David Bowie's Low

by Hugo Wilcken

  Bowie remained in Clos-des-Mésanges for most of June, working, painting and reading. He paid visits to Charlie Chaplin’s wife, Oona, who lived nearby. (“This intelligent, very sensitive fellow who came from the same part of London as Charlie, walked in and wanted to talk. I really am very fond of him.”) He was often seen out and about in local bars and restaurants, dressed simply and generally keeping his head down. But by the end of the month he’d had enough, and decamped with Iggy Pop back to the Château d’Hérouville.

  The sixteenth century Château was a former coach staging post and stables, built in the ruins of a castle, and was said to be the setting for secret trysts between Frédéric Chopin and his lover George Sand. Its vast wings contained some thirty bedrooms, rehearsal rooms, kitchens, a dining hall and a gaming room. Outside there was a swimming pool, tennis courts, a beautiful complex of fountains and waterfalls and even a mini-castle, complete with its own moat. The grounds were enormous and one had the impression of being completely isolated and deep in the countryside, despite the fact that Paris was less than an hour away.

  It was the first ever residential studio suite—a concept that was much copied afterwards. Two studios were located in outhouses, probably former stables, while a third was in the right wing. In 1976, it cost 5,500 francs (£550, $1,000) per day to hire a studio at the Château, not including tape, which was expensive back then (700 francs for a 50mm roll). Session musicians would get around 1,000 francs for a day’s work. The studios were very state-of-the art for the era; the one Bowie used for The Idiot and Low had an MCI-500 console and the first Westlake monitors to be installed in Europe. Originally opened in 1969, the Château studios had taken a few years before building up an international reputation, which eventually came when Elton John recorded Honky Château there in 1972. Since then, the Château’s ever-expanding clientèle counted the likes of Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, T-Rex, Rod Stewart, Bill Wyman, Cat Stevens and the Bee-Gees plus dozens of French artists.

  Bowie and Iggy Pop settled in at the Château; their idea was to record when the mood took them, but to basically take it easy. On the face of it, they made for unlikely friends. Although there were certain things in common—both rock performers, both in something of a personal and artistic impasse, both struggling with drugs and mental health problems—it was basically a case of opposites attracting. Bowie was the sexually ambiguous English dandy; Iggy Pop the hyper-masculine American rocker. Career-wise, Bowie was riding a tidal wave, his fame largely transcending the rock world. By contrast, Iggy Pop was at an all-time low, flat broke, without a band and without a recording contract, until Bowie used his weight to get him one at RCA. Bowie was the consummate professional: even during the nightmare of his cocaine addiction, he still toured his albums, touted himself regularly in the media, starred in a movie and, of course, made records that many consider his finest. Iggy Pop, on the other hand, was erratic, disorganised, had no self-discipline, wouldn’t turn up to studio sessions, hadn’t put out a record in years—and was essentially heading for a massive fall without the helping hand of someone of Bowie’s calibre.

  It would seem that Iggy Pop needed Bowie a hell of a lot more than Bowie needed him. But Iggy had a certain underground cachet that Bowie probably envied. “I was not executive material like him,” Iggy Pop said in 1996. “I couldn’t do the things he seemed to do so well and so easily. Yet I knew I had something he didn’t have and could never have.” The Iggy persona was about danger and violence, urban edge, outlaw posturing, rawness, unrestrained liberty to the point of nihilism …in short, a blunt instrument of American masculinity, and the polar opposite of what Bowie was about at the time. “David always had a weakness for tough guys,” was how his friend Marc Bolan bitchily put it. Likewise, Iggy Pop had been intrigued by the “British music-hall, pure vaudeville” quality he’d seen in Bowie the first time they’d met. In other words, it was a perfect match of alter egos.

  There was a touch of Tom Ripley in the way Bowie adopted those he admired, as if they were another role to be played. Bowie had already sought out and befriended another American hard man, Lou Reed, in rather similar circumstances. Lou Reed’s former band the Velvet Underground was of course a legendary nexus of the sixties New York scene, but by the early seventies Reed was down on his luck and in desperate need of a leg up. Enter David Bowie, who talked Reed up in the media and produced Transformer (1972)—which did indeed transform Reed’s career through the classic hit “Walk on the Wild Side.” The album is largely about New York’s gay and transvestite scene, and the glammed-up Bowie certainly helped bring out Lou Reed’s inner drag queen. In a sense, he did the same for Iggy Pop, suffusing Iggy’s balls-out rock routine with a more ironic, cabaret sensibility, giving him a veneer of sleazy European sophistication.

  For Bowie, The Idiot wasn’t just about resurrecting Iggy Pop’s stalled career. It was also a dry run for Low, with which it would be recorded almost back-to-back, in the same studios. In fact, the recordings overlapped. Sound engineer Laurent Thibault: “Low was recorded after The Idiot, but Low came out first. David didn’t want people to think he’d been inspired by Iggy’s album, when in fact it was all the same thing. There were even tracks that we recorded for Iggy that ended up on Low, such as ‘What in the World,’ which was originally called ‘Isolation.’” (You can hear Iggy’s backing vocals on “What in the World.”) Bowie produced The Idiot, played many of the instruments and cowrote all the songs—the lyrics largely written by Iggy and the music by Bowie. “Poor Jim [Iggy’s real name], in a way, became a guinea pig for what I wanted to do with sound,” Bowie explained later. “I didn’t have the material at the time, and I didn’t feel like writing it all. I felt much more like laying back and getting behind someone else’s work, so that album was opportune, creatively.” Iggy Pop agrees: “[Bowie] has a work pattern that recurs again and again. If he has an idea about an area of work that he wants to enter, as a first step, he’ll use side-projects or work for other people to gain experience and gain a little taste of water before he goes in and does his …and I think he used working with me that way also.”

  As with Low, the recording was all done at night, from around midnight on. Bowie covered keyboards, saxophone and most of the guitar parts; the other musicians were Michel Marie on drums and Laurent Thibault on bass. Phil Palmer, nephew of Kinks frontman Ray Davies, played guitar on “Nightclubbing,” “Dum Dum Boys” and “China Girl.” Carlos Alomar wasn’t present, but the rest of Bowie’s rhythm section (Dennis Davis and George Murray) turned up a few weeks in. According to Robert Fripp, Bowie had asked him and Eno to attend as well, but “it so happened that David and Iggy had a dispute and the project was postponed.” Keyboardist Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream was also at the Château, but apparently had to leave before recording had got properly under way. And Ricky Gardiner, guitarist with prog rock group Beggar’s Opera, had also originally been asked to lend a hand on The Idiot, but “then I had this last-minute phone call saying that it was no longer necessary for me to go, and that Mr Bowie sent his apologies,” he later recalled. A few weeks later, he got another call summoning him to the Château, “asking could I go off …and perform miracles on the new album?” That new album was of course Low.

  In the studio, Iggy would sit writing lyrics on the studio floor, surrounded by books and piles of paper. But musically, it was Bowie who was in control. He’d arrived with bits of instrumentals recorded on minicassettes, which he’d play to the musicians. The way he directed them was autistic to say the least: “I’d continually ask him if what we were playing was OK,” recalled Laurent Thibault in 2002. “He wouldn’t reply. He’d just stare at me without saying a word. That was when I realised he was never going to reply. For example, Bowie would be playing a Baldwin piano hooked up to a Marshall amp. Michel gets up from his drumkit to see what Bowie’s up to. Bowie still won’t say a word. And I’m recording it all. David would listen back to the tape, and once he was happy with the results, we’d move on to
the next thing. After a while, we stopped bothering to ask him anything.” They recorded quickly, without it ever being explicit whether they were working on Iggy’s album or Bowie’s.

  According to Thibault, Low’s signature crashing drum sound was conceived in these sessions as well. The Château was the first in Europe to have an Eventide Harmonizer, which is an electronic pitch-shifting device—you could raise or lower the pitch of any instrument directly without having to slow the tape down, as had been previously necessary. Bowie apparently decided to hook the Harmonizer up to the drums, with astonishing results. This account doesn’t really square with Visconti’s, though (as we’ll see a little later on). And listening to The Idiot, although it does seem that some songs have a treated drum sound (particularly “Funtime”), it’s not nearly as evolved or as startling as what Visconti developed for Low.

  At the time, Iggy Pop excitedly talked up The Idiot as a cross between Kraftwerk and James Brown. That’s an exaggeration, and would actually be a better description of the first side of Low. The Idiot is still mostly a rock album—replete with heavy metal–style licks—and doesn’t really play off a pop sensibility in the way Low does. But Bowie’s genre-thieving, magpie sensibility makes itself felt. A funk feel creeps in on most tracks; synthesisers fill out the sound (sometimes mimicking strings, sometimes as sound effects); an early use of a drum machine features on “Nightclubbing”; and the dissonant, wandering lead guitar lines (mostly played by Bowie) are pretty similar to what Ricky Gardiner achieved on the first side of Low. The experimentalism is most apparent on the final track, “Mass Production,” with its looped industrial noise. “We made a tape loop using David’s ARP,” recalled Laurent Thibault, “but it sounded too erratic and David didn’t like it. So I had the idea of recording it on a quarter-inch tape, and once he was satisfied, I set up a loop so huge we had to set up mic stands right round the console. As the loop went round, you could see the little white joining tape, making it look like a toy train. David sat on his swivelling chair for three quarters of an hour, just watching the tape circle go round and round the four corners of the room, until finally he uttered the word ‘record.’” (Of course, this was in the days before sequencers—nowadays you could do all that on a computer in a few minutes.)

  The Idiot also finds Iggy Pop straining towards other idioms, experimenting with his voice: “To work with [Bowie] as a producer …he was a pain in the ass—megalomaniacal, loco! But he had good ideas. The best example I can give you was when I was working on the lyrics to ‘Funtime’ and he said, ‘Yeah, the words are good. But don’t sing it like a rock guy. Sing it like Mae West.’ Which made it informed of other genres, like cinema. Also, it was a little bit gay. The vocals there became more menacing as a result of that suggestion.”

  Iggy’s catatonic, lugubrious croon—like a drugged-up Frank Sinatra—is one of the signatures of the album. As on Station to Station, the crooning comes over as a form of alienated male hysteria. The emotionally skewed quality of the album is apparent right from the first track, the superb “Sister Midnight.” A funk bass and riff play against dirty, dissonant guitars, while Iggy Pop’s basso profundo contrasts weirdly with Bowie’s falsetto yelps. The lyrics set the tormented, psychiatric tone of the album, as Iggy recounts a dream in which “Mother was in my bed, and I made love to her/Father he gunned for me, hunted me with his six-gun.”

  There’s a relentlessly disturbing feel to the album that would be too much to take if it weren’t for the camp touches and stabs of dark humour scattered across most of the tracks. The autistic worldview of Low is one in which relationships are an impossibility; on The Idiot, relationships are not only possible, they’re a mutually destructive addiction. Songs kick off with a vision of happy codependence, only to sink into rupture and depression or violence. “China Girl” (reprised by Bowie six years later as a cheesy pop song, but excellent here) uses the analogy of East and West, as Iggy corrupts his oriental lover with “television, eyes of blue” and “men who want to rule the world.” (The song also alludes to Bowie’s messianic delusions: “I stumble into town, just like a sacred cow, visions of swastikas in my head, plans for everyone.”) Even the jokey, cabaret-style “Tiny Girls” (a risqué title given Iggy Pop’s sexual proclivities of the time) ends with the sour message of a world where even the “girls who have got no tricks” ultimately “sing of greed, like a young banshee.” Relationships are power struggles in which lies and deception are the weapons, and the strong crush the weak.

  There’s misogyny, but also plenty of self-hate in there too—in fact it’s pretty much the sort of album you’d expect two junkies running away from deteriorating relationships might make. But the songs are mostly leavened with irony and humorous touches. The exception is the eight and half minutes of the final track—nothing on the rest of the album matches the sheer nihilism of “Mass Production.” (Eno described listening to the album as akin to sticking your head in concrete, which is not true at all, except perhaps for this one track.) Crunching, industrial synth sounds fight distorted guitars over the genocidal imagery of “smokestacks belching, breasts turn brown.” Iggy Pop croons against the backdrop of suicide (“although I try to die, you put me back on the line”), begging the lover who thanklessly saved him to “give me the number of a girl almost like you,” since “I’m almost like him.” The estrangement from the self is now complete, and the song collapses in a morass of detuned synthesisers and grinding noise.

  Bowie’s stylistic imprimatur is all over the album. Even the title’s literary allusion is more Bowie than Pop. The cover is a black-and-white shot of Iggy Pop in a karate-style pose inspired by the painting Roquairol by the German Expressionist painter Erich Heckel—a Bowie-esque reference. Not only did Bowie write most of the music, he also suggested song subjects and titles, and generally kick-started Iggy’s imagination. For “Dum Dum Boys,” “I only had a few notes on the piano, I couldn’t quite finish the tune,” Iggy Pop recounted later. “Bowie said, ‘Don’t you think you could do something with that? Why don’t you tell the story of the Stooges?’ He gave me the concept of the song and he also gave me the title. Then he added that guitar arpeggio that metal groups love today. He played it, and then he asked Phil Palmer to play the tune again because he didn’t find his playing technically proficient enough.” The danger of the album being perceived as Bowie’s was something Iggy Pop was well aware of, and shaped his work on their following collaboration, Lust for Life: “The band and Bowie would leave the studio and go to sleep, but not me. I was working to be one step ahead of them for the next day … See, Bowie’s a hell of a fast guy. Very quick thinker, quick action, very active person, very sharp. I realised I had to be quicker than him, otherwise whose album was it going to be?”

  And yet, the influence was definitely not just a one-way street. The harsher, messier guitar sound is something that infused Low and was further developed on “Heroes”. Bowie was also particularly impressed with Iggy’s way with words: “‘[China Girl]’ has an extraordinary lyric, and it was really sort of thrown out as he was writing it,” Bowie recalled in 1993. “It was literally just thrown out on the recording session, almost verbatim. He changed maybe three or four lines. But it was an extraordinary talent that he had for spontaneous free thought.”

  Iggy Pop’s lyrics pointed Bowie towards a new way to write, which shows up on Low (“the walls close in and I need some noise” [“Dum Dum Boys”] sounds a bit like a lost line from “Sound and Vision”). On previous albums, you got the feeling that Bowie’s efforts to escape cliché had him resorting to ever more baroque constructions and recherché imagery. And sometimes, he went too far (“where the dogs decay defecating ecstasy, you’re just an ally for the leecher, locator of the virgin king”). But with Iggy Pop, there’s no sixth-form cleverness. He pulls off the trick of avoiding cliché while keeping it simple, direct and personal. Death stalks the seventies work of both Bowie and Iggy Pop, but Bowie has nothing quite so blunt as “though I try to die, you
put me back on the line.” Instead, he locates the death impulse in the mystique of rock ’n’ roll suicides, of lovers jumping in the river holding hands, and so on. Such romantic imagery is eschewed on Low.

  The Idiot is a blistering album that brought out the best in both of them. It was no great commercial success at the time, but then again no commercial concessions had been made in its creation either. Nonetheless, in its way, The Idiot turned out to be just as influential as Low. It’s hard to imagine the curdled croon of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis if Iggy Pop hadn’t got there first. And “Mass Production” is almost a template for Joy Division (and quite probably the last song Ian Curtis ever heard as well—The Idiot was still spinning on the turntable when his wife discovered his lifeless body). If Iggy Pop was the godfather of punk, then The Idiot was the sound of Iggy keeping a step ahead (with Bowie’s help of course), shepherding a new generation towards the post-punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties.

  Bowie was still suffering from mental problems—from paranoia and black magic delusions. On several occasions he’d turned up at the hospital at nearby Pontoise, convinced he was being poisoned. Another time, Iggy Pop playfully pushed him into the Château swimming pool. Visibly shaken, Bowie decided to abandon the recording sessions on the spot—months before at a party in Los Angeles, the actor Peter Sellers had warned him of the occult danger of “dark stains” at the bottom of swimming pools. The sessions were held up for several days, until Iggy persuaded him to return. Sound engineer Laurent Thibault also got on the wrong end of Bowie’s paranoia. Thibault basically coproduced the album and comixed it as well, with Tony Visconti, but Bowie left him (and all session musicians) off the credits. Bowie had got it into his head that Thibault had smuggled a journalist into the Château, although in fact he’d known all about it and probably arranged it. “David wasn’t there for the interview, but he told me a journalist was coming and told me what I had to say to him,” recalled Thibault. “Then after, when David returned to the Château, he threw the copy of Rock ’n’ Folk [a sort of French Rolling Stone] at my face as he got out of the car. He said he didn’t know there was a traitor among us.… The journalist had asked the names of the musicians. David had been happy to share the information, but had changed his mind since, he didn’t want anyone to know. He then told me that this French article might appear internationally, that what I’d said would be taken at face value, and that, consequently, he couldn’t put my name on the record sleeve. Of course, my jaw dropped to the ground, and on the way back to Paris, he said that it’d teach me a lesson.”