David Bowie's Low

by Hugo Wilcken

  “That whole Station to Station tour was done under duress,” Bowie later said. “I was out of my mind totally, completely crazed. Really. But the main thing I was functioning on, as far as that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism was concerned, was mythology.” Essentially, Bowie’s interest in fascism wasn’t really political, it was just another offshoot of his loopy obsession with the occult: “The search for the Holy Grail. That was my real fascination with the Nazis. The whole thing that in the thirties they had come over to Glastonbury Tor. And naïvely, politically, I didn’t even think about what they had done.…It’s hard to see that you could get involved with all that and not see the implications of what you were getting into. But at the time I was obsessed with the idea that the Nazis were looking for the Holy Grail.”

  On February 11, after his Los Angeles concert, Bowie met up with the novelist Christopher Isherwood, a writer he admired. Isherwood’s best known novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, are in essence autobiographies of a bohemian young Englishman in Weimar-era Berlin (the latter was made into the movie Cabaret, starring Liza Minelli and Michael York). The Berlin cabaret life described by Isherwood—dancing in the face of imminent catastrophe—appealed to Bowie in the same way that Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies had appealed and had prompted him to write “Aladdin Sane.” And of course it was exactly that kind of atmosphere that had influenced the look of the Station to Station tour. The two talked at length, with Bowie pumping Isherwood for stories about Berlin—clearly already on his mind as a possible European refuge. Isherwood was rather discouraging: Berlin was quite boring even then, he told Bowie. And the decadent bohemia he portrayed in his books? “Young Bowie,” Isherwood waspishly pronounced, “people forget that I’m a very good fiction writer.” Nevertheless, Bowie would end up living fifteen minutes’ walk from Isherwood’s old Berlin flat. And to some extent he’d play the same sort of “decadent Englishman abroad” games as the young Isherwood had in the early thirties (with Iggy Pop as Sally Bowles to Bowie’s “Herr Issyvoo”).

  There were more Nazi shenanigans on April 2, when returning from a trip to Moscow, Bowie was strip-searched at the Russian/Polish border, and had biographies of Speer and Goebbels confiscated by customs officials (Bowie claimed it was research material for the Goebbels film). The Station to Station tour rolled into Berlin a week later, on April 10. Bowie had been there once before, to perform on West German TV in 1969, but didn’t know the city. He went into sightseeing mode, taking his presidential open-roof Mercedes on a tour of East Berlin, and then to Hitler’s bunker. Long after he moved to Berlin and had presumably outgrown his occult fixations, Bowie remained fascinated by the city’s Nazi past, seeking out remaining examples of Speer’s architecture, visiting the former Gestapo headquarters and so on. The Berlin tour stop found Bowie already slipping into the Isherwood role: it was then that he met transsexual cabaret performer Romy Haag (described by one biographer as “like Sally Bowles, only more so”), with whom he would later have a well-publicised affair.

  Back in England for the first time in over two years, Bowie courted yet more controversy at London’s Victoria Station by seemingly giving a Hitler salute (May 2). Bowie claims that the photographer caught him mid-wave, which is probably true, but he’d certainly opened himself up to the misrepresentation. An interview with Jean Rook in the Daily Express catches him furiously back-pedalling on his fascist pronouncements of a few days before. Here, the emaciated, Dracula-pale Bowie comes across as worrying and charming in equal parts, talking of himself in the third person, painting the portrait of a Pierrot “putting over the great sadness of 1976.” He describes his Ziggy Stardust look as “a cross between Nijinsky and Woolworth’s”—a beautifully pithy summary of what so much of Bowie had been about.

  talking through the gloom

  Bowie gave a series of triumphant, sell-out concerts at Wembley (May 3–8), to widespread critical acclaim. Brian Eno attended one of them (May 7), and the two met up backstage after the show. They’d run into each other a couple of times before, but weren’t yet friends. Eno’s old band Roxy Music had once opened for Bowie, back in 1973. In the early seventies Bowie and Roxy Music had had much in common, in their English art-school pretensions, their foregrounding of style and pastiche, their swimming against the tide of “authentic” singer-songwriters. Since leaving Roxy, Eno had released a number of solo albums that moved from English rock to the outer reaches of pop experimentalism and hybridisation. He’d set up the Obscure record label, which further collapsed high and low art distinctions, releasing milestone contemporary classical works such as Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Independently from Bowie, he’d also picked up on the German experimental scene. Bowie has occasionally claimed to have introduced Eno to the so-called “krautrock” bands, but the fact is that by then Eno had already worked with electronic pioneers Harmonia, both on stage and in the studio. In fact, one of the stories of the whole mid-seventies art rock phenomenon is the way the various players converge on similar ideas and hybrid forms, making the question of who really influenced whom difficult to say the least, and probably meaningless.

  After the concert, Bowie and Eno drove back together to where Bowie was staying in Maida Vale and talked into the night. Bowie told Eno he’d been listening to Discreet Music (1975). “He said he’d been playing it non-stop on his American tour,” Eno recalled, “and naturally flattery always endears you to someone. I thought: God, he must be smart!” Discreet Music was Eno’s latest release at the time, and is not a pop record at all. One side comprises different versions of Pachelbel’s Canon, processed via various algorithmic transformations, to arrive at something sounding a little similar to Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic. Bowie may have been impressed with it, but it’s not the Eno album with which Low has the most in common. Eno again: “I know he liked Another Green World a lot, and he must have realised that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become friendly with them.” Another Green World (1975) has a different feel to Low, but it deploys some of the same strategies. It mixes songs that have recognisable pop structures with other, short, abstract pieces that Eno called “ambient”—with the emphasis not on melody or beat, but on atmosphere and texture. These intensely beautiful fragments fade in then out, as if they were merely the visible part of a vast submarine creation; they are like tiny glimpses into another world. On the more conventional tracks, different genres juxtapose, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not—jazzy sounds cohering with pop hooks but struggling against intrusive synthetic sound effects. The end result is a moodily enigmatic album of real power and ingenuity. One structural difference between the two albums, though, is that while Eno interspersed the “textural” pieces across Another Green World, Bowie separated them out and put them on another side, which provides Low with a sort of metanarrative.

  Eno styled himself as a “non-musician”; he even tried (and failed) to have that put on his passport as his profession. Of course he had plenty of chops, but his insight was to consider the studio as the primary instrument of creativity (he’d already written an essay entitled “The Studio as a Compositional Tool”). This puts the focus on context rather than content, on the sonic surface rather than deep melodic structure. It ran up against a very different and perhaps more prevalent “rootsy” approach to rock, where musical virtuosity was privileged and studio “trickery” frowned upon; where the studio was viewed more like a camera taking a snapshot of a performance. Eno’s interventionist vision owes something to the studio experimentation of mid-sixties pop but also to the avant-garde process-driven techniques of people like Karlheinz Stockhausen or John Cage, pioneers of the use of tape collages and loops, prepared instruments, electronics and randomness, in the 1950s and 1960s. But the excitement of music in the early seventies lay not so much with the dryly cerebral work of Stock-hausen (who has always been more admired than listened to
) but with more popular forms which could be invigorated with the experimentalism of the academic traditions. Bowie had long been interested in Eno’s approach to the studio, and had occasionally used similar techniques—the Burroughsian cut-up experiments on Diamond Dogs were heading in the same direction, deliberately using disorientation as a means of hitting upon something new and different.

  Bowie and Eno agreed to keep in touch. Meanwhile, the Station to Station tour shunted on to its terminus: Paris. Bowie travelled there by train, under the name Stenton Jones (Stenton being the middle name of his dead father), and gave two concerts at the Pavillon de Paris (May 15–18). He threw a glamorous end-of-tour party at the Alcazar nightclub, attended by the great and good of the entertainment-industrial complex, plus an array of fashionable creatures from the Euro demi-monde (including Romy Haag, with whom Bowie ended the night). At another Bowie-organised party in Paris, this time at the Ange Bleu, Kraftwerk had put in an appearance, receiving a five-minute standing ovation as they entered blank-faced and got up in full-blown 1930s retro style, like the musical equivalents of Gilbert and George. Bowie was enthralled: “Look how they are, they are fantastic!” he kept repeating to Iggy Pop, who had accompanied Bowie on the tour.

  Bowie had already met Kraftwerk frontmen Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter in Los Angeles. According to Schneider and Hütter, they’d talked about working together; according to Bowie, they hadn’t. Whatever the case, nothing ever came of it, but Bowie saw them socially a few times once he’d moved to Germany. These days, Bowie is a touch equivocal about Kraftwerk’s musical influence on him, although there are some undeniably Kraftwerkian moments on Low. But it’s true that Bowie’s and Kraftwerk’s conceptions of rhythm diverge wildly. Low is a meeting of the synthetic and the organic—Bowie was welding R&B beats to electronic soundscapes. But Kraftwerk were in the process of eliminating the human altogether from the beat (their robot rhythms ultimately bled back into black music through house and techno, but that’s another story).

  The significance of Kraftwerk at this stage of Bowie’s career was more general. It was the 1974 release of Autobahn that had turned his attention back to Europe, and to electronic music: “What I was passionate about in relation to Kraftwerk was their singular determination to stand apart from stereotypical American chord sequences and their wholehearted embrace of a European sensibility displayed through their music,” Bowie said in 2001. “This was their very important influence on me.”

  Kraftwerk and the Kosmische bands of the early seventies belonged to a generation of Germans that “had no fathers, only grandfathers,” as film director Werner Herzog once put it. “Because of the war,” Kraftwerk frontman Ralf Hütter told a French journalist in 1978, “and the rupture it caused with the past, we no longer had a tradition to respect, we were free to experiment. And we weren’t taken in by the myth of the pop star either. We’d seen enough of that in the 1930s.” That rupture propelled German artists forwards into the future, but sometimes also backwards, skipping a generation to before the Nazi catastrophe, to the false dawn of the Weimar years or the German Romanticism of the previous century. Kraftwerk actually went both ways, using electronics and avant-garde techniques to create a “European industrial folk music” that conjures up a largely prewar world of futuristic optimism. Band member Wolfgang Flür explains, “All of us in the group are children who were born straight after World War II. So, we had no musical or pop culture of our own, there was nothing behind us, there was the war, and before the war we had only the German folk music. In the 1920s or 1930s melodies were developed and these became culture that we worked from. So, I think it was in us, ever since we were born; I cannot explain us, but it is us. It is romantic, childish, maybe, it is naïve, but I cannot do anything about it. It’s in me.”

  Kraftwerk’s albums evoke a time when autobahns were a novelty; when travelling across Europe in a steam train was the epitome of glamour. They look back to the golden age of the radio, or the futurist visions of a 1920s movie like Metropolis. (More recently, there’s been their twenty-year obsession with cycling, reducing the industrial fantasy of mechanical salvation to its simplest expression.) This nostalgia for a future that never happened was something that Bowie also picked up on; it’s a sadness that informs the second sides of Low and its successor “Heroes”. At heart, it’s very much a form of Romanticism (Kraftwerk signal this with the title of their 1977 track “Franz Schubert”).

  For a couple of years, Bowie’s and Kraftwerk’s careers seemed to intertwine. While Bowie was at work on Low, Kraftwerk were in the studio recording their groundbreaking Trans-Europe Express. An ambiguously kitsch photo of the group looking like a 1930s string quartet adorns the album cover. The title track cheekily namechecks both Bowie and his own “train” album (“from station to station to Düsseldorf city, meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie”); Bowie returned the favour on “Heroes” (“V2-Schneider”). Both Bowie and Kraftwerk conceived of their act as a whole—the music, the clothes, the artwork, the concerts, the interviews, all integrated and self-referring. They both nodded to pan-Europeanism, recording versions of their songs in French, German and English. Both nurtured a camp sensibility, working the delicate seam that lies between irony and earnestness. Both blended postmodern pastiche with a retro-modernist aesthetic. Both made emotional music by seeming to negate emotion. Seen through the prism of psychiatry, the work of both comes across as rather autistic (Bowie’s autism is schizophrenic; Kraftwerk’s obsessive-compulsive).

  what can i do about my dreams?

  In mid May, Bowie and Iggy Pop retired to the picturesque Château d’Hérouville, forty kilometres northwest of Paris, to rest up for a few days after the tour. The Château had been converted into studios by the well-known French film composer Michel Magne in 1969. While winding down there with Iggy, Bowie met up with the Château’s manager and chief sound engineer Laurent Thibault, former bassist with the ultimate prog rock group Magma. The two talked late into the night. Much to Thibault’s surprise, Bowie seemed well acquainted with Magma’s peculiar oeuvre, which mostly consists of a series of concept albums about a planet called Kobaia—with many of the songs sung in native Kobaian. By the end of the night, Bowie had agreed to put down two hundred thousand francs to book the studios for the months of July and September (they were already taken for August). He’d already recorded Pin-Ups there, in 1973, and would eventually record most of Low at the Château as well.

  From there, Bowie moved to a large house at Clos-desMésanges, near Vevey, Switzerland. The move had been engineered by his wife, Angie, partly to get him away from Los Angeles, but largely for tax reasons. Bowie was supposedly settling down to family life with his five-year-old son and wife. But by this stage, their marriage (outrageously open even by seventies rock marriage standards) had more or less broken down in a morass of recriminations and jealousies. Angie had in particular taken against Bowie’s assistant Corinne Schwab, whom Bowie used to shield himself against the people he didn’t want to see. “Coco kept the irritating people out of his life,” his friend and producer Tony Visconti said in 1986, “and Angie had become one of them.” Often, Bowie would simply disappear altogether without telling Angie, sometimes to Berlin, and with only Coco in the know. It enraged Angie. The couple’s living arrangements became increasingly complicated; while Angie was away in London, Bowie would stay at the house, but when she was home, he’d book into a nearby hotel.

  The idea had been to relax after the tour, but Bowie was clearly the sort who thrived on nervous energy, not relaxation. At Clos-des-Mésanges he amassed a library of 5,000 books and threw himself into reading them. Bowie had always been the intellectually curious autodidact, having left school at sixteen. But now it became something of an obsession. During the tour, Bowie had travelled around Europe in a kind of cultural rage, going to concerts, visiting galleries, learning everything he could about art, classical music and literature. It was a reaction against America, but there was also an element of replacing one m
ania for another (albeit far healthier) one.

  A life of leisure in the Swiss Alps for the workaholic Bowie was another mirage, and when Iggy Pop showed up they began to rehearse what would result in Iggy’s first solo venture, The Idiot, produced and cowritten by Bowie. He had admired Iggy’s proto-punk band the Stooges from early on; had got them signed to his then manager’s company, Mainman; had mixed the classic Stooges album Raw Power; had continually boosted Iggy Pop in the press. The two had become close in Los Angeles, when a washed-up Iggy Pop had checked himself into a mental asylum. “I think he respected me for putting myself in a loony bin,” Iggy said in 1977. “He was the only guy who came to visit me. Nobody else came …nobody. Not even my so-called friends in LA … but David came.” (At this time, back in England, Bowie’s schizophrenic half-brother, Terry, had already been interned in a mental institution for some years.)

  Various studio sessions during 1975 had produced little of worth (there’d been the dirge-like “Moving On,” never released, plus a couple of tracks that ended up on Lust For Life, changed beyond recognition). But Bowie had invited Iggy on the Station to Station tour, and early on in the sound-checks they’d come up with “Sister Midnight,” based around a Carlos Alomar riff. Bowie had written the first verse and Iggy the rest, recounting an oedipal dream he’d once had. There was slippage between what was Bowie’s and what was Iggy’s, and Bowie had played “Sister Midnight” a few times live on tour, but it eventually became the first cut on The Idiot, as well as the first real fruit of their fertile (and later not so fertile) partnership.