David Bowie's Low

by Hugo Wilcken

  sometimes you get nowhere

  There’s a sonic link between “Be My Wife” and the Station to Station album in its knees-up pub piano style that is also used on “TVC-15” (Station’s fourth track). “Be My Wife” is about as conventional as it gets on Low, and was the second single taken from the album. It has a verse and chorus and sticks to fairly straightforward band instrumentation. Essentially, though, it’s still another mixed-up pastiche, coupling an English pub singalong feel with Dennis Davis’s aggressive drum crash, a kitsch organ drone, lyrics that are too straightforward to be taken at face value, and Bowie’s camped-up cockney accent that recalls his Newleyesque days as a would-be light entertainer. Britpop bands like Blur and Pulp clearly owe a debt to this song, and in turn, as Bowie remarked recently, “‘Be My Wife’ owes a lot to Syd Barrett, actually.” Certainly, Barrett’s ability to integrate English whimsy and vaudeville into a rock format finds an echo here, and that Englishness underlines the fact that Low is very much Bowie’s post-American album.

  The lyric is the most straightforward of the album, and takes up Station to Station’s theme of restless travel as spiritual metaphor: “I’ve lived all over the world, I’ve left every place.” But its dumb simplicity is something of a tease. “Please be mine, share my life, stay with me, be my wife …” Could this be anything but irony? The fact is that Bowie’s marriage at this stage was in the final stages of disintegration. He would only see his wife a handful of times more, and would soon set about gaining legal custody of his son through the courts. So it was a rather strange refrain to be singing. And yet …the song isn’t exactly ironic either. At least a part of the “sincerity” is sincere, and the passivity of its plea—asking for something but offering nothing—-is of a piece with the rest of the album’s lyrics. The song ends poignantly with the first line of a verse that is never completed. “It was genuinely anguished, I think,” Bowie once said of the song, before adding: “It could have been anybody, though.” That ambivalence strikes pretty much at the heart of not only the song and the first side of Low, but almost everything else Bowie did in the seventies. He’d always located himself in that interesting space where even the singer doesn’t quite know what to make of his material. Is Bowie’s Young Americans a straightforward celebration of Philly soul, or a tricksy postmodern appropriation of it? Surely a bit of both. (Eno has said of Bowie’s 1992 marriage ceremony in Florence that “you couldn’t tell what was sincere and what was theatre. It was very touching.”)

  “Be My Wife” was released as a single in June 1977, but unlike “Sound and Vision” it failed to make a dent in the charts on either side of the Atlantic. Bowie did, however, bother to make a video for it, directed by Stanley Dorfman, and it’s undoubtedly one of his best efforts. A heavily made-up Bowie self-consciously hams it up with an unplugged guitar, illustrating the track’s ambivalences with unsettling aplomb. “I think what’s really unusual about it is the halfheartedness, the clumsiness,” says writer and recording artist Momus (aka Nick Currie). “It’s basically a rock video featuring a Pierrot act, a mime sketch of a rock star making a rock video, yet too comically glum and sulky to go through the required hoops, and lacking the necessary gung ho conviction. Ninety-nine percent of rock videos have full-throttle conviction, conviction turned up to 11. But here Bowie mimes a desultory half-heartedness with deft physical theatre. The character (because it isn’t really Bowie, it’s a fellow, a sad sack, a thin-lipped melancholic) makes to play his guitar and gives up half way through the phrase. He just can’t be bothered. He’s awkward, but the awkwardness is performed very gracefully. There’s something of Buster Keaton in the performance, the grace with which clumsiness is evoked. (Keaton gets a little homage in a much later Bowie video, ‘Miracle Goodnight.’)”

  moving on

  Two instrumentals, “Speed of Life” and “A New Career in a New Town,” bookend the first side—although they are somehow more songs without words than real instrumentals. “A New Career in a New Town” has no words apart from the unspoken title, and yet it conjures up perfectly the feeling of moving to a new town alone, with the mix of anxiety, solitude, nervous anticipation, forced optimism and the sense of looking forwards and back at the same time. The track was recorded at the Château, but the title no doubt came later, after Bowie’s move to Berlin.

  The track starts with a brief, fragile electronic passage, reminiscent of the textural interludes on Radio-Activity, although a touch more off-kilter than that. A smothered bass drum taps out a delicate beat that has an interestingly proto-House feel. It contrasts wildly with the crashing snare that comes in abruptly at 0:36 with the entirely different second theme, accompanied by Bowie’s blues harmonica, and another bar-room melody in a “Be My Wife” mode, plonked out on treated keyboards. Again there is no bridge to return us to the initial Kraftwerkian fragment, which kicks in abruptly again at 1:22, before returning us again to the blues/honky-tonk of the second theme again at 1:36. Just as “Speed of Life” sets down a musical agenda of instruments fighting it out, “A New Career” takes it to an extreme, literally splicing together two fragments that seem to be not only two quite different bits of music but in two altogether different genres as well. Ultimately, it works, with both parts yearning towards something in their different ways.

  The track is really the sonic equivalent of a Burroughs cut-up, juxtaposing clean-lined electronica with old-fashioned piano and harmonica to reflect that feeling of arriving and departing all at the same time. I’m intrigued as to how such experimentalist techniques often work better when transposed to popular culture, necessarily years and decades and eras after they were first deployed in the avant-garde of high modernism. Burroughs’s cut-up method, as he applied it, is philosophically engaging but doesn’t make for great reading (arguably, his best efforts are his more conventional autobiographical works, Junky and Queer). Perhaps something similar could be said about Stockhausen’s electronics or Cage’s tape loops. But modernist ideas, by now very second-hand, when appropriated by people like Bowie or Eno, can result in work that is just as culturally vital or even more so. Lazarus-like, modernism seemed to inject itself into popular culture years after its demise in the high cultures of art, literature and music. In a way, popular music as it developed in the fifties and sixties turns the cultural paradigm on its head. With pop, postmodernism always came before modernism. Pop culture didn’t actually need an Andy Warhol to make it postmodern. Rock ’n’ roll was never anything but a faked-up blues—something that the glam-era Bowie had understood perfectly. (Eno: “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.”)

  honky château

  Sessions at the Château d′Hérouville didn’t go smoothly. Most of the staff were on holiday, and the service was bad. “After three days I noticed that the sound got duller and duller,” recalled Visconti, “and I asked my assistant, a lovely English chap, when was the last time the multitrack recorder was lined up? He said about a week before we arrived, then the technician went on holiday. My assistant was brand new, hired just for us because he could speak English and French. He didn’t know how to maintain the machines. So every morning I’d go into the control room with him and we’d line up the machine together, with the manual open, hoping for the best.”

  Food seemed to be another problem—hardly a help given Bowie’s obsessions about food poisoning. There was a skeleton staff, and for the first few days there was little else to eat apart from rabbit and no vegetables. When the musicians complained, six lettuce heads were plonked down on the table, with oil and vinegar, and with more rabbit. Visconti again: “A French woman was hired to be our assistant. She was supposed to provide us with anything we might need to make the recording go smoothly, but even she couldn’t be bothered to bring some bread, cheese and wine up to the studio when we called down for some at 1 a.m. (a normal working hour for a rock studio). I remember David getting the owner out of bed at that hour and saying
in precise, measured out words, ‘We want some bread, some cheese and some wine in the studio. Now! What, you’re asleep? Excuse me, but I thought you were running a studio.’” Eventually, Bowie and Visconti came down with diarrhoea, precipitating the move to Berlin’s Hansa studios to finish the album.

  Bowie and Visconti got it into their heads that the Château was haunted. Bowie refused a master bedroom, since “it felt impossibly cold in certain areas of it,” and had a dark corner near a window that seemed to suck light into it. Visconti took the room, which “felt like it was haunted as all fuck.” Even Eno (a cooler head, one might imagine), supposedly claimed that he was woken early every morning by someone shaking his shoulder, except that when he opened his eyes there was no one there. Spooky castle clichés and Bowie’s supernatural obsessions were clearly having their effect on the rest of the crew as well.

  Bowie was not in good shape. He may have been “struggling to get well,” but it was early days yet. Quite apart from the drug-induced mental health problems, he was also breaking up with his wife and fighting his former manager, Michael Lippman, in court. Visconti: “There were very rare periods when he was up and excited. Those moments were definitely captured on tape and he would go in and do a backing track, but this would be followed by long periods of depression.” There were ugly scenes as well when Roy Martin, a former friend and now a lover of Angie’s, turned up, resulting in a punch-up in the dining room, with Visconti having to separate the two men. It didn’t take much for Bowie’s paranoia to kick in: “He even grew a bit suspicious of me at one point,” Visconti recalled, “although he had no cause to because I was one of the people who was keeping him sane on that album, and as a result got very close to him. I was with him night and day just trying to keep his head above water because he was really sinking—he was so depressed.”

  In the middle of the sessions, Bowie took time out to attend court proceedings in Paris against Michael Lippman, returning in a comatose state, pale and unable to work for several days. Eno: “He was pretty much living at the edge of his nervous system, very tense. But as often happens, that translated into a sense of complete abandon in the work. One of the things that happens when you’re going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it’s in that sense that ‘tortured’ souls sometimes produce great work.”

  And that seemed to be the case with Low. However bad the external situation seemed to be, the work still materialised. Visconti: “It wasn’t a difficult album to make, we were freewheeling, making our own rules.” The Château itself had “no bearing on the form of the tonality of the work,” according to Bowie, but he found the studio a joy to work in, with its ramshackle, lived-in feeling. And despite all the outside pressures, Bowie, Visconti and Eno were working well as a team. Interviewed at the time, guitarist Ricky Gardiner also enthused about the project: “The sessions are going really well. I had a surprising amount of freedom. I’d ask what kind of things he wanted, for instance, and we’d have a vague discussion about it for two or three minutes. Whatever I did seemed to fit, and that went for all the other musicians.”

  city of ghosts

  By the end of September, with most of the tracks down, Bowie left for Berlin, where the album would be finished and mixed. It was a move that had been brewing a long time, and Bowie would end up staying in the city for over two years. At first he took up residence in a suite in the Hotel Gehrus, in an old castle not far from the Grunewald forest, but soon moved to a 19th century residential block at 155 Hauptstrasse in the Schoneburg district, above a shop selling auto parts. While certainly a comedown from French and German castles, the building nonetheless had a shabby grandeur to it, with wrought-iron gates that led onto the street. Bowie’s seven-room, first-floor apartment was in poor repair but recalled the discreet charms of another era’s haute bourgeoisie, with its parquet floors, high ceilings, decorative cornices and panelled doors. There were rooms for Iggy Pop (although he would soon move to his own pad on the fourth floor), Corinne Schwab and Bowie’s son and nanny (who had been with him at the Château as well). There was an office for Bowie, and an artist’s studio as well—Bowie had taken to painting portraits that were of a rather derivative Expressionist style. In his bedroom, above the bed, hung his own portrait of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (1925–70), who spectacularly committed ritual suicide after a tragi-comic coup attempt (in other words, a very Bowie-esque character).

  Bowie stopped dyeing his hair orange, grew a moustache and started wearing workingmen’s overalls as a sort of disguise, although one of the pleasures of Berlin was that no one bothered him much anyway. He quickly got into a routine of staying in bed until the afternoon then brunching on coffee, orange juice and cigarettes before walking to Hansa, where he would often work through the night. Daytime pleasures, when he indulged in them, included idling in coffeehouses and riding around the wide spaces of the city on bikes with Iggy and Coco. “I just can’t express the feeling of freedom I felt there,” he told Uncut magazine in 2001. “Some days the three of us would jump into the car and drive like crazy through East Germany and head down to the Black Forest, stopping off at any small village that caught our eye. Just go for days at a time. Or we’d take long, all-afternoon lunches at the Wannsee on winter days. The place had a glass roof and was surrounded by trees and still exuded an atmosphere of the long gone Berlin of the twenties.”

  He often visited art galleries on both sides of the Wall, but his favourite was the Brücke museum in Dahlem in the Berlin suburbs, devoted to a group of artists who were working in Berlin and Dresden before the First World War. The Brücke (“Bridge”) movement—which included artists such as Kirchner, Bleyl, Heckel and Nolde—developed an impressionistic style of painting that aimed not at any sort of realist reading of a subject, but rather an inner emotion. Landscapes are simplified to broad brush strokes, colours are abstracted until they break free of the object, which in turn becomes merely a vehicle to express the interior state. Just as the Cubists in France were inspired by the stripped-down and exaggerated nature of primitive art, the Brücke artists looked for inspiration in the thick lines and spare design of medieval woodcuts, to create a German version of the avant-garde scene in Paris. Although spiritual renewal was an overriding theme, the works themselves give off a sense of brooding anxiety and nostalgic melancholy; the portraits often have a strange distance to them, like haunted masks.

  The Brücke artists (and Expressionism in general) were more than just passing fancies for Bowie; the interest had remained with him since art school. “When I was in Berlin I’d find old woodblock prints from the Brücke school, in small shops, at unbelievable prices, and to buy like that was wonderful.” There’s a clear philosophical link between their work and the inward turn of Low’s second side, the notion of landscape as emotion: “It was an art form that mirrored life not by event but by mood,” Bowie said in 2001, “and this was where I felt my work was going.”

  At night, Bowie explored yet another peeling layer of the Berlin myth. The nightclub scene was a bizarre mix of the very new and the very old, a bit like the population of Berlin itself at the time—the middle generation having been swept away in the cataclysm of war. Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing” gives a good enough flavour of what it was like to be out on the tiles with Bowie. The pair of them would frequent cabarets, and a transvestite bar where the velvet seats and smoky mirror had been preserved intact since before the war, as explained to Bowie by a 75-year old art dealer who’d been going there since the days of Marlene Dietrich in the 1920s. In Romy Haag’s club, “her cabaret was on a stage about ten feet wide and she used to have as many as twenty people on that stage all doing these quick vignettes,” recalls Visconti. “They’d put strobe lights on and then they’d mime to the records. I remember Romy herself did a great mime to one of David’s records, “Amsterdam,” but it was all speeded up so that the voice was in a female range. It was quite bizarre and you fe
lt you were in a Fellini film.” It was the Christopher Isherwood side of Berlin, which had Bowie fascinated during his initial months in the city. And photos of the time show Bowie very much acting the part of the Weimar-era Berliner, in his pinch-front fedora and leather overcoat.

  On the other side of the age equation, Berlin was also full of young people, and especially artists, attracted to the city thanks to generous government grant schemes and a dispensation from national service. West Berlin had largely been cleared of industry due to its physical isolation, leaving behind huge warehouse spaces that artists and musicians would transform into studios, with government aid. It led to a vibrant alternative culture; musicians would be coming and going through Hansa studios and Bowie would be socialising with people like Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese, with whom he shared a rehearsal stage built into an old theatre. Often enough, Bowie would “hang with the intellectuals and beats at the Exile restaurant in Kreutzberg. In the back they had this smoky room with a billiard table and it was sort of like another living room except the company was always changing.”

  But the early months were traumatic. He and Iggy had come to Berlin to “kick drugs in the heroin capital of the world,” in the words of Iggy Pop—although thankfully heroin held little appeal. Bowie had cut back on his cocaine intake but hadn’t killed the habit altogether; some mornings he’d still be locking himself in the bathroom. Other days he might knock back a bottle of whisky, “just to get rid of the depression.” He was once spotted in a bar, alone and sobbing. And he was still suffering from paranoia, obsessed with the “leeches” who were bleeding him. He could fall into autistic detachment, refusing to look people in the eye, doodling and drawing as they tried to talk to him. “His job was to work, and his joy was in discussing it—if a mumbled yep or nope could be elevated to discussion,” was how one colleague at Hansa put it.