha keyboards, chamberlain and heavily treated guitar and piano. The initial melody came from Visconti’s son, sitting at a piano one afternoon playing the same notes over and over. The bulk of this heavy hearted, yet strangely uplifting piece was recorded in Bowie’s absence in Paris. Upon his return, Eno played him the tape and Bowie demanded a mike, recording his vocals in the style of a record by a Balkan boys’ choir he had in his possession. The end result is wonderful, bearing a resemblance to Scott Walker’s “The Electrician”, another piece Bowie cites as a major influence at this time.

The other ambient tracks are almost as powerful. Bowie states that “Art Decade” is inspired by West Berlin, a song that descends into its own oblivion. “Weeping Wall” is perkier (sounding to me like the “you have just entered a shop” music from the videogame “Secret of Mana”), and then “Subterraneans” which starts very Eno, ending with a child-like Bowie crumbling at the albums conclusion.

Low is an incredible album. It is impossible to describe how the album makes me feel, such are its bi-polar qualities. It strips music down into its component parts, and remains Bowies highest achievement. However, as an artist he has this tendency to come and go in waves. Towering achievements are usually countered by a slow descent, characterised by the two weaker albums that followed.

Whilst often described as a trilogy, Heroes and Lodger are nowhere near as good as Low. Heroes is the better album, not just for the staggering power and intensity of the vocal on the title track. Often described as the greatest performance yet recorded, his voice reaches a fever few could help to emulate. And I know that this is going to sound like pure madness, but even better in my opinion is “Heroes / Helden”, found on the “Christiane F.” soundtrack album. The switch into German at the halfway interval is majestic; there is something slightly magical hearing Bowie belting out the words in the guttural language of Berlin.

The other actual songs on “Heroes” are patchy. “Beauty and the Beast” is poor and annoying, “Joe the Lion” not a patch on anything from Low. “Sons of the Silent Age” takes us back to the Bowie we thought we’d left behind in Aladdin Sane, “V-2 Schneider” the only hint of anything fresh and new. However, the ambient pieces, although slightly shabbier than those found on Low, are good. “Sense of Doubt” is unsettling, sounding slightly cobbled together, whereas “Moss Garden” is soothing and elegant. It’s a shame he didn’t call it a day with the peculiar “Nuekoln”, as closing track “The Secret Life of Arabia” is an absolute clunker.

Lodger is also another notch down in quality, sounding more akin to studio off-cuts. Also, calling it part of the ‘Berlin’ trilogy is actually incorrect, the majority of it recorded in New York and Switzerland. The most interesting aspect is the artwork, the cover shot intentionally rendering Bowie ugly and broken. “Fantastic Voyage” is a reasonable enough start for those who like the show-tunes (resembling the songs recorded for the film ‘Labyrinth’), but “African Night Flight” is just awful, an annoying mixture of bad music and indulgence.

The highlight by a country mile is “Boys Keep Swinging”, a nod for what was to come with “Scary Monsters”, a foot-tapping, indeed swinging piece with a scintillating bass part. “Look Back in Anger” is also good, fast-paced and intricate, “Repetition” interesting with its varied guitar parts and bouncing bass-lines. Elsewhere though, this album represents Bowie going through the motions, songs like “Red Sails” and in particular the dire “DJ” offering little new.

Also of interest from this period is the afore-mentioned soundtrack album Christiane F. It is practically a compilation of this time in his history, a clearing of the decks before he rolled up his sleeves (literally, if the ‘Dancing in the Streets’ video is any indication) for the eighties. The biggest point of interest is the wonderful live version of “Station to Station”, faster paced that the studio version and well worth a listen.

Seeing Bowie’s career like this, in a chronological order, is highlighting to me how cylindrical his career seems to be. Any original bursts of creativity are usually followed up by ever decreasing circles of the not so great, watered down version of his surges of talents. As with Ziggy Stardust, the follow up albums never quite make the grade, as he seems to tread water until the next big idea comes along – almost as if he needs something new to take his fancy to re-ignite his muse. And so we leave Bowie, with the 70′s firmly behind him, into that most wonderful of decades, the 80′s.

Low 95%
Heroes 60%
Lodger 49%
Christiane F. 57%

A Year with Bowie [part 1] [part 2] [part 3] [part 4] [part 5]