David Bowie's Low (33 1_3) - Hugo Wilcken (Conv.)

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Low Praise for the series: These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it Vice down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds— Vice NME A brilliant series …each one a work of real love— Nylon Passionate, obsessive, and smart— Boldtype Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—

Each volume has a distinct, almost militantly personal take on a beloved beloved long-pla l ong-playe yerr …the books that have have result resulteed are like the albums themselves—filled with moments of shimmering beauty, forgivable Tracks Magazine flaws, and stubborn eccentricity— Tracks Uncut [A] consistently excellent series— Uncut

The nobility—and fun—of the project has never been questioned …a winning mix of tastes and writing styles— Philadelphia Philadelphi a We Week ekly ly Reading about rock isn’t quite the same as listening to it, but this Neon NYC NY C series comes pretty damn close—



























website at www.continuumbooks.com www.continuumbooks.com and and 33third.blogspot.com



























Also available in this series: Dusty in i n Me Memphis mphis by Warren Zanes Foreve Foreverr Changes by Andrew Hultkrans Harve Harvest by by Sam Inglis The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller Meat Meat Is Murder by by Joe Pernice The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh Abba Gold Gol d by by Elisabeth Vincentelli Electri Electricc Ladyland L adyland by by John Perry Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Let L et It Be by Steve Matteo Live L ive at the Apollo Apol lo by DouglasWolk Aqualung by by Allan Moore OK Computer by by Dai Griffiths Let L et It Be by Colin Meloy Led L ed Zeppe Z eppeli lin n IV by by Erik Davis Armed Armed Forces Forces by Franklin Bruno Exil Exilee on Main Street Street by by Bill Janovitz Grace by Daphne Brooks



























Born in the U.S. U. S.A A. by Geoffrey Himes Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder Kic Ki ck Out the Jams by Don McLeese In the Aeroplane Aeroplane over over the Sea Sea by Kim Cooper Music from fr om Big Pink by by John Niven The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck Love L oveless less by Mike McGonigal Doolittl Doolit tlee by Ben Sisario Daydream Daydream Nati N ation on by Matthew Stearns T here’s a Riot Rio t Goin’On Goi n’On by Miles Marshall Lewis Stone Roses by Alex Green Court and Spark by by Sean Nelson

Forthcoming in this series: London L ondon Calli Cal ling ng by by David L. Ulin



























Low

Hugo Wilck Wil cken en





























2011 Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com © 2005 by Hugo Wilcken All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents. eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-3129-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilcken, Hugo. Low / Hugo Wilcken. p.c p. cm. -- (33 (33 1/3) Includes bibliographical references (p.).





























CONTENTS acknowledgements ackn owledgements introduction from kether to melkuth the visitor visitor one magical movement talking talki ng through the gloom the gloom what can what can i do about my dreams? dreams? waiting for the gift through throu gh mor ning’s ning’s thoughts i’ll never never touch you je est un autre a little girl with grey eyes nothing to do, nothing to say





























pulsations afterlife homesick blues crash your plane, walk away bibliogra bibl iography phy





























acknowledgements Thanks to my family, particularly Patrick Wilcken, for his help with research and critical reading of the text. Thanks also to David Barker, for commissioning the book; to Nick Currie, for an interesting exchange of e-mails; to Chris from menofmusic.com, for locating and sending me material; and to everyone else who helped in the writing of the work. And a special thank you to Julie Street, for her significant editorial input and all-round support. This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend Peter Meyer (1964–2003).





























introduction L ow in late 1979, soon after my fifteenth birthday. One of I first heard Low my older brothers had sent me a cassette, home-taped from the vinyl. I was far from my family and my native Australia doing a term of school in Dunkirk in northern France, ostensibly to learn French. Dunkirk was a grey simulacrum of a city. It had been destroyed during the Second World War, and entirely rebuilt afterwards according to the original plans. Every building contained the ghost of its bombed-out twin. At the city’s edge, a wide desolate beach stretched out for miles. At low tide, you could see the wrecks of boats that had never made it across the Channel, during the desperate evacuation of Allied troops in 1940. Flanders is only twelve kilometres to the east, and the landscape around Dunkirk is similar—fluorescent green fields that are unrelentingly flat, quite disorientating for someone from hilly Sydney. In winter, the northern, pewter skies hung oppressively low, and the drizzle was constant. My French was approximate and communication difficult, accentuating the sense of isolation that is the natural state for L ow was the perfect soundtrack. a fifteen-year-old boy. Of course, Low L ow Fifteen is the age of bedroom retreat, and three of the five Low































Wall” or “ S ubter ubt erra ranea neans, ns,”” which suggested fa fading di ng civilis civil isations ations gone to ground. The album left a haunting impression. In the eighties, David Bowie forfeited a fair chunk of his artistic mystique in exchange for megastardom as a stadium entertainer, and my interest moved on to other things. Lately, he’s redeemed himself somewhat, but it’s only in the past few years that my attention turned bac back to what what now seems seems to me to t o be a fa fascinating scinating moment in the midm idseventies, when people like Bowie, Brian Eno or Kraftwerk were redefining what it meant to engage with the pop and rock genres. It was partly about injecting an experimental, European sensibility into a medium that was largely American in its conception. Of course, high and low art had been collapsing into each other ever since Warhol, Lichtenstein and the other pop art innovators had emerged in the early sixties. But if in the sixties it was art that was slumming it with pop aesthetics, the reverse was happening in the mid-seventies. L ow marks the highpoint of this development, Pop went arty. And Low with its atmosphere of modernist alienation, its expressionism, its































from kether to melkuth L ow and its siblings were a direct follow-on As far as the music goes, Low from the title track of Station to Station. It’s often struck me that there will usually be one track on any given album of mine which will be a fair indicator of the intent of the following album. —David —David Bowie, 2001

I see Low L ow as very much a continuation from Station to Station, which I think is one of the great records of all time. —Brian Eno, 1999 L ow begins with the rattling pistons of a The journey towards Low locomotive, opening the title track of David Bowie’s previous album Station to Station, recorded in Los Angeles in late 1975. Retro steam































with a car revving up and driving off, the sound also crossing over from left to right channel. Like Autobahn, Station to Station is a veritable epic in rock/pop terms. Clocking in at over ten minutes, this is the longest track Bowie has ever written (the instrumental introduction alone L ow ). It’s over a minute before Earl outdistances most songs on Low Slick’s guitar kicks in, mimicking at first a train whistle, then the clunki lu nking ng sounds sound s of engines and and whee wheels on o n track. track. “ I got some s ome quite quit e extraordina xtraordinary ry things out of Earl Earl Sli S licck,” k, ” Bowie has has said. “ I think it captured his imagination to make noises on guitar, and textures, rather than playing the right notes.” That experimental groping towards sound as texture rather than chords and melody is definitely there all right, even if it’s not really followed through on the rest of the album. From there on, there’s a gradual building up of instrumentation. A metronomic two-note piano figure sets up a self-consciously mechanical beat, which is almost immediately opposed by the R&B rhythm section of Dennis Davis (drums), George Murray (bass) and































territory is clearly being marked out, quite different from earlier Hunky Dory or Ziggy Z iggy Stardust St ardust , which, from a musical successes like Hunky perspe perspecctive ti ve,, remain remain conventi conventiona onall slic sli ces of English rock. rock. After the extended funk/industrial workout, Bowie’s vocals crash in, and things start to get weird. The first half-dozen lines pack in a bewilder bewildering ing arra rray of allusions ll usions to gnostic gnosti cism, ism , black black magic and and the kabbala kabbala (a medieval medieval sc s chool of Jewis Jewish h mysti my sticcism). is m). “ T he re return of the thin white duke, throwing darts in lovers’ eyes / The return of the thin white duke, making sure white stains.” This is for initiates only—the sexual/ sexual/drug drug connot connotaations ti ons of the “ white whit e stains” stains ” may be obvious obvi ous enough, but the casual listener will hardly pick up that it’s also the title of an obscure book of poetry by the notorious English occultist Aleister Aleist er Crowley (1875–1 (1875–1947). 947). “ T hrowing darts darts in i n lovers’ eyes” also references Crowley, alluding to a no doubt apocryphal incident in 1918, when Crowley killed a young couple in a magical rite that involved hurling darts. A mangled version of a famous line from Shakespeare’s Tempest































course.” That’s something of an exaggeration—intellectually, the mix of references is rather confused, although it works extremely well on a poeti poeticc level. level. Crowleyism was not a rock novelty in 1975. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was a disciple; Can’s extraordinary Tago Mago (1971) alludes to Crowley; and arguably the most famous LP ever, Sgt epper , depicts Crowley on its cover. Previous Bowie songs also ref referenc erencee occult occultis ism m (“ Quicksand” Quicksand” nameche namechecks cks Crowley C rowley,, Himml Him mler er and the Golden Dawn society of which both were members), and traces of L ow . But never was it so blatant it subsist on later albums, including Low as on Station to Station. What are we to make of this? Certain critics Revolution make a great deal indeed. The late Ian McDonald (whose Revolution in the Head remains remains the benchmark of Beatles literature) grandly depicts B owie owi e as as a Prospero Pros pero fig figure ure executi executing ng an “ exorcis exorcism m of the self, self, of mind, of the past ….Bowie has ascended the Tree of Life; now he wants wants to come down to earth, earth, to love,” and and to “ cast his occ occult grimoire grimoir e into the ocean.”

































go five or six days without sleep, the point at which reality and imagination im agination become become irretrievably irretrievably blurr bl urreed: “ By the th e end end of the th e wee week k my whole life would be transformed into this bizarre nihilistic fantasy world of oncoming doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism.” Essentially, Bowie was suffering from severe bouts of cocaine psychosis, psychosis, a condit condition ion very very simil si milaar to schizophr schizophreenia, with its it s highly highl y distorted perceptions of reality, hallucinations, affectlessness and a marked tendency towards magical thinking. His interviews of the time are classics of messianic delusion, as he raves on about Hitler being the first first rock rock star, star, or his own politi poli ticcal ambitions ambit ions (“ I’d love l ove to enter

































of “ normal” norm al” exi exist stenc ence. e. Lif Li fe at at Doheny Doh eny Drive, wher wh eree he’ he’ d take t aken n up residence, resembled a kind of court, peopled with musicians, dealers, lovers, and a whole host of parasitic shysters and hangers-on. His assist ssi staant Corinne Co rinne “ Coco” Co co” S chwab chwab acte acted d as a gatekee gatekeeper per,, sorting sorti ng out the logistics of his life, insulating him from situations and people that upset him. His ability to do anything for himself had become severely rest restra rained. ined. F ame, ame, cocaine, cocaine, isol i solation ation and Los Angeles Angeles (“ the least least suitable place on earth for a person to go in search of identity and stability,” as he’d put it later) had all conspired to spin Bowie off into a very dark place indeed. Given this state of affairs, the wonder is that Bowie got anything

































days and then realise after a few days that I had done absolutely nothing. I thought I’d been working and working, but I’d only been rewriting the first four bars or something. And I hadn’t got anywhere. I couldn’t believe it! I’d been working on it for a week! I hadn’t got past past four bars! bars! And I’d I’ d rea realise li se that I’d bee been changing hanging those four four bars bars around, doing them backwards, splitting them up and doing the end first. An obsession with detail had taken over.” It was yet another consequence of the psychosis, and that eerie, overwrought quality is excell llenc encee, in all over Station to Station. It’s the cocaine album par exce its slow, hypnotic rhythms, its deranged romantic themes, its glacial alie li enati nation, on, its it s dialogue wit with h God (“ (“ Word on a W ing”), ing”), in the t he pure

































late to be grateful, it’s too late to be late again/It’s too late to be hateful hateful,, the th e European European canon canon is is here. here. ” “ It was like li ke a plea pl ea to come back back to Europe,” Europe, ” Bowie Bowi e com comment mented ed a few year yearss later l ater.. “ It was one of those th ose self-chat things one has with oneself from time to time.” That last lyric points to what the track achieved sonically. The train has travelled from occult-tinged, post-Manson Los Angeles towards a certain modernist Europe and its avant-garde pretensions, its experimental song structures, its fascination with sound as texture. A Europe where traditional popular music (British music hall, French chanson, German cabaret) had always privileged exaggeration and role-playin role-playing g over aut authenticit henticity y and self-e self-expre xpressi ssion. on. “ Towards Towards the end

































Bowie himself hovers somewhere between America and Europe, his hair in a James Dean quiff, his tieless white shirt severely buttoned to L ow , too, is a treated still from The Man Who the neck. The cover of Low ell to Earth.



































the visitor



































Apart Apart from from that t hat early early run-through of “ S ubter ubt erra ranea neans, ns,”” then, the th ese L ow was that they got Bowie thinking sessions’ real contribution to Low about (and (and cre creating) ating ) atm atmospheric, ospheric, “ mood mood”” music musi c for for the first first time. ti me. In a career of over a decade, Bowie had yet to record a single instrumental piece. In this respect, the loghorrea of Station to Station



































soundtrack— The The Man Who Fell to Earth has a sci-fi premise but isn’t really a scifi film and a spacey, futuristic soundtrack would have set the wrong tone. As for the quality of Bowie’s work, those who did hea hear it were were impressed. impressed. Phil P hilli lips ps found found it i t “ haunti haunting ng and bea beautif uti ful, with chimes, Japanese bells, and what sounded like electronic wind and



































he’s playing. Like Bowie, Newton creates music, and near the end of the film, he makes an album of spectral sounds entitled The Visitor . The scene in which a character buys this album shows a record store display promoting Bowie’s Young Americans in the background. An early screenplay apparently used Bowie lyrics as well.



































images from the film illustrate its importance. The role was a perfect feint for the Bowie persona, crystallising the metaphor of the alien, which Bowie continued to both nurture and fight against (his uninspi uni nspiring ring “ regul regular ar guy” schtick of the 1980s was was some som ething thi ng of a reaction to it). As late as 1997, the chosen title of his album























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































someone in the manic phase of bipolar disorder. The first thing you notice is the startling drum crash, like a fist pounding at your speake speakerr. “ W hen hen it came out, out , I thought Low L ow was the sound of the future,” recalled Joy Division/New Order drummer Ideal for L iving LP, Ste St ephen phen Morris. Morris. “ W hen hen rec recording the Ideal LP, I remember we kept asking the engineer to make the drums sound like ‘Speed of Life’—strangely enough he couldn’t.” It was a trick Visconti used with the Eventide Harmonizer. He sent the snare to the Harmonizer, which dropped the pitch, then fed it straight back to the drummer. It was done live, so Dennis Davis was hearing the distortion as he played, and responding accordingly. Visconti added L ow ’s signature sound, which is not just the two onto the mix to get Low the thump but also a desce descending nding echo. Visconti: “ W hen hen the album came out the Harmonizer still wasn’t widely available. I had loads of produce producers phoning phoni ng me and asking what what I had done, but I wouldn’t wouldn’ t tell them. I asked, instead, how they thought I did it and I got some great answers that I found inspirational. One producer insisted I compressed the drum tracks three separate times and slowed the tape down every time, or something like that.” The heavily treated drums and the foregrounding of the bass was another inversion—instead of just getting the bass and drums down and doing the creative stuff on top, Visconti and Bowie were refocusing on the rhythm, which goes to the heart of what popular music is about. The sound itself later became a post-punk trope t rope whe when n produce producers finally finally twigged to t o how it i t was was done, done, but at the time t ime it i t was was a radica radicall depa departur rturee. L ow is about things opposing each other Sonically, the first side of Low —the synthe synt heti ticc versus versus the t he organic, organic, noise versus versus music musi c, the abra abrasive versus versus the t he melodic melodi c. And it’s it ’s all all already lready ther t heree on “ S peed peed of Life Life. ” The T he first sounds are the fade-in of a scratchy, descending dissonant synth



























days). Everything is descending on this track: treated drums, lead guitar, synth effects, harmonising synths. And all the different elements are fighting it out, aggressively drawing attention to themselves as if in an orchestra composed of soloists. This is an album where the seams show: no bones are made about processed quality of the sound, which refuses to cohere in the way it did on Station to Station. Essentially, it’s an artier take on Station’s funkkrautrock hybrid. Just at the moment you might expect the track to develop into something else, or for the vocal to finally materialise (as it did after “ S tation tati on to S tation’s” tati on’s” extended extended intro), in tro), “ S peed peed of Life” Life” fades out. It’s a matt matteer of deflec deflecti ting ng expectati expectations. ons. Eno again again:: “ W hat I think thi nk he was was trying to do was to duck the momentum of a successful career. The main problem with success is that it has a huge momentum. It’s like you’ve got this big train behind you and it wants you to carry on going the same way. Nobody wants you to step off the tracks and start looking round in the scrub around the edges because nobody can see anything promising there.”



























i’ll never touch you We have to wait for the second track before we get any Bowie vocals. “ Breaki Breaking ng Glass” is another fragment, ragment, not even even making two t wo minut mi nutes, es, and probably the shortest song Bowie has ever recorded. It’s got the heavily treated funk-disco beat, Eno’s moog fanning from right to left speaker, and a menacing Carlos Alomar rock riff—one of the few stabs at a rock rock sensibilit sensibil ity y on the t he album album.. Acc According to Aloma Alom ar, “ Dennis Dennis Davis had a lot to do with that. David wanted a song that was much lighter and much sillier, and ‘Breaking Glass’ was definitely it. If you leave a hole open in the music, you’re going to get a signature line on the guitar for the introduction, which I duly did. For the rest of the song, I wanted to ape a Jew’s harp, just a drone. We were just having fun. If you listen to all the quirks in the music—the call and response stuff between bass, guitar and drums—that was done with just three members of the band.” The last time we heard Bowie singing on record, on the final track of Station to Station, he was offering a seriously histrionic reading of the Tiomkin/Wa T iomkin/Washington shington song “ W ild Is the Wind.” Wi nd.” Bowie’ Bowie’s neur neurotic otic croon on Station to Station —which —which owed owed more than a passing debt to Scott Walker—cranked up the drama value another few notches, adding to the weirdly tense atmosphere of that album. In complete contra ont rast st,, Bowie Bo wie comes comes over flat and monotone monot one on “ Breakin Breaking g Glass.” Glass. ” The alienation is still very much to the forefront, but it’s no longer romantically overwrought. It’s withdrawn and autistic. (One of the curious things about the album is how it surrenders what look like



























The lyric is also a fragment. There’s no verse and chorus, just a few lines sung flatly, with a weirdly random emphasis on certain words (“ (“ Baby, Baby, I’ve I’ ve BEEN breaking breaking glass in your you r ROOM again/Don’ again/Don’ t look at the CARPET, I drew something AWFUL-ON-IT”). And there’s no baroque imagery, no throwing darts in lovers’ eyes. Alomar is not wrong to say that “ Brea Breaking Glass” is the t he light, li ght, silly sil ly song of the album, because there is something comic about the lyric, something of the child who knows he’s been naughty. But there’s also something creepily psycho about it, and the tension between the two is what makes it work. In “ W hat hat in i n the World” World” and “ Sound and Visi Vision, on,”” the bedroom bedroom is where where we retre retreaat to, t o, to shut s hut the t he world world out. But the room in “ Brea Breaking Glass” is an altogether darker place. It’s the locus of occult ritual. The track’s title is most probably an occult allusion, and drawing “ something awful” awful” on the ca carpet rpet certainl rtainly y is. is . “ Well, ll , it is a contrived contrived image, image, yes, yes,”” Bowie said said in 2001. 2001 . “ It ref refers to both bot h the t he kabba kabbali listi sticc drawings of the Tree of Life and the conjuring of spirits.” The singleline li ne “ Listen” Lis ten” and “ S ee” ee” are are als also o stra st rangely ngely inca i ncant ntaatory to ry (as (as well well as presa presaging ging “ Sound and Vision” isi on”). ). Is Bowie Bo wie commenting commenting on the doomy doom y, fetishised existence he’d led in Los Angeles? Or are the magical obsessions still current? Probably a bit of both. Although LA marked the highpoint of his cocaine psychosis and related occult fixations, they subsisted, and it was years before he could entirely shake them off. Throughout 1977 and 1978, the letters he would send friends and associates were marked with special numbers, to which he would L ow, he refused to sleep in ascribe occult meanings. While recording Low the Château’s master bedroom on the grounds that it was haunted. (And (And he seemed seemed to persuade persuade the others that it was too. Visconti: is conti: “ T he talk every night seemed to be about the ghosts that haunt the place.”)



























where where things thi ngs were were moving movin g in the room,” room, ” Bowie Bo wie later reca recall lled, ed, “ and this was when I was totally straight.” The lyric seems to have been composed in cut-up Burroughs fashion, where Bowie would take phrases he’d written and rearrange them in disorientating ways, trying to break down the sense for new meanin meanings gs to t o emerge emerge—or —or to cance cancell eac each other ot her out. out . “ Don’t Don’ t look” l ook” is follo ol lowe wed d by “ S ee”; ee”; and “ You’ re such a wonderful wonderful person person”” is follo ol lowed wed by “ But you got problems, problems, I’ll I’l l neve neverr touch you.” you. ” The T he lyric is like li ke a conversational fragment in which a psychotic who has just trashed his girlfriend’s room is telling her that she’s the mad one. It’s a solipsistic world in which the psychosis is projected onto the other. The lyrics and intonation are without affect, without angst or self-awareness; we’re seeing the psychosis from the inside. That solipsism seems to me to be one of the psychological keys to the album. Everything becomes a reflection of the self, until you lose sight of where the self stops and the world begins. The instrumentals of the second side are tone poems that are ostensibly about places— Warsaw and Berlin. But they’re really interior landscapes, extrapolating the world from the self. And that whole dialectic of objectivity and subjectivity informs the German Expressionist painters of the Die Brücke and Neue Sachlichkeit movements that Bowie was so keen on at around that time (of whom more later). Bowie once said that the work of the Die Brücke artists gave him the feeling that they were were “ descr describi ibing ng some som ething thi ng just jus t as it was was disa di sappe ppeaaring.” T hat hat could L ow. Like aptly be applied to most of the songs on the first half of Low “ S peed peed of Lif Li fe,” “ B reaking reaking Glass” Gl ass” fade fadess out just ju st as the ri ri ff is star st arti ting ng to sink in. Just at the moment you think it might be leading somewhe somewhere re,, it’s it ’s gone. gone. Acc According to Visconti, Bowie “ couldn’t ouldn’ t come up with any lyrics when he was doing the music and thus that’s why





























and Low L ow , are like the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Station is weird Crowley-esque mythology, girlfriends who disappear into the TV set and talking to God—it’s a loghorreic L ow is stew of exaggeration, simmering hysteria and delusion. And Low the other side of the psychosis. It’s an autistic world of isolation and withdrawal, fragmentary thinking and mood swing, alogia and affecti ective ve flatt flatteening ni ng …“ I’ll I’ ll never never touch to uch you.” you. ”





























je est es t un autre utre But it would be way too reductive to suggest that Bowie made a schizophrenic album because he was schizophrenic. The connections are a little more interesting than that. Bowie certainly drugged himsel into a state in which schizophrenic-like behaviour emerged, although even through the worst of it he never totally spun out of orbit, as his profe professionalism ssionalis m and work work rate rate te t estif sti fy. T here here’s ’s a part part of his drug addiction that falls into cliché. After all, Bowie was hardly the only rock star in mid-seventies LA burning himself out on cocaine. Each era has its drug which translates its myth—in the mid-sixties, LSD reflected a naïve optimism about the possibility of change; and in the mid-seventies, cocaine echoed the grandiose nihilism of post-Manson LA. And Bowie fell into that trap. Above and beyond all that, Bowie had long had a fascination with and horror of madness. It had informed most of his work to date, T he an Who Sold the World in in particular. In the mid-seventies, Bowie often talked about the strain of madness that ran through his family, and his fear of inheriting it. His half-brother, Terry Burns, really was a schizophrenic. Terry was nine years older, and someone Bowie clearly





























hospital in 1982, after which Terry developed a fixation on him, convinced that Bowie would return to rescue him. They didn’t meet again, gain, and Terry Terry commi committ tteed suic sui cide in 1985. Bowie’s Bowie’s 1970 tra t racck “ All the Madmen” Madmen” and his 1993 single si ngle “ Jump T hey hey Sa S ay” are are both about Terr Terry y, as is i s “ T he Bewlay Bewlay Brothers” Brothers” (1971) (1971) in all like li keli lihood. hood. 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 “ outsi out sider der art”—art rt”—art produced produced by people with menta m entall ill i llness ness (henc (hencee the title of the nineties Bowie-Eno collaboration Outside). While making the Berlin trilogy, he and Eno visited Gugging, an Austrian psychiatric psychiatric hospita hospit al-cum-a l-cum-art rt studio st udio that encoura ncourage gess pati patieents to paint paint.. What Bowie derived from the experience was the artists’ lack of selfconsciousness. onscious ness. “ None of the th em kne kn ew they were were arti artists sts,, ” he told tol d ourna ournalist list T im de Lisle Lisle in 1995. “ It’s compe compelli lling ng and and sometim sometimees quite frightening to see this honesty. There’s no awareness of embarrassment.” The subtext seems to be about regaining lost innocence through new ways ways of expressi xpression, on, unshackl unshackleed by the conventions convention s of “ normal” society. Bowie’s outsider art enthusiasm is reminiscent of the





























reac reachin hing g the highwater mark mark with his h is haunting haunt ing “ Word Song, 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 posit ive symptoms sym ptoms overstimul overstimulaate the t he imagination, leading 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 beha behaviour viour tha t hatt might mi ght normall normally y be thought strange strange ca can be writ written ten off off as ust another personality trait. There aren’t the same social brakes as in the “ real” real” world. And all all the more so for for Bowie Bowi e, whose copi coping ng strategy was to hive off characters that were fantasies of himself. But perf performa ormanc ncee as as thera therapy can be dange dangerous. rous. Invented Invented chara characcters ters 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 —eve —eventually ntually turning you into int o the thing t hing you’re you’ re flee fleeing ing from.





























a litt li ttle le g irl ir l with grey gr ey eyes eyes L ow , and on to the Back to Low t he third thi rd tra track, “ W hat hat in i n the World” World”— — according to Laurent Thibault a hold-over from the Idiot sessions. sessions. Cloc Cl ocking king in at 2:23, 2: 23, it’s it ’s bare barely ly any longer than than “ Brea Breaking Glass. Glass.”” In In a way, it’s a composite of the two tracks that preceded it. Sonically, the th e cool rock menace menace of “ B reaking reaking Glass” is replaced replaced with wit h the t he compressed, synth syn theti eticc fre frenzy nzy of “ S peed peed of Lif Li fe,” while whil e lyrically yricall y the t he 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 litt li ttle le more rounded than “ Breakin Breaking g Glass,” Glass, ” less circular circular than “ S peed peed of Lif Li fe.” We’re back with the crashing drums (with an even more pronounce pronounced disco flavour flavour), ), while te t exturall xturally y, there there’s a synth-ge synt h-gene nera rated ted bubbling bubbli ng noise right up in the mix, m ix, sounding as though something’s ust about to boil over. Carlos Alomar’s rhythm guitar has a soft, azzy 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 L ow sessions according to Bowie. But that messy, drunken guitar line (played elsewhere by Fripp) is a signature































make you cry”). There’s the disconnection of the previous song, from both the supposed inter i nterlocutor locutor (“ I’m just a litt li ttle le bit bi t afraid raid of you”) you”) and from from the t he self (“ what you yo u gonna gonna say to t o the t he real real me”). me”). Bowie Bo wie has has said that t hat at at this t his period period,, “ I wa was at the end end of my tether t ether physicall physically y and emotionally mot ionally and had had serious serious doubts about my sanit sanity y, ” but that “ overa overall ll,, I get a se s ense of rea real optimi opti mism sm through the t he veil veilss of L ow . I can hear myself really struggling to get well.” despair from Low And perha perhaps ps you catch glimpses gli mpses of that struggle st ruggle in “ W hat hat in the t he World.” If it’s it ’s impossible impossi ble to ta t ake a lyric like “ I’m in the t he mood for 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 mixe mi xed d up and heartf heartfeelt in the “ something dee deep inside i nside of me, yearning deep inside of me, talking through the gloom.”































nothing nothing to do, do, nothing nothing to say s ay L ow could have In retrospect, it seems strange that an album like Low 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 minut mi nutes es long, “ S ound and Vis Visio ion” n” is at least least the perf perfect ect length l ength for 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 as an afterthought afterthought.. “ S ound and Visi Vision” on” was was the t he first 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.































T he backi backing ng voca v ocals ls and instrum in strumentation entation were were “ all rec recorded orded before 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 concoc oncocti tion on Eno had dre dreamed up. “ Sound and Visi Vision” on” wa was “ the ultim ult imaate retre retreaat song,” song, ” ac according to Bowie. “ It was was just j ust 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 aili ng to connect onnect with wit h fema female le others in “ Breaki Breaking ng Glass” and and “ W hat in the World, World,”” the lyrics here are addresse addressed d only onl y to t o the t he self, self, “ drifti drifting ng into my solitude,” presaging the wordless, inward turn of the second side. Bowie’s transformations of the seventies were progressive stages of Z iggy Stardust St ardust was escape. Ziggy was a very English sort of Houdini act, slipping free from the dour constrictions of lower-middle-class life; L ow ’s from the suburbs; from England; and most of all from the self. Low































music reviews of the day (which now come over as rather hysterical in themselves). In the NME , for instance, Charles Shaar Murray was writ writing ing about an album album “ so negati negative ve it doesn’t doesn’ t even even contain contain emptiness mpt iness or the void,” void, ” an an album that is i s “ futili uti lity ty and dea 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 o 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 mericans has a nihili nihi listi sticc underc undercurr urreent; the album album is “ the squashed 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































himse hims elf understood understood well well enough: “ I thought I’d take the stage set, set, throw it away, and go and live in the real thing.”

































round and round T he next next two t wo songs, the t he Ballardian Ballardian “ Always Always Crashing Crashing in i n the Same Car” and “ Be My Wif W ife,” e,” signal a slight sli ght shif shi ft in i n form form and and mood. mo od. T hey both nod to a more conve conventi ntiona onall song structure structure,, with “ Be My W ife ife” even fea featu turing ring a chorus of sorts. “ Always 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

































Hunky Dory mimic chatt chatter er on “ Andy Warhol Warhol”” from Hunky mimi c those of “ T he Madca Madcap Laughs”). Laughs”). Bowie’ Bo wie’ss “ I was was going round and round round the t he hotel garage, must have been touching close to ninety-four” is pretty close to Barrett’s Barrett’s “ You’re ou’ re spinni spi nning ng around around and around in a car car with wit h electric electric light li ghtss flashi flashing ng very fast” fast” (f (from “ No Good T rying”). rying”). Likewise, “ Jasmine, Jasmin e, I saw you peepin peeping, g, as I put my m y foot foot down to t o the th e floo floor” r” has some som ething thi ng of Barrett’s Barrett’s mela m elancholy ncholy “ Dark Dark Globe” (a (a song Bowie B owie has Madcap’s highlig singled out as Madcap highl ight): ht): “ Oh where where are are you now, now, pussy willow that smiled on this leaf, when I was alone, you promised a stone sto ne from your hear heart. t.”” (And there’ there’ss also “ singi si nging ng through t hrough the th e gloom, glo om,”” from from the t he James James Joyce poem poem “ Golden Hair” Hair” that Bar B arre rett tt set to to

































Crashing in the Same Car.”* Car.”* It’s a song about repeated failure transformed into recurring nightmare, with suicidal overtones. The image of crashing over and over again, again, and de d eliber li beraately (“ as I put my foot down to t o the t he flo floor” or”), ), rec recalls ll s Iggy’s Iggy’s “ though I try to die di e you put me bac back on the t he line li ne.. ” The T he slower beat, Eno’s swirling synth instrumentation and the ghostly keyboard treatm treatments ents add to t o the the track’s track’s oneiric onei ric fee feell . 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 stif sti fle and comfort. comfort. Instea Instead of journeying journeying from A to B, a ca car is

































channelling the themes and strategies that would become familiar in L ow’s turn the post-punk era of the late seventies and early eighties. Low 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 we were all all trade trademar marks ks picked picked up in part part or in toto tot o by post-punk bands bands like li ke Joy Division, Divisi on, Ultravox!, Ultravox!, the Human League League or Americ Americaan acts like Talking Heads and Devo.

































s ometi ometim mes you get ge t now nowhere here T here’ here’ss a sonic soni c link between between “ Be My W ife” ife” and the t he Station to Station album in its knees-up pub piano style that is also used on “ T VC-15 C-15”” (Station’s fourth fourth track). track). “ Be My W ife” ife” is about as L ow , and was the second single taken from conventional as it gets on Low the album. It has a verse and chorus and sticks to fairly straightforward band band instrume inst rumentation. ntation. Essenti Essentiaally ll y, though, it’s it ’s stil st illl another mixed-up mixed-up



































song ends poignantly with the first line of a verse that is never comple ompl eted. “ It was was genuinely genuinely anguished, I think, t hink,”” Bowie once once said said of the song, before before adding: ddi ng: “ It coul could d have been been anybody, anybody, though. th ough.”” T hat ambivalence strikes pretty much at the heart of not only the song and L ow , but almost everything else Bowie did in the the first side of Low



































moving on



































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 o high modernism. Burroughs’s cut-up method, as he applied it, is philosophica phil osophicall lly y engaging ngaging but doesn’ doesn’tt make for for grea great rea reading (argua (arguably bly,,



































honky château



































cold in certain areas of it,” and had a dark corner near a window that see seemed to suck suck light li ght into i nto it. i t. Visconti took t ook the room, room, which which “ felt like li ke 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 shaking his shoulder, shoulder, exce xcept that when when he opene opened d his















































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































David Bowie's Low (33 1_3) - Hugo Wilcken (Conv.)

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