David Bowie's Low

by Hugo Wilcken

  Bowie’s interest in schizophrenia goes beyond the fact that his half-brother had the illness. At around this time Bowie was enthusiastically reading Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a work that posits the essential schizophrenic nature of prehistoric man, and man’s religious impulse as a direct result of it. Bowie has also had an abiding interest in “outsider art”—art produced by people with mental illness (hence the title of the nineties Bowie-Eno collaboration Outside). While making the Berlin trilogy, he and Eno visited Gugging, an Austrian psychiatric hospital-cum-art studio that encourages patients to paint. What Bowie derived from the experience was the artists’ lack of self-consciousness. “None of them knew they were artists,” he told journalist Tim de Lisle in 1995. “It’s compelling and sometimes quite frightening to see this honesty. There’s no awareness of embarrassment.”

  The subtext seems to be about regaining lost innocence through new ways of expression, unshackled by the conventions of “normal” society. Bowie’s outsider art enthusiasm is reminiscent of the appropriation of primitive art by early 20th century modernists like Picasso. And to me there is something distinctly modernist about the schizophrenic world—in the alienation, the affectlessness, the fragmentation, the form over content, the hyper-subjectivity. There are clear similarities between the wordplay and disjointedness of modernist literature and schizophrenic discourse (the psychiatrist of James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia is reputed to have told him that the difference between the two was that “you dived to the bottom of the pool; she sank”). That wordplay is all over the songs of the schizophrenic Syd Barrett—a significant influence on Bowie— reaching the highwater mark with his haunting “Word Song,” which literally is just a jumble of alliterative words strung together. Bowie’s cut-up writing style, derived from William S. Burroughs (yet another diagnosed schizophrenic), often has a similar feel to it, where the lyrics become a game of association and alliteration to the point of abstraction.

  Schizophrenia stretches the personality in both directions. The schizophrenic is both less of a person and more of a person. Negative symptoms send him to a grey limbo of autistic disconnection; positive symptoms overstimulate the imagination, leading to a conflation of myth and reality. Since art is myth and performance is exaggeration, it’s not too hard to draw the parallels. The rock celebrity world in particular is one of myth and fantasy, where behaviour that might normally be thought strange can be written off as just another personality trait. There aren’t the same social brakes as in the “real” world. And all the more so for Bowie, whose coping strategy was to hive off characters that were fantasies of himself. But performance as therapy can be dangerous. Invented characters can take on a life of their own; masks and faces blur into one. The strategies used to avoid madness might ultimately be the ones that bring it on—eventually turning you into the thing you’re fleeing from.

  a little girl with grey eyes

  Back to Low, and on to the third track, “What in the World”—according to Laurent Thibault a hold-over from the Idiot sessions. Clocking in at 2:23, it’s barely any longer than “Breaking Glass.” In a way, it’s a composite of the two tracks that preceded it. Sonically, the cool rock menace of “Breaking Glass” is replaced with the compressed, synthetic frenzy of “Speed of Life,” while lyrically the song plays the same game of projecting alienation on to another. If it’s another fragment with no real verse/chorus structure, it nonetheless sounds a little more rounded than “Breaking Glass,” less circular than “Speed of Life.”

  We’re back with the crashing drums (with an even more pronounced disco flavour), while texturally, there’s a synth-generated bubbling noise right up in the mix, sounding as though something’s just about to boil over. Carlos Alomar’s rhythm guitar has a soft, jazzy feel to it, jarring with Ricky Gardiner’s scratchy, neurotic lead work. The lead sounds eerily like Robert Fripp here, although he wasn’t present at the Low sessions according to Bowie. But that messy, drunken guitar line (played elsewhere by Fripp) is a signature of Bowie albums from Low through to Scary Monsters.

  Everything sounds speeded up—there’s a building, manic quality to the song that is like the euphoric upswing of bipolar disorder. Bowie’s voice remains flat and unengaged, and breaks down into a disturbing, wordless drone by the end of the song. The lyric is another cut-up jumble, with its juxtapositions of contradictory images, its meanings left behind in the hidden and unsaid. It’s addressed to another girl with “problems”: she’s a reflection of the protagonist—withdrawn (“deep in your room, you never leave your room”), silent (“never mind, say something”), affectless (“love won’t make you cry”). There’s the disconnection of the previous song, from both the supposed interlocutor (“I’m just a little bit afraid of you”) and from the self (“what you gonna say to the real me”).

  Bowie has said that at this period, “I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity,” but that “overall, I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from Low. I can hear myself really struggling to get well.” And perhaps you catch glimpses of that struggle in “What in the World.” If it’s impossible to take a lyric like “I’m in the mood for your love” at face value—it’s too much of a rock cliché, especially with Bowie singing it in ironic rock mode—there might be something more mixed up and heartfelt in the “something deep inside of me, yearning deep inside of me, talking through the gloom.”

  nothing to do, nothing to say

  In retrospect, it seems strange that an album like Low could have singles culled from it, but it had two, one of which was a sizeable hit in the UK, reaching number three (although it failed to make much impression on the other side of the Atlantic). Fractionally over three minutes long, “Sound and Vision” is at least the perfect length for a single, and it’s also the song that most plays off a pop sensibility. The resemblances with a conventional pop hit of the time stop there, though. For a start, the intro is actually longer than the body of the song. It’s almost like an instrumental with a lyric fragment tacked on at the end as an afterthought. “Sound and Vision” was the first song Bowie wrote at the Château specifically with Eno in mind, and this holding back of the vocals was Eno’s idea, in order to create tension. It also returns us to lyric restraint after the garrulousness (by Low’s standards) of “What in the World.”

  On top of the Harmonized drums you can hear a hissing noise (actually a heavily gated snare), sitting strangely with a jaunty, jangly rhythm guitar riff and some synth melody lines that veer towards the cheesy. The “doo-doo” backing vocals, by Eno and Visconti’s then wife Mary Hopkin (of “Those Were the Days” fame), add to the pastichey, ironic feel to the track: “I was out in France when they were recording Low and Brian Eno was there doing all the basic tracks for David to write songs around,” Mary Hopkin later recalled. “Brian asked me to do some backing vocals with him, just a little riff. He promised me it’d be way back in the mix with tons of echo, but when David heard it he boosted it right up and it’s very prominent, much to our embarrassment because it was such a corny little riff!” The sonic effect is that of a pop song with quotation marks, not quite sure whether it’s a part of the genre or merely referencing it.

  The backing vocals and instrumentation were “all recorded before there was even a lyric, title or melody,” says Visconti. And the lyrics, when they finally did come, played against the skewed yet chipper concoction Eno had dreamed up. “Sound and Vision” was “the ultimate retreat song,” according to Bowie. “It was just the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.” The song is at the literal and the matic centre of the first side. After failing to connect with female others in “Breaking Glass” and “What in the World,” the lyrics here are addressed only to the self, “drifti
ng into my solitude,” presaging the wordless, inward turn of the second side.

  Bowie’s transformations of the seventies were progressive stages of escape. Ziggy Stardust was a very English sort of Houdini act, slipping free from the dour constrictions of lower-middle-class life; from the suburbs; from England; and most of all from the self. Low’s key image of the room as refuge symbolises that other kind of escape, striking out for the interior, like Thomas Jerome Newton’s “astronaut of inner space,” and calling to mind Dostoevsky’s dictum that “Life is in ourselves, and not in the external.” The neurotic travel (“I’ve lived all over the world, I’ve left every place”) is exchanged for the blankness of immobility.

  “That’s the colour of my room, where I will live”: it’s a room in a new town, Berlin, to which Bowie would move near the end of the Low sessions. Not a mansion with a swimming pool, but a first-floor flat in a slightly run-down building, in an immigrant area of a city of ghosts. After the razzle of glam rock, after the constant reinventions, the gaudy theatre of Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke, it was something of a shock that Bowie could turn around and make an album that was so empty and private, with lyrics so sparse and simple, with “nothing to do, nothing to say.” An album of waiting, of seeming nihilism. That shock and surprise is pretty evident in the music reviews of the day (which now come over as rather hysterical in themselves). In the NME, for instance, Charles Shaar Murray was writing about an album “so negative it doesn’t even contain emptiness or the void,” an album that is “futility and death-wish glorified, an elaborate embalming job for a suicide’s grave.”

  That’s to ignore the fact that there had always been a heavy dose of nihilism in most of Bowie’s work—whether in his Nietzchean mode (The Man Who Sold the World), or in the gothic romances of doomed rock messiahs and Orwellian dystopias. Hedonism in the face of impending doom is a constant theme, reaching its elegiac peak in the title track of Aladdin Sane. Even the mostly euphoric Young Americans has a nihilistic undercurrent; the album is “the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey,” Bowie told Cameron Crowe in 1976. After all those rock star games, there was perhaps something liberating about declaring the essential emptiness of things—a declaration that may be related to Bowie’s Buddhist enthusiasms of the 1960s.

  That’s not to say that Bowie was totally through with star games. Throughout the album, irony and sincerity are confused and blended. A creepy song like “Breaking Glass” has a jokey edge; “Sound and Vision” is both pop pastiche and an existential portrait; we’re not quite sure whether to take the anguished entreaties of “Be My Wife” seriously or not. More to the point, we’re not sure whether even Bowie is sure. He’s the unreliable narrator, performing an eternal balancing act between sincerity and irony, even in the midst of personal crisis. His angst is at once genuine, and a modish pose. After all, “Bowie in Berlin”—with the studio by the Wall, escapades with partner-in-crime Iggy Pop, the Expressionist paintings, the Isherwood-ish life of decadence and dilettantism—all that is probably his most enduring myth of all, beating Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust and the rest of them hands down. If Berlin was genuinely a sanctuary after his mad years in the New World, it was no less a fantasy, something he himself understood well enough: “I thought I’d take the stage set, throw it away, and go and live in the real thing.”

  round and round

  The next two songs, the Ballardian “Always Crashing in the Same Car” and “Be My Wife,” signal a slight shift in form and mood. They both nod to a more conventional song structure, with “Be My Wife” even featuring a chorus of sorts. “Always Crashing” has a metal-ish guitar solo (albeit heavily treated), and even a proper end rather than a fadeout. Both have more of a narrative feel—elliptic and impressionistic though it might be. And both move into more self-aware, introspective territory, after the autism-from-the-inside of the preceding three tracks.

  The rhythm bed of “Always Crashing in the Same Car” was laid down at the Château, but the song was one of the last to be completed at Hansa studios in Berlin in November 1976. “David spent quite a while writing the melody and lyrics,” recounted Visconti in 2001, “and even recorded a verse in a quasi-Dylan voice. But it was too spooky (not funny, as intended), so he asked me to erase it and we started again (in those days tracks were limited, since computers and time sync codes, to latch two machines together, were not in use yet).” The brief lyric was inspired by a real event. One night, in the grip of paranoid psychosis, Bowie had been cruising the streets in his Mercedes and had spotted a dealer whom he was convinced had ripped him off. In a rage he started ramming the dealer’s car over and over again, before finally driving off back to his hotel. There he found himself maniacally driving around in circles in the hotel’s underground garage.

  Bowie has said that Syd Barrett was an influence on “Be My Wife,” but the lyrics to “Always Crashing” also recall certain lines from Barrett’s Madcap Laughs, an album that Bowie has often praised, and has referenced before (the jokey, skewed snatches of studio chatter on “Andy Warhol” from Hunky Dory mimic those of “The Madcap Laughs”). Bowie’s “I was going round and round the hotel garage, must have been touching close to ninety-four” is pretty close to Barrett’s “You’re spinning around and around in a car with electric lights flashing very fast” (from “No Good Trying”). Likewise, “Jasmine, I saw you peeping, as I put my foot down to the floor” has something of Barrett’s melancholy “Dark Globe” (a song Bowie has singled out as Madcap’s highlight): “Oh where are you now, pussy willow that smiled on this leaf, when I was alone, you promised a stone from your heart.” (And there’s also “singing through the gloom,” from the James Joyce poem “Golden Hair” that Barrett set to music on Madcap, which recalls Bowie’s “talking through the gloom.”)

  Syd Barrett has been one of the touchstones of Bowie’s artistic development. Seeing the charismatic Barrett perform with Pink Floyd at the Marquee in 1967 made Bowie realise what an English rock star could be—and of course Bowie went on to record Barrett’s “See Emily Play” on Pin-Ups. There is a fair amount of Barrett in the Ziggy Stardust character (the Arnold Corns, the band Bowie initially formed to record the first Ziggy songs, was named after Barrett’s song “Arnold Layne”). Before Ziggy Stardust there was Hunky Dory, which shows traces of Barrett’s post-Floyd solo work in its whimsy and its acoustic, psych-folk feel. And the first side of Low, too, has something of Barrett’s solo work about it. There’s a similar attention deficiency, a slapdash feel; the songs—with their odd harmonic twists that musically don’t quite cohere—stop seemingly halfway through as if the singer has suddenly lost interest. There’s also the flat tone of the singing, the lyric mix of peculiar juxtapositions coupled with the occasional cliché, and the sudden mood swings and musical changes (“A New Career in a New Town”). Above all, there’s the impression of seeing the schizophrenic mind from the inside, without too much awareness of the madness, and yet with introspective self-pity straining through every now and then, as it does on “Always Crashing in the Same Car.”*

  It’s a song about repeated failure transformed into recurring nightmare, with suicidal overtones. The image of crashing over and over again, and deliberately (“as I put my foot down to the floor”), recalls Iggy’s “though I try to die you put me back on the line.” The slower beat, Eno’s swirling synth instrumentation and the ghostly keyboard treatments add to the track’s oneiric feel. If “Always Crashing” doesn’t feature the bedroom symbolism of the preceding three songs, the vision of a car tearing around a hotel garage nonetheless echoes the album’s central image of enclosed spaces that both stifle and comfort. Instead of journeying from A to B, a car is turning around on itself, the only possible exit being into the deserts of the interior.

  There’s something Kraftwerkian and nostalgically retro about the theremin-like sounds Eno engineered on this track, recalling the futurism that synthesisers signalled in the p
opular culture of the fifties and sixties—in movie soundtracks like The Forbidden Planet (1956) for instance, or the theme tunes to “Star Trek” or “Doctor Who” (written in the early sixties with an ancestor of the EMS synth Eno used on Low). In sixties pop, synths were used to sometimes gimmicky effect during the psychedelic years of 1966–67; they were then largely co-opted by prog rock groups in the early seventies, where a noodling synth sound often represented not so much machine futurism but fantasies of expanding consciousness and other suspect hippie notions. By the time of 1976’s punk revolution, however, “electronic stuff was considered something you couldn’t touch,” explains onetime Ultravox! frontman John Foxx, who was also working with Eno at the time and moving in similar directions to Bowie and Kraftwerk. “It was too close to Pink Floyd, forbidden by Johnny Lydon, declared ungood.”

  By Bowie’s own admission, punk “was virtually over by the time it lodged itself in my awareness.” In a way, Bowie managed to wrongfoot the zeitgeist by not even being aware of it, instead channelling the themes and strategies that would become familiar in the post-punk era of the late seventies and early eighties. Low’s turn away from American to European romanticism, its focus on alienated subjectivities, on the artificial and the urban, its mix of modernist imagery and postmodern pastiche, its forefronting of a synthetic sound—these were all trademarks picked up in part or in toto by post-punk bands like Joy Division, Ultravox!, the Human League or American acts like Talking Heads and Devo.