Artist Guide - David Bowie Pt 2

Where to start when faced with a legacy stretching over forty years bequeathed by one of pop’s great shapeshifters? Part-timers may opt for The Best Of and whilst this is perfectly acceptable, those digging deeper will find greater reward. Dame David helpfully released 10 original studio albums over a 10 year period that is generally accepted to be his creative peak. This decade-long purple patch forms the basis of this guide, split into two parts to aid digestion. The comments section is below for any Bowie zealots vexed at my omission of The Man Who Sold The World, Let's Dance or the Labyrinth soundtrack indeed...

This is the concluding part of my humble foray into the Dame’s output (see part one for 1971-75)

Station To Station (1976) An illuminating mid-point between Bowie’s soul-influenced Young Americans album and the experimental “Berlin trilogy” that followed, Station to Station contains echoes of both. Supposedly central to this album is Bowie’s Thin White Duke persona, a darker, megalomaniac version of his Young Americans soul guise, distorted into strange new shapes by cocaine dependence and dragging the soul sound of Young Americans into dark new places.

Visually subtler than Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke was an Aryan, suit-wearing creation with interests in The Third Reich that led some to erroneously suggest that Bowie himself had sympathies with fascism.

Certainly, Station to Station begins with sinister, nameless atmospherics yielding to a creeping dirge with an air of brooding malevolence. In characteristic fashion, the second half of the song then shifts without warning to an anthemic, ebullient rocker underpinned by a stomping disco beat, even namechecking Bowie’s then drug of choice: “it’s not the side effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love.”

The twisted disco theme is echoed in the dextrous hooks of Golden Years and the rapier riffing of Stay. By way of balladry, the sweeping melodrama of Word On A Wing and Wild Is The Wind see Bowie breathe life into grandiloquent sentiments with his impassioned delivery and restrained arrangements.

With the nucleus of R & B musicians in place (Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davis and George Murray) who would provide the crucial foundation to Bowie’s sound until 1980, Station To Station is a marvellous flowering of melody, funk and innovation, considered by some to be his magnum opus.

Low (1977) The beginning of the “Berlin trilogy”, Low describes Bowie’s state of mind at the time; recovering from cocaine addiction, reeling from the momentum of his own success and with his first marriage in freefall. Consequently, he left LA and its decadent coke scene behind, decamping to Berlin to regain control of his career and life.

Originally intended to be a series of recording experiments that were uncertain to be released, the first “side” of the album (as was intended with the original vinyl format) is actually brimming with short, direct compositions. Be My Wife sees Bowie singing in what is almost a London “geezer” accent, the urgency of the popping bass and thudding piano riff underpinning lyrics that seem like a human cry for contact/domesticity/love amid the paradoxical loneliness of megastardom – “Please be mine/Share my life/Stay with me/Be my wife.”

Ditto Sound and Vision, lyrically evoking solitude, futility and despair: “pale blinds drawn all day/nothing to do, nothing to say”. However, the musical buoyancy of this track is established and indomitable by the time Bowie’s first words emerge halfway through, softening the lyrical theme and almost creating an air of positivity, a stiff-upper-lip attitude as opposed to maudlin self-pity.

Side two consists of four ambient, synth-driven pieces, the other instruments ebbing away as side one closes. Bowie and keyboardist Brian Eno (who was to collaborate on the entire trilogy) deliberately threw away the manuals to the synthesizers they were using to veer away from convention and aid the creative process, ironically setting a convention for others to follow in later years – many artists have made a good living peddling stark synth-laden wares inspired by Low. Bowie’s voice is actually featured on side two, though he uses it like another instrument, singing wordlessly in some arcane tongue.

Despite being a product of the late 70s, Low is a distinctly modern album with little organic warmth to be found within its synthetic structures. However, it remains a densely textured work of enduring depth that will reward the patient listener manifold.

Heroes (1978) Recorded at the self-explanatory Hansa By The Wall studios in West Berlin, the proximity to one of the 20th century’s most prominent landmarks led to the epic grandeur of the title track, one of Bowie’s best loved songs and familiar to anyone not living under an oppressive communist regime for the past 30 years. The Dame has stated that Heroes was written after observing a canoodling young couple who met at the wall under a gun turret each day and the incongruity of this lover’s meeting place kickstarted Bowie’s artistic licence, imagining them to be having an affair and imposing this restrictive location on themselves due to their guilt.

However, producer Tony Visconti has a conflicting account, claiming that the adulterous couple was actually himself and backing vocalist Antonia Maas kissing by the wall, thus inspiring the song and causing Bowie to invent an anecdote to protect Visconti’s marriage. Whatever the inspiration, Bowie injects the song with a consuming passion that is unrelated to Low’s detached vocal performances. Similarly, the emotional fervour of Robert Fripp’s stunning guitar is universal despite being practically warped beyond recognition by Eno’s synth, producing an almost constantly sustaining series of notes pitched calculatedly to strike the listener square in the solar plexus.

The album was recorded in very few takes with Bowie sometimes composing lyrics as he sang; the words for Joe The Lion, set to a backdrop of Alomar’s snarling funky riffage, were partly inspired by a performance artist who was willingly crucified to the top of a Volkswagen (“Tell me who you are if you nail me to my car”…).

A close sonic sibling of Low, Heroes also features stark instrumentals on its second side – Sense of Doubt, with its vaporous electronics and sinister four-note piano motif, could conceivably soundtrack an austere existence in the solitude of a communist-era apartment block. As part of the Berlin “triptych” (as Bowie called it), Heroes slots in next to Low without incongruity.

Lodger (1979) Slightly less electronic than its Berlin siblings (though no less experimental) and eschewing the ambient instrumentals, Lodger is probably the least immediate of the albums covered in this guide, with slightly fudgy sound quality – Bowie has admitted to not paying enough attention to the mixing, distracted as he was by personal matters such as his doomed marriage.

In the opener Fantastic Voyage (perhaps the most melodic offering on the album), Bowie allows his voice to soar in a departure from the almost-spoken singing style that characterised much of his late seventies work. He employs a similar vocal urgency in Yassassin (Turkish for: Long Live), a song which could almost pass for the standard Western rock star’s fling with world music; effort is required on the listener’s behalf, though its ballsy union of choppy reggae guitar and Middle Eastern melodies elevate it above mere tokenism.

DJ was released as a single and indeed is one of the only tracks on Lodger that one can imagine even grazing the Top 40, with its quasi-danceable disco beat and a chorus melody verging on hummable. It also features a startling solo from guitarist Adrian Belew that veers from sirens, springs and 80s computer game sound effects in the space of a few seconds; all the more impressive when considered that Belew did not hear the tracks on Lodger until he was actually recording his parts, the idea being to capture his instinctive reaction.

At first listen Lodger appears less related to Low and Heroes than they obviously were to each other, though anyone scratching beneath the surface will find that Lodger is an incremental progression of what Low started and Heroes continued; a result of Bowie fusing his top-notch, black American R&B band with Kraftwerk and Neu-inspired European electronica.

Scary Monsters (1980) As the 80s dawned, the musical spine of Alomar, Davis and Murray remained to provide taut rhythmic frameworks to be embellished or distorted by whatever means Bowie saw fit. Thus, Robert Fripp was unleashed to carve up Fashion’s disco beat with his teeth-grinding industrial guitar and It’s No Game (Part 1) included female vocals doubling Bowie’s lyrics in Japanese.

The video for Ashes To Ashes, another of Bowie’s best loved and most innovative tracks, featured Bowie’s sense of theatrics returning to the fore, heavily made up in a pierrott clown costume. The song itself, an opaque haze of strings, staccato popping bass and Eno-esque sound effects (absent for this album, though his influence can be heard throughout), is a result of the previous three years’ envelope-pushing distilled into a pop song of near-peerless complexity that was a number one hit in the UK. Lyrically, Bowie revisits his Major Tom character from Space Oddity, though the doomed astronaut fared little better this time around: “strung out in heaven’s high/hitting an all time low…”

Penultimate track Because You’re Young, a narrative concerning two star-cross’d lovers, has been interpreted by some as a farewell to ex-wife Angie, whom he finally divorced shortly before the album’s release. Indeed, the words have a certain poignancy when viewed in this light: “Because you’re young/You’ll meet a stranger some night/What could be nicer for you/And it makes me sad/So’ll dance my life away.” It has also been suggested that this song is a warning to his young son about the pitfalls of romance, Bowie roaring the outro words of “A million dreams/A million scars” as if they are the sum total of his romantic escapades to date.

If Lodger was a continuation of the processes of Low and Heroes, Scary Monsters was the culmination of what was learned and applied during the entire Berlin trilogy, achieving the mainstream commercial success that eluded its three predecessors to boot. This was the aural representation of the sun setting on a great artist’s most fertile period.

Scary Monsters is often cited as being Bowie’s last great album before his muse was swallowed by the globe-straddling behemoth that was 1983’s Let’s Dance, an album that has been viewed varyingly as overproduced, unit-shifting eighties cheese and supremely crafted, intelligent pop music. Perhaps both views are correct to a certain extent, in that Bowie had reached so high he still had some way to fall; some prime Bowie moments can be found amid the slick ‘80s production.

Of course, further great songs can indeed be found on albums outside of the ten highlighted in this guide, whether in the gentle folk of Space Oddity, the dark experimentalism of The Man Who Sold The World or even in post-millenial minor returns to form. However, it is this ten-year stretch of sustained innovation that elevates him above the vast majority of his peers, meriting inclusion with the Beatles, Dylan and a tiny handful of others who were able to excel whilst under the perpetual glare of megastardom.

Artist Guide - David Bowie Pt 1

Where to start when faced with a legacy stretching over forty years bequeathed by one of pop’s great shapeshifters? Part-timers may opt for the Best Of, and whilst this is perfectly acceptable, those digging deeper will finder greater reward. Dame David helpfully released 10 original studio albums over a 10 year period that is generally accepted to be his creative peak. This decade-long purple patch forms the basis of this guide, split into two parts to aid digestion. The comments section is below for any Bowie zealots vexed at my omission of The Man Who Sold The World, Let’s Dance or the Labyrinth soundtrack indeed…

Hunky Dory (1971) After the false start of his only hit Space Oddity in 1969 and the following year’s patchy The Man Who Sold The World album, Bowie had been dropped by his record label when he began this, his first true classic. This album represented perfect synergy for Bowie as his songwriting and lyrical abilities came of age, with the musicians who would later become the Spiders From Mars backing him for the first time.

An accessible, lushly orchestrated album laden with some of the more instantly recognisable tunes from Bowie’s oeuvre, Hunky Dory is predominantly a gentle, acoustic affair underpinned by a rich, melodic directness, though the proto-glam thrashings of Queen Bitch serve as a precursor to the Ziggy Stardust era. It would be a solemn soul who could resist the hooks of Changes, its weighty lyrical substance (concerning his own capacity for reinvention) rendered light and breezy by its infectious melody.

Indeed, the musical ebullience of Hunky Dory itself, in particular the droll campery of Fill Your Heart and the warm singalong Kooks, is in contrast to lyrical themes that show Bowie’s existential reflections coming to the fore – generational divides, the joys of fatherhood and the future of man. The latter topic is referenced in Oh! You Pretty Things, via the lyric “Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use” and Nietzschean references to “Homo Superior”, though this song was, somewhat incongruously, also a solo hit for Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits.

Ambivalent “tributes” to contemporaries abound – see Andy Warhol, Song For Bob Dylan and Queen Bitch (a Velvet Underground vignette). Succinctly describing Dylan as having a voice “like sand and glue” (gently pastiched by Bowie), Song For Bob Dylan acknowledges the folk singer’s ability to write words which “could pin us to the floor”, though in truth tries to cajole Dylan to return to the intensity of his sixties work. In all, an exhibition of classic songwriting by a nascent talent, oft-imitated, pilfered and diluted by less-gifted sorts in the intervening decades.

The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972) Perhaps THE definitive concept album, Ziggy Stardust concerns an alien rock star who comes to fame when the dying planet Earth has only five years left (see opening track, helpfully called Five Years) and having remained true to the rock lifestyle of bacchanalian excess is eventually a casualty of his own success (see final track, again helpfully entitled Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide).

Backing band the Spiders from Mars come to the fore, lending a group dynamic to the album where each member plays a more active role in the music rather simply backing Bowie. In particular, lead guitarist Mick Ronson, an emotive, melodic player of whom Bowie said “you believed every note had been wrenched from his soul”, was the perfect foil to Bowie in the early 70s and his paint-stripping performances here lend a visceral thrill to this glam-rock odyssey. Listen to the solo at the end of Moonage Daydream as it trills into oblivion and marvel at the fact that Bowie had pictorially represented how he wanted the solo to sound via squiggly lines drawn with a crayon. At the same time, Bowie yells “In out-ah! Far out-ah!” like Mark E Smith might if he were alien, bisexual and prone to wearing make-up applied with a trowel.

This album also counts the seminal Starman amongst its tracks, a masterwork whose impact could not be dulled even by countless club singer interpretations on Stars In Their Eyes, and Lady Stardust, a homage to fellow glam rocker Marc Bolan that seems self-referential in places - “people stared at the make-up on his face” could easily refer to the public response to a heavily made-up Bowie or the legions of fans who copied his look - a bold move when viewed in the social context of 1972, homosexuality only having been legalised five years earlier. A reference point for anyone wanting to understand how today’s musical landscape evolved, this is an album thrillingly played from an era when rock and roll was still relatively young and retained the power to weave itself into the fabric of popular culture.

Aladdin Sane (1973) Following the huge success of Ziggy Stardust, this was the first album Bowie recorded as a bona fide superstar, posing in full Ziggy-get up on the cover in one of rock’s most iconic images. Musically, Aladdin Sane augments the glam rock of Ziggy Stardust with Mike Garson’s elegant piano, adding a flavour of avant-garde jazz to the title track and a touch of classical majesty to Lady Grinning Soul’s camp melodrama.

Revisiting, not for the last time, the apocalyptic theme used on his The Man Who Sold The World album three years earlier, Drive In Saturday juxtaposes a doo-wop backing with a vision of the future where mankind has to relearn sex from old porn movies, the mechanics and emotions of intercourse being but a distant memory in this particular Bowie dystopia. The Prettiest Star shares some of this 1950s musical revivalism, but with a more lyrically straightforward (for Bowie) homage of love, complete with a Ronson solo that may make you swallow your own tongue.

Tellingly, a frantic cover of the Rolling Stones Let’s Spend The Night Together doesn’t specify the gender of the addressee (unlike Jagger’s anthem-for-the-alpha-male original), perhaps to maintain the aura of sexual ambiguity synonymous with Bowie’s glam phase. Elsewhere, Panic In Detroit slinks along with a snake-hipped Bo Diddley beat and ends with a dual guitar freakout, whereas Cracked Actor rocks like a bastard’s bastard. What more can one say? Another gem in the Dame’s jewellery box.

Diamond Dogs (1974) Apocalyptic visions return once more with this album, originally intended to be an theatrical representation of George Orwell’s 1984, but that concept was halted after Orwell’s widow protested. This did at least offer free rein for Bowie to vent forth his own tangential musings of a doomed future, though a cursory glance at the song titles Big Brother and 1984 betrays the roots of the original idea. As you might imagine, Big Brother features Bowie looking to the future and seeing it dominated by an omnipresent Orwellian figure, though if he really could have viewed the post-millennial years and seen them dominated not by 1984’s shadowy autocrat but a vapid reality TV namesake, I wonder which he would have thought the greater evil…?

Musically, 1984 offers a taste, with its Shaft-esque wah-wah guitars, of the black American soul sound that was to follow. Rock & Roll With Me also highlights this transition, its glam rock guitar rendered almost peripheral, pushed aside to make room for the soulful balladry whose sound would be reprised and embellished on Young Americans.

By now Bowie had relinquished the services of Ronson and the supporting musicians who played on his last few albums and not wanting to entrust his music to others at this point, he plays most of the instruments on the album himself. As such, Bowie fills the space vacated by Ronson with his own saxophone and keyboard playing, attempting frayed lead guitar parts occasionally – this gives the album an unpolished, almost lo-fi quality but the abrasive rifferama of Rebel Rebel ensures his contribution to air guitar history. The Stones-esque title track provides a triumphant glam rock swansong, Bowie jumping ship with enviable foresight just before the scene became stale, his next incarnation ready and waiting…

Young Americans (1975) Known as Bowie’s Philadelphia soul album, its exquisite backing vocals are high in the mix and prominent throughout, the pitch perfect warmth of a young Luther Vandross (!) and chums enabling Bowie’s compositions to soar, despite him being slightly out of his idiom with this new venture which he partly dismissed as “plastic soul”. A touch harsh perhaps, as Bowie’s songwriting remains as strong as ever and it took courage to leave behind his established Ziggy Stardust persona (still identifiable both on the cover and in the music of Diamond Dogs). The title track is perhaps the most forceful and immediate track on the album, with a lyrical standpoint that Bowie has suggested is more personal (a sentiment echoed throughout the album) – here he is no longer writing conceptually or from a or character’s perspective.

Guitarist Carlos Alomar, whose methodical, tasteful (yet always funky) playing would form a bedrock to Bowie’s sound for the rest of the decade, makes his debut here – check out Right and Fascination, where not an ounce of musical flab is evident in Alomar’s unfeasibly tight jangling. Fame features John Lennon and must surely figure as the former Beatle’s funkiest recorded moment, though his performance is limited to some stabs of fuzzed-up guitar and shouting “Fame” in falsetto behind Bowie. Lennon also contributes backing vocals to a version of Across The Universe which manages to be both gently funktastic and sympathetic to the original - arguably one of the finer Fabs covers.

Whereas this album’s prominent saxophone noodling may be off-putting to non-soul aficionados and the sheer technical ability of the backing singers can also make Bowie sound thin and reedy at times, for the most part this is lush, soulful, engaging and affecting – in short, another triumph.

Please note that the years 1976 – 1980 are covered in part 2