David Bowie's Low (11 page)

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.”

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 felt 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.

Essentially, the less coke Bowie did, the more he drank. One waiter at a Kurfürstendamm beer house remembers him throwing up in the gutter after drinking a gallon of König-Pilseners. “Virtually every time I saw him in Berlin, he was drunk, or working on getting drunk,” Angie Bowie wrote in her biography. She’d turn up in Berlin unexpectedly, throwing Bowie into a state of emotional turmoil. During one of those visits, an anxiety attack had Bowie thinking he had heart problems and he wound up spending the night in a hospital. “I couldn’t understand why he’d gone to Berlin. He never asked me if I wanted to live there. It never once occurred to David to stay at home with Zowie and me. His boredom threshold was too intense to live with. He swung from genius to the erratic without warning.” It all came to a dramatic head when, in a jealous rage, Angie demanded that Bowie fire his assistant, Corinne Schwab. When Bowie refused, Angie tried to burn Corinne’s room, then slashed her clothes and threw them out onto the street along with the bed, and caught the next flight out of Berlin. Angie and Bowie would only meet one more time, to exchange legal documents relating to their divorce.

Berlin was an island, cut off from the world, but big enough to get lost in as well. Each layer of the Berlin myth
seemed to reflect something in the Bowie persona—the Expressionist artists; the cabaret decadence; the Nazi megalomania; the cataclysmic destruction; the isolation behind the Wall; the Cold War depression; the ghosts who never depart. Above all, Berlin wasn’t quite real. Its military zones, the bullet-holes still pockmarking the edifices, the watch-towers, Speer’s megalithic relics, the bombed-out buildings next to shiny new ones, the huge black tanks that rumbled along the streets …as Visconti put it, “You could have been on the set of
The Prisoner
.”

Low
’s second side represents a drastic mood change. The nervy, fragmented art-funk gives way to four longer, slower textural pieces that descend into mutism. Because Bowie deliberately divided
Low
’s tracks up in the way he did, rather than scatter these “ambient” pieces throughout the album, it’s hard not to read off a structural metanarrative. On the one hand, the division reflects split mentalities; on the other, the second side becomes the logical consequence of the first. In that respect, the album bears some similarities to Joy Division’s
Closer
, which is not a concept album, but one where the sequencing leads us somewhere ever darker as we progress. The jittery psychosis of
Low
’s first side describes a mindset that could have led somewhere equally suicidal (just as
The Idiot
signed off with the terminally morbid “Mass Production”). But although the second side’s pieces are soaked in melancholy, they are neither
suicidal nor entirely nihilistic. There’s even something vaguely uplifting about the first three. They are, however, profoundly solipsistic. The autism and retreat of the first side’s lyrics find their wordless counterpart here as the music lifts off and spins into inner orbit, free from external reference points. Like the landscapes of the Brücke artists, the four pieces superficially describe a place (Warsaw on the first track, Berlin on the other three), but that place is really just a prompt, just a vehicle for a mood. And in the case of “Warszawa,” Bowie was only in Warsaw for a matter of hours, while changing trains. If this is a portrait of a city, as the title implies, it is painted with the broadest of brushstrokes.