by Hugo Wilcken
In August, with the Château already booked for another band, the Idiot sessions moved on to the Munich Musicland studios, owned by Giorgio Moroder. Bowie met up with Moroder and his producer partner Peter Bellote, the architects of the synthetic eurodisco sound that was sweeping Germany at the time. There were never any plans to work together at that time (they would do years later), but viewed from a certain angle, Moroder and Bowie weren’t so very far apart in what they were doing. Moroder was using the New York disco sound and marrying it with synthesisers and a thumping robotic beat to create a particularly European-flavoured dance music. And the following year, Moroder and Bellote would produce Donna Summer’s hugely influential synth disco anthem “I Feel Love,” which impressed Eno greatly at the time.
According to Bowie, he and Eno started meeting up at around this point. Bowie: “At our regular sound swap-meets in 1976, Eno and I exchanged sounds that we loved. Eno offered, among others, his then current fave, Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s military R&B and I played him Neu! and the rest of the Düsseldorf sound. They sort of became part of our soundtrack for the year.” This sounds a little unlikely—Eno would have already heard Neu! by the summer of 1976, since he’d already met and worked with Neu! guitarist Michael Rother (Rother’s other group, Harmonia, had been championed by Eno as early as 1974).
In any case, Neu! was certainly a part of Bowie’s musical landscape at the time: “I bought my first vinyl Neu! 2 in Berlin around 1975 while I was on a brief visit,” he later recalled. “I bought it because I knew that they were a spinoff of Kraftwerk and had to be worth hearing. Indeed, they were to prove to be Kraftwerk’s wayward, anarchistic brothers. I was completely seduced by the setting of the aggressive guitar-drone against the almost-but-not-quite robotic/machine drumming of Dinger. Although fairly tenuous, you can hear a little of their influence on the track Station to Station. Indeed, in the summer of ’76 I called Michael Rother and asked whether he would be interested in working with myself and Brian Eno on my new album entitled Low. Although enthusiastic, Michael had to decline and to this day I wonder how that trilogy would have been affected by his input.”
Again, Bowie is muddling a few things up here. He wasn’t in Europe at any time in 1975, so presumably it was more like the spring of 1976 that he first got hold of a Neu! album. (That perplexes me, since I too detect a Neu! influence on Station to Station.) And Michael Rother recalls being contacted by Bowie in 1977 for the “Heroes” sessions, not for Low. According to a 2001 interview with Bowie in Uncut magazine, it was one “Michael Dinger” who had been Bowie’s first choice for guitarist on Low. Bowie no doubt means Klaus Dinger, the other half of the Neu! duo. Bowie had supposedly called him up from the Château, but Dinger had politely refused.
Rother and Dinger had originally played in Kraftwerk, but left in 1971 to pursue their more organic sound, recording three influential albums (Neu, Neu! 2 and Neu! 75). The Neu! sound was about textures, and about stripping things back to simple structures until you arrived at a spacey, meditative groove, often referred to as motorik. (Eno: “There were three great beats in the 70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s Funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.”) Motorik was basically a steady 4/4 rhythm that would often fade in slowly, but what made it different was that there were no tempo changes, no syncopation and minimal variations. The guitars and other instrumentation accompanied the beat, rather than the other way around. It was very human, a pulse that simply went on and on, inducing a trancelike state of mind and the gentle welling of emotion. “It’s a feeling, like a picture, like driving down a long road or lane,” Klaus Dinger explained in 1998. “It is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion.”
Bowie mentions Neu! quite a bit at this time, but I don’t hear anything on Low that sounds too much like them (although “A New Career in a New Town” is something of a tribute to Neu! offshoot La Düsseldorf). Nonetheless, there is a convergence in the approach of bands like Neu! and what Bowie was to do on Low. The feeling that a lot of German artists had then of being forced to start again with a blank page after the betrayals of a previous generation, of having to pare it all down to nothing in order to see what will emerge, all that resonates on Low. The rock star moves and masks partially give way to a junky trying to kick the habit while living above an auto repair shop in an immigrant quarter of Berlin. “Nothing to say, nothing to do …I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision.”
Another element that the Bowie of Low shares with German bands like Neu! and Can is the willingness to treat music as soundscapes, rather than structured songs with their melodic “narratives.” That very much informs tracks like “Weeping Wall” or “Subterraneans.” These have an emotional quietude about them as well, quite different from the histrionic register that Bowie more often retreated to on earlier albums to express emotion. Many of the German bands also shared a strategy of radical repetition overlaid with experimentation. There was Neu!’s motorik rhythm, Kraftwerk’s robotic beats, but also Can’s endless grooves on songs like “Halleluwa,” that sound like a long jam but were in fact carefully reconstructed in the studio with tape loops. Bowie and Eno were converging on similar studio-driven ideas of repetition-plus-experimentation.
From Munich, the Idiot sessions moved on to Berlin, and the Hansa-by-the-wall studios. The nucleus of the Low team assembled there for some final work on The Idiot—rhythm section Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davis and George Murray, as well as producer Tony Visconti, whom Bowie had called in to mix the Idiot tapes. He’d wanted Visconti to produce, but he hadn’t been available, so Bowie had done the job himself aided by Laurent Thibault. Visconti found the tape quality to be fairly poor—a “salvage job”—and did the best he could with what he was given. (In retrospect, The Idiot’s slightly muddy sound adds to rather than detracts from the album.)
This was the first time Bowie had worked at Hansa-by-the-wall, where he and Visconti would later mix Low and then record its follow-up “Heroes”. The studio was only twenty or thirty metres from the Wall: “From the control room we could see the Wall and we could also see over the Wall and over the barbed wire to the Red Guards in their gun turrets,” recalled Visconti of his time working at Hansa. “They had enormous binoculars and they would look into the control room and watch us work, because they were as star-struck as anyone. We asked the engineer one day whether he felt a bit uncomfortable with the guards staring at him all day. They could easily have shot us from the East, it was that close. With a good telescopic sight, they could have put us out. He said you get used to it after a while and then he turned, took an overhead light and pointed it at the guards, sticking his tongue out and jumping up and down generally hassling them. David and I just dived right under the recording desk. ‘Don’t do that,’ we said because we were scared to death!”
It was the charged, John Le Carré aspect of Berlin as it was then. “The thing about all those Bowie/Eno/Iggy/ Hansa albums was the mythology that went with their creation,” mused New Order drummer Stephen Morris in 2001. “Why was a studio overlooking the Berlin Wall so important?” The Wall provided almost too much symbolism for one city to bear. All cities construct myths around them-selves—but in the Berlin of the sixties and seventies, the myth was in danger of smothering the city under it. This was Berlin as the decadent outpost of the West—dangerously cut off and etiolated, frozen in the aftermath of disaster, a city that continued to pay for its sins, where paranoia was not a sign of madness but the correct response to the situation. The symbolism of the Wall was as much psychological as it was political. Not only was it a microcosm of the Cold War, it was also a mirror you could gaze into and see a looking-glass world, utterly like yours but utterly different as well. It divided mentalities, and expanded schizophrenia to the size of a city. And the Wall was just one of many layers of the myth of Berlin.
waiting for the gift
With The Idiot mixed, Bowie retreated to his home in Switzerland, where Eno s
hortly joined him. Together they started writing and throwing around ideas for the new album, then provisionally called New Music: Night and Day (a title that caught the concept of the two different sides, but which sounded rather pompously like the work of a minimalist composer). A few weeks before the sessions got under way, Bowie had put in a call to Visconti: “He phoned me up, it was actually a conference call, he had Brian on one line, himself on another,” Visconti later told Australian broadcaster Allan Calleja. “I was in London, and David and Brian were in Switzerland I think, where David used to live. David said: ‘We have this conceptual album here, we want to make it really different, we’re writing these strange songs, these very short songs.’ It was conceived right from the beginning that one side was going to be pop songs and the other side was going to be ambient music in the style of Brian and Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk.” Actually, it seemed that the original idea had been not so much pop songs for the first side but raw rock songs, with minimal studio intervention. That would have emphasised two completely different approaches, probably at the expense of any sonic unity at all. But perhaps Bowie had got the raw rock idea out of his system with The Idiot, and working with Eno was always going to be more about pop.
The idea was radical experimentation. Visconti again: “The three of us agreed to record with no promise that Low would ever be released. David had asked me if I didn’t mind wasting a month of my life on this experiment if it didn’t go well. Hey, we were in a French château for the month of September and the weather was great!” Bowie asked Visconti what he thought he could contribute to the sessions; Visconti mentioned the pitch-shifting Eventide Harmonizer he’d just got. Bowie asked what it did, and Visconti famously replied that “it fucks with the fabric of time!” Bowie was delighted, and “Eno went berserk. He said: ‘We’ve got to have it!’”
Brooklyn-born, Tony Visconti had started out playing in various bands in New York and elsewhere across the country, carving out a reputation on the circuit as a proficient bass player and guitarist. He’d put out a couple of singles as part of a duo with his wife Siegrid, but when the last single flopped he took up a job as a house producer with a New York label. Shortly after, he relocated to London, where he met a not-yet-successful David Bowie at the early stages of his career. Together they recorded Space Oddity (excluding the title track) and The Man Who Sold the World, although Visconti missed out on the albums that propelled Bowie into bona fide rock stardom (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane). But he’d hooked up with Bowie again to mix Diamond Dogs and produce Young Americans, Bowie’s first smash hit in the States.
Visconti had come of age as a producer in late sixties London, a crossover period where producers were becoming a lot less like lab technicians and more like an invisible member of the band, the one with a handle on the technology that would drive experimentation. George Martin’s mid-sixties work with the Beatles was clearly one kind of template for Visconti. Instead of the live takes of the early Beatles albums, Martin would take different instrumental, vocal and percussion tracks and build them up, layer upon layer, over a number of sessions. In other words, the process started having a more direct influence on the content. Visconti has singled out “Strawberry Fields” as the moment where “George showed us once and for all that the recording studio itself was a musical instrument.” The Beatles had recorded two versions of the song, one more psychedelic, and one more understated, with classically inspired instrumentation. Lennon liked the beginning of the first and the end of the second; the trouble was they were recorded at slightly different speeds, and the keys differed by a semitone. Martin speeded up one version, slowed down the other, then spliced the two together. “This track was the dividing line of those who recorded more or less live and those who wanted to take recorded music to the extremes of creativity,” Visconti later commented to Billboard. Here, you can already see the intersection of Visconti’s and Eno’s vision of the studio, even if they’re converging from different standpoints.
The fact that Visconti hadn’t come up through the ranks at a studio but had started off as a musician also gave him a different, more hybrid take on the duties of a producer. He could play several instruments, and was excellent at arrangements. It was another area where he had at first looked to George Martin: “I would read Beethoven and Mozart and learn the voicings from how they voiced the string section, and I’d apply that. And then I’d listen to George Martin, and I’d say, ‘That’s what he did. He listened to Bach.…’ He’s taking something classical and old and tried and true and putting it in a pop context, so I just worked it out. And I just imitated him for a few years until I developed some tricks of my own.” All this cross-disciplinary expertise meant that Visconti tended to play a greater role in the studio than most producers. On Bowie albums, Visconti is not only sound engineer and mixer, but often scores the arrangements (the cello part on “Art Decade,” for instance), and sometimes sings and plays various instruments as well.
The Low sessions kicked off at the Château on September 1st, without Eno for the first few days. The assembled band was the R&B rhythm section Bowie had had since Young Americans, namely Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis. On lead guitar was Ricky Gardiner, a suggestion of Visconti’s, after Bowie’s other choices had fallen through (Visconti and Gardiner had been working on demos for what would become Visconti’s only solo album, Inventory). The main keyboardist was Roy Young, formerly of the Rebel Rousers; he’d also played with the Beatles in the early sixties. Young had first met Bowie in 1972 when they’d played on the same bill; Bowie had wanted him for Station to Station, but had given him too short notice. Then, in the summer of ’76, Young had been playing in London when Bowie had called him from Berlin, asking him to come over. Apparently Bowie had originally wanted to do Low at Hansa, but then changed his mind, probably because he’d already paid upfront for studio time in France. In any case, a few days later he called Young again to switch the venue to the Château.
Bowie’s and Visconti’s working methods crystallised on the Low sessions. They would start late. (Eno: “It was all overnight, so I was in a kind of daze a lot of the time, days drifting into one another.”) As with The Idiot, Bowie came into the studio with various bits and pieces on tape—The Man Who Fell to Earth material; leftovers from the Idiot sessions; stuff he’d recorded at his home in Switzerland—but no complete songs written, and no lyrics. In other words, the studio was very much part of the writing process. To begin with, the rhythm section would be told to jam with a loose chord progression. There might be minimal direction from Bowie or Visconti, and some experimenting with different styles, but basically they’d simply keep kicking the progression around until something emerged that developed into an arrangement. Carlos Alomar: “I’d get together with the drummer and the bass player and we’d work on a song, maybe reggae, maybe slow or fast or up-tempo, and we’d let David hear it three or four different ways, and whichever way he wanted to do it, we just did it.… Basically he says: ‘How about something like this?’ ‘OK fine.’ I just start grooving and start playing until I came up with something, and that ability has been like the saving grace.” The rhythm section provided the seed bed for most of the first side, and Bowie was generous with writing credits if he thought one of the musicians had come up with a defining element of the song. Alomar already had credits for his riffs on “Fame” and “Sister Midnight.” On Low, Bowie cut credits for “Breaking Glass” three ways with bass player George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis.
This initial backing-track phase was very quick and in the case of Low took only five days, after which Dennis Davis and George Murray played no further part in the proceedings (in fact, by the time Eno turned up at the Château, they’d already left). Once Bowie was happy with the backing tracks, work with the overdubs could begin—essentially recording guitar and other solos. Alomar would normally have come up with an initial solo to hold the rhythm section together, but then record a new one later. Ricky Gardiner and Roy Young would be
recording their parts too. On Low, these were generally further electronically treated by Visconti, Eno or Bowie (there’s not a lot of “natural” sound on Low), so this is where the sessions would enter a more experimental, nebulous phase. Some of it was about treating instruments as the musicians were playing, with Visconti using the Harmonizer, various tone filters, reverbs and a panoply of other studio tricks.
Eno would mostly be using a portable synth he’d brought along with him. Visconti: “He has an old synthesiser that fits into a briefcase made by a defunct company called EMS. It didn’t have a piano keyboard like modern synths. It did have a lot of little knobs, a peg board and little pegs, like an old telephone switch board to connect the various parameters to one another. But its pièce de résistance was a little ‘joystick’ that you find on arcade games. He would pan that joystick around in circles and make swirling sounds.” (This synth lives on, and Bowie even used it on a recent album, Heathen: “Some years ago, a friend very kindly bought me the original EMS AKS briefcase synth that Eno used on so many of those classic records of the seventies. In fact, it was the one he used on Low and “Heroes”. It was up for auction, and I got it for my fiftieth birthday.…Taking it through customs has always been a stomach-turning affair as it looks like a briefcase bomb in the x-ray. Eno got pulled out of the line on several occasions. I wouldn’t even dream of taking it through these days.”)