Documentary/Music (2008) 150 minutes ~ Color
These documentary reviews concentrate on David Bowie in the 1970's - the decade in which he not only made his name but in which he dominated the music scene like no other musical icon before or since. Running at over 2.5 hours the program looks at his pre-fame era, his early low-selling albums, his glam period when the world sat up and took notice and his constant rejuvenation throughout the decade when every few weeks it seemed this bizarre creature would adopt a brand new persona. This set features rare and classic performance footage, exclusive interviews, exhaustive archive and fascinating contributions from his closest friends, associates, band members, producers and other colleagues and review and critique from the finest Bowie writers, archivists and journalists, including one of the final interviews the late, legendary DJ John Peel ever gave.
Stars: David Bowie
These documentary reviews concentrate on David Bowie in the 1970's - the decade in which he not only made his name but in which he dominated the music scene like no other musical icon before or since. Running at over 2.5 hours the program looks at his pre-fame era, his early low-selling albums, his glam period when the world sat up and took notice and his constant rejuvenation throughout the decade when every few weeks it seemed this bizarre creature would adopt a brand new persona. This set features rare and classic performance footage, exclusive interviews, exhaustive archive and fascinating contributions from his closest friends, associates, band members, producers and other colleagues and review and critique from the finest Bowie writers, archivists and journalists, including one of the final interviews the late, legendary DJ John Peel ever gave.
Stars: David Bowie
Category
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Short filmTranscript
00:00:00In the notoriously fickle world of pop music, only a few artists have ever managed to carve
00:00:19out a continually evolving career that spans several decades of creative development.
00:00:25David Bowie, musical superstar and one of the world's biggest celebrity icons, has
00:00:30achieved precisely this.
00:00:32Anybody who is that clever at manipulating images is always conscious of the zeitgeist.
00:00:40They're always conscious of the mood of the times and the shift in people's tastes and
00:00:49just the general overall feeling of culture.
00:00:53Since the fifties you had Elvis, in the sixties you had The Beatles, in the seventies David
00:00:56Bowie was the biggest superstar, pop star, rock star in the world.
00:01:00He was like the person that would always be number one, always be the person to be, everything
00:01:05he did was kind of a new, it would be a new movement.
00:01:09There is one period however that many believe to contain Bowie's finest artistic moments.
00:01:14In the late seventies, Bowie embarked on what has come to be known as the Berlin Trilogy,
00:01:18a series of albums which redefined modern music.
00:01:23It wasn't punk, it wasn't prog, it wasn't soul, but it had this tremendous feel to it.
00:01:32The short sharp shock of the vocal tracks and the fresh invention of them and the near
00:01:37hysteria of the vocals and the lyrics is what really gives them that extra, extra electricity
00:01:43and edge.
00:01:44This film is a review of those albums, the artists they emerged from and the artists
00:01:49that changed forever.
00:01:53In 1975, Bowie had already established himself as a global superstar, taking his first steps
00:02:08into the acting world in the Nicolas Roeg production, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
00:02:27I think The Man Who Fell to Earth is a fascinating film.
00:02:31Nick Roeg, the director, at that time was absolutely white hot.
00:02:36He'd done performance with Donald Camel and he'd done Walkabout and he'd had a huge commercial
00:02:42hit with Don't Look Now.
00:02:45And his idea of filming Walter Tevis' science fiction novel about an outsider sort of blossomed
00:02:54into fruition when he saw Bowie in the BBC Cracked Actor documentary because he just
00:02:59saw this otherworldly man talking sort of semi-incoherently in the back of a car and
00:03:05thought, blimey, I've got my lead performer here.
00:03:09We're not stopped.
00:03:12Is there anything behind us?
00:03:16No.
00:03:17There's an underlying unease here, definitely, I wouldn't say it's an uneasiness, but it's
00:03:30very calm and it's a kind of a superficial calmness that they've developed to underplay
00:03:38the fact that there's a lot of high pressure here.
00:03:41Nicolas Roeg was a great director and it's a very interesting study of identity and therefore
00:03:45to cast Bowie was almost a masterstroke because he was an artist who questioned identity and
00:03:51personas and played with masks.
00:03:52With the passing of time, the initial visceral reaction to Bowie being, to a rock star being
00:03:57cast in a film has passed and you just see this kind of strange alien figure which is,
00:04:03which would have been the dream really of director and star.
00:04:05Guy left out trying to define the thing apart from my own personal characterisation and
00:04:10as I, it was hard to understand what Nick wanted to achieve with Newton's character.
00:04:19I could only use my own terms of reference, so my characterisation is really immaterial.
00:04:27What I enjoyed about it was the actual process of making the film.
00:04:31Roeg's filmic techniques and his use of sort of really odd time structures and things like
00:04:38that and Bowie's complete sort of detachment in that film, it is unlike any other Bowie
00:04:46film because it's really rather good and it just sort of completely set the tone for really
00:04:54the next four or five years of Bowie's career.
00:04:58I think that was probably his best acting role, I thought he was, I thought he was really
00:05:02good in it and it's surprisingly good.
00:05:05I don't think he's ever bettered it, in fact he's just, he's kind of gone downhill ever
00:05:09since with his acting, just as Gigolo was dreadful and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence,
00:05:13I had to live half way through, au revoir Mr Bowie, is what I said.
00:05:17I think history will show that he's one of the better rock star turned actors, at least
00:05:21for that period between sort of Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence,
00:05:27in later years he made some really duff films, Absolute Beginners etc.
00:05:31He has a presence, he certainly has a charismatic presence on screen and is more effective as
00:05:36a screen presence than many, many rock musicians and actors.
00:05:42Get out of my mind, all of you!
00:05:52Leave my mind alone!
00:05:58The Man Who Fell to Earth was also notable in that it marked further musical development
00:06:02for Bowie, whose attempts to produce a soundtrack for the film were later abandoned.
00:06:07Elements of these sessions would later appear on his album Low.
00:06:11He was asked to come up with some soundtrack ideas, but he then found out that he was not
00:06:17the only person being asked to come up with soundtrack ideas, that they said to him, give
00:06:21us a few examples of your work, and they said that to a few other people as well, and that
00:06:24they would choose from a selection, and he threw a bit of a huff at this.
00:06:28John Phillips from the Mamas and Papas was used for the score in the end, and it did
00:06:33work, Bowie later said that perhaps the music used in Low and so forth would have distracted
00:06:37too much from the film and wouldn't have worked as a soundtrack, it would have been too much
00:06:41of a jarring impact.
00:06:43The soundtrack that he started working on with Paul Buckmaster, of course it's famously
00:06:48never heard apart from the baseline to Subterraneans, which was the only bit salvaged from it.
00:06:54What that does suggest is that a lot of people make out that Bowie's Berlin period was influenced
00:07:21entirely by Eno.
00:07:22I mean, he was making this music himself, sort of separately from it, at least 12 months
00:07:30before.
00:07:32After his work on the film, Bowie returned to somewhat more established territory with
00:07:36the album Station to Station.
00:07:39While a relatively classic sounding Bowie pop album, it also contained something different,
00:07:44a title track which was an experimental ten minute odyssey.
00:08:02The album, I think, marks the end of a period of kind of traditionalism, they're very, very
00:08:08traditional songs, and there's a lot of kind of guitar and rock instrumentation, drums
00:08:15and bass and singing, which is more in what he did before.
00:08:21But I think there's certainly a break, a break period, I think philosophically maybe there's
00:08:26an overhang, but I think Station is the last of a kind of a traditional rock David Bowie.
00:08:33I think that was still part of his obsession with R&B, I always sort of viewed that album
00:08:38as a more heavier funk thing, more James Brown and Barry White than the disco thing
00:08:44he'd been looking at in Young Americans.
00:08:48And it's kind of quite cold and glacial, that album.
00:08:51There's several Bowie albums that sort of are quite unlike anything else he did, and
00:08:55I think although it's sort of got a bit of funk in it, it's got a bit of soul in it,
00:09:00it also points the way to what was to happen with Low and Heroes especially.
00:09:07And the title track was almost sort of Berlin Cabaret in a way, it started with this long
00:09:13dissonant funk bit, and then it goes into this sort of burlesque.
00:09:17Drink, drink, raise a glass, raise a glass, oh yeah.
00:09:23It's not the side effects of the cocaine.
00:09:27David Bowie did once say that if you looked at his albums there was always one track which
00:09:34anticipates what he's going to do next time around.
00:09:37And I think in the case of Station to Station it was the title track.
00:09:40Station to Station the track perhaps stands outside the rest of the Station to Station
00:09:44album indeed, because on that album it's kind of, it's a chillier Young Americans, it's
00:09:49a very cold version, a very metallic version of the Plastic Soul he'd come up with triumphantly
00:09:54on Young Americans.
00:09:55Station to Station itself, the track however, is a ten minute extended workout of various
00:09:59rhythms, various ideas, various notions.
00:10:02The cold, alienated atmosphere of the album also reflected Bowie's mental state at the
00:10:07time, isolated in Hollywood in the throes of cocaine addiction.
00:10:13Cocaine numbs the emotional side of you, it kills you emotionally and it kills you spiritually
00:10:19and I think you can hear that in that album.
00:10:22He would just hold up in his mansion in LA, living on virtually nothing except what he
00:10:28was snorting up or whatever, having his assistant pretty much kind of fend off and decide who
00:10:34got access to it and who didn't.
00:10:35And it was a kind of very typical 70s lifestyle, coke was very much the kind of drug du jour.
00:10:41You know he'd got everything he'd wanted, I mean bear in mind he had tried for at least
00:10:48a decade before he broke through in Britain with Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, and then
00:10:54you know it was almost like be careful what you wish for because he created something
00:10:58he had to get out of in Britain, he went over to America and suddenly through Diamond Dogs
00:11:05and especially Young Americans, suddenly became America's favourite alien.
00:11:12Bowie's fragile mental state was also resulting in a number of disturbing fascinations, most
00:11:18notably a flirtation with Nazi imagery.
00:11:22The problem with Station to Station for most people, it was at a time when Bowie was absolutely
00:11:27fixated with Nietzsche and right-wing ideas, political ideas.
00:11:34He was not a well man by his own admission, he's not proud of the period.
00:11:38He discussed matters of fascism and I think it was to an extent picked up on as a faux
00:11:43pas by the press and blown out of proportion.
00:11:45When he started touring that album, when he came to England in 76, of course he arrived
00:11:50at Victoria Station and there was this black Mercedes with the ones that the SS used to
00:11:57use waiting for him and all the fans were there and at the end of the fans he said he
00:12:02waved but he didn't wave, he gave a Nazi salute and people were appalled at this.
00:12:12For our generation, our parents, you know, there was an impossibility of finding anything
00:12:20in the Nazi aesthetic which was in any way acceptable but at the same time there it was
00:12:28and there was something romantic and appealing about the tragedy of what had happened to
00:12:36Germany that Bowie was playing with and playing with a bit too closely I think.
00:12:43I think I've always thought that an artist should remain apolitical and if anything,
00:12:50if there are aspects that he doesn't agree with, then to caricature them more than anything
00:12:54else.
00:12:55So it's what I've always tried to do.
00:12:57Still very much in the public eye, Bowie staged a couple of sell-out shows at Wembley.
00:13:02Both concerts were attended by musician and producer Brian Eno.
00:13:07Eno was a very interesting character by sort of 76 and it's difficult I think for people
00:13:14to remember that, certainly people who weren't there now where he's this sort of mercurial
00:13:20boffin, pop boffin, you know, he was a pop star, he was a glam rock star, you know, he
00:13:28had been in Roxy Music, he was feted by the British press.
00:13:51Brian had an interesting trajectory in that he was at art school at an interesting time
00:13:58in the late 60s, so open to many different influences.
00:14:05He became involved in the experimental music scene but then he joined Roxy Music and they
00:14:11have pop success but they're quite experimental.
00:14:14One of the early sort of glam pop sort of iconic highlights is of Eno sort of twiddling
00:14:30away in this analogue synthesizer in the background with Roxy Music on top of the pop looking
00:14:34the most kind of garishly blonde and effeminate of the lot of them.
00:14:37He then went on to create his label, Obscure Label.
00:14:41He called me up and he said he was starting a label and did I want to record for the label.
00:14:49I had a record, I had one side and a friend of mine, Max Eastley, who's a sound sculptor,
00:14:57had the other side and that was one of the first four releases on Obscure in 1975.
00:15:03When Brian produced those records, he was A&R as well, you know, it was his label, he
00:15:10chose the people and I think if you look back, it was incredible A&R decisions, you know,
00:15:18Gavin Bryars, John Adams, Michael Nyman, all of the people who he chose are still around,
00:15:27they still have very active careers.
00:15:32Bowie and Eno's meeting in 1976 however, would not be the first time their paths had crossed.
00:15:39In the early seventies, about 1970, Philip Glass came to the Roy College of Art in London
00:15:47and did a performance of Music With Changing Parts, one of his early pieces and it was
00:15:52minimalistic movies, basically tripod harmony repeated over and over and over.
00:16:02Eno was fascinated with minimalism and a lot of his career in art college was based
00:16:10on doing minimalist, Lamont Young and various minimalist pieces performed as art pieces.
00:16:16He went to this concert and he was shocked to meet David Bowie there, David Bowie was
00:16:19there at the concert because he was interested as well.
00:16:23At Wembley, he met Eno backstage and then later in Paris, Eno went backstage again to
00:16:29talk to David and these discussions said, well maybe we can do something.
00:16:33When they buddied up again in the mid-seventies, there was a sort of mutual flattery society
00:16:36between Bowie and Eno.
00:16:39They had known each other because Roxy Music had supported Bowie on tour back in the day.
00:16:42Bowie praised discreet music to the hilt, Eno has said himself since that he was charmed
00:16:47by the flattery, which a lot of people have said about David Bowie, that he is an impeccable
00:16:51flatterer who brings people on side by praising their work when they're expecting to walk
00:16:56in and have to praise his work.
00:16:58Both artists had been developing steadily over the seventies.
00:17:02While Bowie had taken a more American route, Brian Eno's work had seen him collaborating
00:17:06with a number of bands based in Berlin and surrounding Germany.
00:17:11There was a lot of interesting music coming from Germany and it became crassly known as
00:17:16Krautrock but then the performers like The Noise and The Clusters and things like that,
00:17:21they quite enjoyed that title and you had Tangerine Dream sort of on the more sort of
00:17:25ambient side, Faust were around and also, I mean, not from Berlin but Kraftwerk were
00:17:34like listening to the future.
00:17:51People use this term Krautrock, but I don't know what that means, apart from the fact
00:18:02that it's kind of insulting.
00:18:06It sums up something that was so diverse.
00:18:08There wasn't just one scene, I mean, Germany, nowadays people think that what they call
00:18:14Krautrock is part of artists working together.
00:18:18There were different scenes in Dusseldorf, complete different music to that of Munich
00:18:24and Berlin and we didn't even exchange much information.
00:18:30Everybody was concentrating on developing their own music.
00:18:34I am quite sure that most of the groups really worked apart from the other groups and a lot
00:18:43of Berlin groups also left Berlin because at this time Berlin was quite like an island.
00:18:51At this point Eno had most notably recorded with Harmonia, a supergroup collective featuring
00:18:56members of German bands Cluster and Neu.
00:19:01In 73 when I joined Harmonia we played in Hamburg and suddenly there was Brian Eno sitting
00:19:07in the first row of our concert and so we talked and he joined us even on stage for
00:19:14a jam and we invited him to our place to visit us.
00:19:19So he visited us in 76 in August and we had a very pleasant time together working for
00:19:27ten or twelve days.
00:19:28He was very serious, very straight and lots of ideas, he was of course used to work in
00:19:38big studios and it was really a big experience for me to work with Brian.
00:19:45You have to also name Conny Plank, the great co-producer, producer of our albums in the
00:19:5370s.
00:19:54He did Neu, he did one Harmonia album, he worked with Cluster, Kraftwerk and he did
00:20:01my first three solo albums.
00:20:04I think we all owe Conny Plank very much gratitude and I think the same respect was paid or is
00:20:13paid by David Bowie and Brian Eno because they know he was one of the key players in
00:20:21that scene, working with people who were on that track, looking for new sounds, new
00:20:30creations in the 70s.
00:20:34Looking to escape from his Hollywood nightmare, Bowie found himself further embracing this
00:20:38musical movement, particularly the fact that it seemed to reject typical American rock
00:20:43and roll values.
00:20:44You know, for many, many years after the war, German music had simply, it had almost been
00:20:48like the kind of beneficiary of an American martial plan where they simply just ate whatever
00:20:52the kind of rock and roll warriors were.
00:20:56And it actually took perhaps a generation or so to kind of reassert some sense of self-confidence.
00:21:02I think the main thing about that music was a real sense of freedom.
00:21:06You know, that you didn't have to be dominated by an American or a British model of pop music
00:21:13which had been the two dominant forces.
00:21:15That's what I think this whole period is about.
00:21:17It's about reinvention again.
00:21:19But it's reinvention in a much more artistic manner.
00:21:22I mean, you know, all that Ziggy stuff, you know, all that inventive characters, I never
00:21:25really bought, to be honest with you.
00:21:27I kind of found it a bit unconvincing.
00:21:30I never kind of bought.
00:21:31And I hated it when Bowie used to do these interviews, yeah, you know, and he'd talk
00:21:35about Ziggy in the third person or, you know, this, all the thin white juke or, yeah, this
00:21:39character and that character.
00:21:41I confused many people and I certainly didn't help because I refused to explain until now
00:21:48because I'm no longer playing characters.
00:21:50But when I played, when I wrote the characters and their environments for the different albums
00:21:54like Halloween Jackal, Thin White Juke, Led Insane, Ziggy Stardust, I used to take the
00:21:59characters off the stage with me if I had to be interviewed or be put in front of media
00:22:04of any type.
00:22:06I would talk in their terms.
00:22:07At the time in America he was in a very poor state of health.
00:22:10I mean, he was addicted to cocaine and he was drinking a lot and when he basically said
00:22:17he had to get out of America in order to survive, in order to stay alive.
00:22:24In mid-1976, Bowie finally left behind his disintegrating American lifestyle and moved
00:22:30out to Berlin.
00:22:31It would mark a radical departure both in terms of music and lifestyle.
00:22:37I think the whole rock star thing, the getting wasted every night, the psychosis, the paranoia,
00:22:45the rock stardom, the flirtation with right-wing politics, all of this had led him to Berlin
00:22:51and all of this had led him to a point where I think he felt, fuck it, you know, let's
00:22:55leave that behind now, let's start the new palette, let's start something fresh.
00:23:00He moved to Berlin and wanted to live like basically an ordinary person.
00:23:04He wanted anonymity and hence like low profile and stuff like that.
00:23:10But that was like an anonymity that he wanted in how he started, which of course he didn't
00:23:14get because everybody knew who he was and people kept mobbing him and hustling him.
00:23:18Success makes you paranoid, you know.
00:23:20There's a great quote from Malcolm Muggeridge.
00:23:24He said, you know, one day I go out and people pester me all the time and I just think, why
00:23:27don't you fuck off and leave me alone?
00:23:29Just want to be on my own.
00:23:30Leave me alone.
00:23:31Then you go out the next day and nobody talks to you and they leave you alone.
00:23:34And you say, oh my God, I've lost it, you know.
00:23:36It just makes you so paranoid.
00:23:38He wrote in his diaries that people were coming to his door, all these kind of Nazi collectors
00:23:42and people and he got people to get rid of these people.
00:23:46So it was a very turbulent period.
00:23:50It was a confusing and turbulent period after station to station.
00:23:55Bowie, I think by that time he'd been famous for five years.
00:23:59He was confident enough in his success and in his abilities as a musician and a singer
00:24:06and a songwriter to take this step and that his fans would follow him.
00:24:11My point is to communicate for myself, first and foremost, and if I have a public that
00:24:15was willing to follow me and keep going with me, that's great, but if I start losing them
00:24:20or dropping them off, there's nothing much I can do about that.
00:24:24I didn't start writing for that reason.
00:24:27During this time, Bowie had also begun working alongside a kindred spirit, a fellow artist
00:24:32who was in a similar state of retreat from drug addiction.
00:24:35In a move that many see to be the official beginning of the Berlin period, Bowie underwent
00:24:40co-writing and production duties on Iggy Pop's The Idiot, and was later heavily involved
00:24:45in the 1977 follow-up, Lust for Life.
00:24:57What's happening?
00:25:01Nightclubbing.
00:25:03We're nightclubbing.
00:25:06We're an ice machine.
00:25:12Bowie was very, very close to Iggy Pop.
00:25:15And in America, he'd actually gone, he'd found out that Iggy Pop was dying in hospital and
00:25:20he'd gone to see him.
00:25:22And he had paid his hospital bills and asked him, do you have anybody to look after you
00:25:28and stuff?
00:25:29And Iggy said no, and Iggy felt that he had to leave America, and Bowie felt he had to
00:25:35leave America.
00:25:37And they both felt a good place for both of them to go was to go to Berlin.
00:25:40They hung out together, they were trying to clean up together, clean up their systems
00:25:44and be inspired by the scene around Berlin, which is very vibrant, you know, it's full
00:25:48of, it was a very cross-cultural capital at the time, you know, where east meets west
00:25:52and full of, it was a multi-ethnic society, believe it or not, and full of sort of outsider
00:25:59artists.
00:26:00So they both took that very much on board.
00:26:02They sort of needed each other, they'd both been quite damaged by what had happened to
00:26:07them.
00:26:08And obviously, Iggy Pop never had the sort of, you know, huge success that Bowie had.
00:26:13He really wanted to help him, and they could help each other, and I think the sort of creativity
00:26:21that they, you know, were able to give each other was fantastic, and you can hear it on
00:26:27the two Iggy Pop albums.
00:26:29In many ways a prototype for the sound created in his Berlin period, Bowie even returned
00:26:34to The Idiot in 1983 with his cover of the song China Girl.
00:26:43I'm just a record of my little China girl I'm a mess without my little China girl
00:27:01Wake up in the morning with my little China girl I hear hearts beating loud as thunder
00:27:15There's some great ideas there, great lyrical ideas, great, great musical ideas, and they're
00:27:21expanded more than they are on, say, Low, where everything on Low and Heroes, to an
00:27:25extent, is short, sharp shock, on The Idiot ideas are expanded and played with, and sometimes
00:27:31they go down blind alleys, other times they lead to fantastic revelations, which clearly
00:27:36Bowie thought, yeah, that's working, let's do that again on Low and Heroes and so forth.
00:27:42Now relocated, Bowie began trying to immerse himself in the cultural scene of his adopted
00:27:47country, trying to contact various musicians with a view to working with them.
00:27:54Initially he wanted to explore this music, so he tried to contact Crawford, but Crawford
00:28:00said that they were very, very busy in Dusseldorf and they didn't leave their studio and they
00:28:04didn't want to work with anybody else, so that was the end of that.
00:28:07And then he heard that Eno was in Germany, he got wind of that, and he contacted Eno,
00:28:13and Eno said, let's meet in Cologne in Connie Plank's studio, let's see what we can do.
00:28:19We worked with Brian Eno, and he was on the run to go to Montreux to work with David Bowie,
00:28:30and he said we should come along, but it didn't happen.
00:28:36I don't know which reason it was, but there was a moment where we were quite excited about
00:28:43that idea, but then it didn't work out, I don't know why.
00:28:48David Bowie called me, that was a surprise, and asked me to join them in Berlin in the studio.
00:28:54At first there was a secretary calling me and inquiring about whether I was interested
00:29:00at all in working with him, and I said, yeah, well, basically no problem, of course, but
00:29:06I would prefer to talk to David about this, and so the next one was David, and then we
00:29:13talked about the production, what would possibly happen, I even suggested to ask Jackie Lieberzeit,
00:29:24the drummer of Cannes, to come along, and what instruments to take along, and another
00:29:31few days, so that was very pleasant and inspiring, and we were looking forward to working together,
00:29:39and another few days on, there was another, I think it was a man this time, the third
00:29:44person calling me and telling me that David had changed his mind, which, as far as we
00:29:52know nowadays, wasn't true.
00:29:55Both were kind of tricked, you know, both then got subsequent calls saying that the
00:29:57other had lost interest in the project, and the suspicion is that it was somebody in Bowie's
00:30:00management, you know, the kind of people that kind of, you know, the sort of, Bowie's very
00:30:04commercial, very get-real side, as it were, had actually sort of placed those calls because
00:30:09they didn't really want Bowie's, you know, Bowie the Cash Cow to be put in jeopardy by
00:30:14these avant-garde projects with these obscure kraut rockers.
00:30:19Some years ago, David Bowie and I got in touch again.
00:30:22I had read in some interviews he had given five years ago, I think in Uncut magazine,
00:30:30where he said, oh, I wonder how my Berlin albums would have turned out if Michael Rother
00:30:37had joined me.
00:30:40But unfortunately, he turned me down, and that wasn't true, of course, and so he was
00:30:47told I had changed my mind, and I was told he had changed his mind, and I was happy to
00:30:53find out, and we were both, I think, quite happy to find out that neither of us had declined
00:30:59to work with the other one.
00:31:02Bowie began recording his new album in September 1976.
00:31:05The resultant work, a hugely experimental piece entitled Low, would come as a bolt out
00:31:11of the blue to both critics and fans alike.
00:31:29Strange enough, just as British punk rock was starting to pass its absolute peak and
00:31:42starting to go mainstream, Bowie came out with this thing that nobody expected that
00:31:46was completely different again.
00:31:48He didn't fall for the trap of, oh, I must keep up with the Young Bucks and do a punk
00:31:51rock album.
00:31:52He'd come up with something that startled everybody.
00:31:54It was still a time in music when major acts were expected to change things.
00:32:00They're not anymore, but they were then, e.g. the new Dylan album or the new Stones album
00:32:06or the new, going back a bit, obviously, Beatles album.
00:32:10What have they done next?
00:32:11And by that time, that kind of notion was kind of fading away.
00:32:14The Rolling Stones were doing Black and Blue, which is a piss-poor album.
00:32:20Led Zeppelin, well, they basically finished by then, and they were just doing that kind
00:32:23of heavy rock thing.
00:32:24They'd been doing it for years.
00:32:26Nobody was making any kind of brave statements or going against the grain.
00:32:33Possibly the only equivalence, probably, in the modern era is probably Madonna's total
00:32:37turnaround on Ray of Light, from making very mainstream pop records to making a record
00:32:43that was significantly innovative.
00:32:47Possibly Ray of Light and Lower are probably on the same level.
00:32:54I think Low is incredible, because it still sounds like, you know, it still sounds like
00:33:25nothing you've ever heard.
00:33:26I love the fact that the record company wanted to bury it.
00:33:31And you can sort of understand why, because he just, you know, Young Americans was such
00:33:35a huge commercial record, you know, Station to Station, for its weirdness, still had golden
00:33:41years on it.
00:33:43And then there was this.
00:33:44Orsay wanted to block the record.
00:33:46The shareholders wanted to, with Orsay, said, we're not allowing this, we'll take our shares
00:33:50out.
00:33:51People who are demanding money up front, you know, the record should have come out around
00:33:57Christmas of 76, but no, no, it was delayed all the way till January 7th, which is a dead
00:34:01time in the music business.
00:34:04And Charles Sean Murray in the NME, the NME went into great detail of how bad it was,
00:34:09and what a load of absolute depressing rubbish it was.
00:34:12If you look at the reviews for Low, everybody's just like, this is fucking a disaster.
00:34:17You know, what is the guy doing?
00:34:18You know, he's off his tits.
00:34:20But the public just understood it.
00:34:22The public went, yeah, we get this, you know, like I said, you play that album a few times
00:34:26and you get it.
00:34:27Low was an unprecedented listening experience, consisting in part of a series of fragmentary
00:34:33scattershot instrumentals, Bowie's first attempts at such, that created a sound as distinct
00:34:38as anything that has been heard since.
00:34:41Side one is full of sort of fractured, dynamic, paranoid, rock funk sketches, which seem to
00:34:49get up ahead of steam, then fall apart after two and a half minutes.
00:34:53And they're all the more effective for that.
00:34:55You've got these odd fragments of pop songs on the first side.
00:35:01Of course, they owe something to Bowie's musical heritage and tradition.
00:35:07But the whole thing is sort of very lopsided.
00:35:11You've got things that always crash in the same car, which just sort of starts, and this
00:35:17sort of strange, low-key thing, the instrumentation, is quite bizarre.
00:35:44He's a very confused man, writing that song.
00:35:46Obviously, the theme is that he's always going around in circles and repeating the same patterns.
00:35:51And he's trying to escape himself.
00:35:53And in making this record, he was trying to escape the old David Bowie and become more
00:35:57of an experimental artist and less of a rock messiah.
00:36:02It's a deeply affecting song, and sonically, it's full of invention.
00:36:05It's almost as if every time you hear it, it's shape-shifted, that song.
00:36:09There is so much going on with the sound and the dynamic that it's really hard to pin down.
00:36:14It's like it's made of mercury.
00:36:17In the same car
00:36:33Always Crashing in the Same Car is a lot of people's favourite because you get a real
00:36:36emotion coming through that song.
00:36:39Breaking Glass, What in the World, all very impactful, very visceral blows to the solar
00:36:47plexus almost.
00:36:48Tracks like Speed of Life, New Career on Side 1 of Low, they sound filmic somehow, perhaps
00:36:54the titles give you some of that impetus, but they have a cinematic sort of movie soundtrack
00:37:00effect.
00:37:01The instrumentals on the first side are pop songs, they're instrumental pop songs, and
00:37:06you could easily put a lyric to either of them.
00:37:10And they're great, they're upbeat, they sound like film music, they're really sort of buoyant.
00:37:27If you're in a new town, the first several bars of that are absolutely, I mean they really
00:37:33are, they do belong in a sort of, they could easily sort of be made in the 21st century.
00:37:38They really are way ahead of its time, but then it's almost as if Bowie doesn't, he can't
00:37:42quite, he doesn't have it in him to quite pursue that all the way, and so then the kind
00:37:45of band comes in and there's more conventional elements like harmonica or whatever.
00:38:04It was when listeners flipped to side B of the record that things began to get even more
00:38:09uncompromising.
00:38:11Starting with the track Warsawer, often referred to as Warsaw, it became clear that Bowie was
00:38:17now truly embracing an ambient aesthetic.
00:38:34Everything changes on the second side, where the sound sort of collapses under itself,
00:38:40because, you know, you are taken off into this sort of, one is loathe to use the term
00:38:46sonic landscape, but you are really.
00:38:49It was not written in that order, obviously.
00:38:51The stuff evolved of its own accord in a very different order to that, but I just took an
00:38:57arbitrary decision to put all fast stuff on one side and slow stuff on another for no
00:39:01other reason than that.
00:39:03I thought, well, I'll keep all the accessible stuff on one side and the less accessible
00:39:07stuff on another side and leave it up to people to pick on the side they want to play.
00:39:11I thought that the experimental side, I think it was on low, was quite interesting.
00:39:17Warsawer, I remember the title.
00:39:20I quite like that.
00:39:23Warsaw is one of the more Eno-influenced tracks.
00:39:26I believe Bowie had to go to a court case about illegal involvement with a manager,
00:39:33as so often in those days, and had to leave for a few days and said to Eno, you get on
00:39:38with something and let's see what you've got up to when I come back.
00:39:41And that was that track, apparently.
00:39:53The sounds on the second half of the album are basically created by a very early sampling
00:40:12instrument called a Chamberlain music sampler, which is basically the prototype for the Mellotron.
00:40:19The Mellotron keyboard is basically a keyboard where if you press the key, you activate a
00:40:23small tape which had a sample of an instrument.
00:40:26I mean, the Mellotron is very famously used by King Crimson on their first record in the
00:40:30Court of the Crimson King, but it was also used by the Moody Blues extensively.
00:40:34Eno loved programming this and fiddling with it.
00:40:56So the sounds on Warsaw, or Warsaw, a lot of them come from this Chamberlain, from Eno
00:41:05and Bowie themselves, working on this and making these beautiful textured, almost symphonic
00:41:10orchestral sounds from this sampling instrument.
00:41:13I don't wish to reproduce what's already been done.
00:41:16I don't want to reproduce violin sounds.
00:41:18I'd much rather use the synthesizer as a texture.
00:41:23And if I need a sound that I haven't heard in my head, then I require the assistance
00:41:27of the synthesizer to give me a texture that doesn't exist.
00:41:32If I want a guitar sound, I use a real guitar.
00:41:35But then I might mistreat it by putting it through the synthesizer afterwards.
00:41:38Brian Eno had a way of working which had already become very refined.
00:41:44He'd recorded Another Green World with these very delicate instrumental pieces.
00:42:07Around that same period, he was working on music for airports.
00:42:12And it's quite instructive to compare music for airports, which begins with piano played
00:42:20by Robert Wyatt.
00:42:22It has an incredible poise.
00:42:41And what is added to that is just a kind of ghosting of the playing.
00:42:47Because Bowie is much more interested, I think, in chaining together sequences of melodies
00:42:54which are going to stick in your head, whether they kind of make a sensible structure or not.
00:43:17To me, those instrumental pieces are very much about Bowie and Eno swapping ideas and
00:43:32playing around together in the studio.
00:43:34I'm not creating narrative form albums at the moment.
00:43:38As I said, it started off as experimental work.
00:43:41But I've had such a good time and I've developed such enthusiasm for what we were doing that
00:43:48I can see an extension of the way that I'm writing for some time to come, until the initial
00:43:55spark of enthusiasm leaves it.
00:43:59And then, of course, I'll move on from there.
00:44:01But at the moment, I'm very excited about this process of writing.
00:44:05When Low came out, it was 1977, I was just leaving school.
00:44:11One guy in my class was, of course, a Bowie fanatic.
00:44:14And one Saturday, he said, oh, come around to my house.
00:44:17I've got a new David Bowie album.
00:44:19It's really awful.
00:44:20You have to hear it.
00:44:21So he came around.
00:44:22It was this orange cover.
00:44:23And it was the side thing from The Man Who Fell to Earth.
00:44:27And he said, listen to this.
00:44:28And he put it on the second side.
00:44:30And we were all saying, oh, God.
00:44:52Other people were saying, that is awful.
00:44:54That's just, that's nothing.
00:44:56That's not music.
00:44:57That's just sound.
00:44:58That's a whole side of emptiness.
00:45:01I was just doing it.
00:45:02I said, well, that sounds really interesting.
00:45:03What is that?
00:45:04And I wanted to find out what it was.
00:45:06I didn't know what it was.
00:45:07And I will categorically say that that was my very first.
00:45:11My ears were open to the avant-garde in music.
00:45:14I think around the world, millions of people would have heard this music
00:45:17for the first time.
00:45:18Low is obviously a collaboration with Brian Eno.
00:45:24You can hear it.
00:45:27But it fits together very well, I think.
00:45:30This emphasis on Brian Eno's role has often led to the misconception
00:45:34that he actually produced Bowie's Berlin albums.
00:45:37The producer was, in fact, music industry veteran Tony Visconti.
00:45:42Tony Visconti's role is absolutely crucial to the three so-called
00:45:48Berlin albums because he did produce it.
00:45:52And Visconti is a very hands-on producer.
00:45:54You know when you hear a Visconti record because he shapes it.
00:45:58He's a musician as well.
00:46:00He's interpreted Bowie's ideas for a long time.
00:46:04The received wisdom is that Eno was the genius behind the throne here
00:46:07that Eno produced these albums.
00:46:09He didn't, factually.
00:46:11Bowie and Visconti and Eno himself have all said since,
00:46:15they're quite surprised at how people do fixate on this.
00:46:18Eno was involved in about, say, five or six of the ten tracks on Low,
00:46:21a similar number on Heroes, which is obviously a healthy chunk,
00:46:25but it doesn't make you the focal point of the whole exercise.
00:46:29There are certain tracks where you can hear a little bit of Brian Eno
00:46:35and then it becomes something completely different
00:46:38that he would never have done.
00:46:52I think you're talking about a lot of very strong, strong people,
00:46:58people with strong ideas, strong wills,
00:47:01producing something that is a hybrid, in a way.
00:47:07Despite the experimental nature of Low,
00:47:10it never seems to be the kind of music you'd expect to hear
00:47:13from a band like Bowie or Visconti.
00:47:17Sound and Vision reached number three in February 1977.
00:47:41Sound and Vision, I think,
00:47:44Sound and Vision is something, I think,
00:47:47that actually fits quite nicely on any kind of Bowie greatest hits collection.
00:47:52Although he does go through all these changes,
00:47:54there's actually a lot, you know,
00:47:56you always find many, many common elements of that.
00:47:58I mean, you know, the saxophone play
00:48:00and the kind of slightly glam, stompy sort of feel.
00:48:03I mean, there are elements that, you know,
00:48:05they're always like common trademarks.
00:48:07There's a lot of them on Sound and Vision.
00:48:09What's great about it is there aren't many lyrics,
00:48:12but the essence of it is sound.
00:48:14It is like a textured soundscape rather than a song,
00:48:18and the voices, they work as instruments rather than...
00:48:22I think the lyrics are incidental.
00:48:24Don't you need a sunshine
00:48:30About Sound and Vision
00:48:42It shows that you can be art and you can be pop at the same time
00:48:47and you don't have to compromise either way.
00:48:50This was a single. This was David Bowie.
00:48:52This was a man that operated in the centre of the pop pantheon.
00:48:56He wasn't out there on the fringes.
00:48:58It's the emblem of the Low album, if you like.
00:49:01It's the poster boy for the Low album.
00:49:04It was also a very strange single
00:49:06because it's almost an instrumental but not quite.
00:49:09It's almost an anthem but not quite.
00:49:11It's this strange kind of nearly track,
00:49:14but in the gap between the nearly and the completion
00:49:17is what makes it so magical and fills it with an extra energy.
00:49:20While Sound and Vision was a hugely popular song,
00:49:23Bowie himself felt that there was another standout moment on the album.
00:49:27Be My Wife was a bizarre medley of influences
00:49:30that, with its distinctly English stylings,
00:49:33can often be seen as a sound that was reprised 20 years later
00:49:37with the Britpop movement.
00:49:39Sometimes you get so lonely
00:49:44Sometimes you get nowhere
00:49:48I've lived all over the world
00:49:53I've left every place
00:50:01Be My Wife was a track that Bowie liked more than the other guys around,
00:50:05apparently, it's been said since.
00:50:07Eno and Tony Visconti were not that keen on it as a track,
00:50:11but Bowie was very keen on it and did push for it
00:50:14and said, yeah, no, I really want this on the album.
00:50:17I've always loved Be My Wife.
00:50:19I just think it's a very desperate song but a very funny song
00:50:23and I think he really finds his Englishness again,
00:50:27even though it was recorded in France and finished in Germany.
00:50:31You can see Blur in there,
00:50:33but then Blur, Aaron Amalgam of Bowie, Barrett, Andy Newley,
00:50:37all the same sort of things put together,
00:50:40and singing in an English accent,
00:50:43I think that always marks people out
00:50:46and I think, yeah, I can definitely see Blur in there.
00:50:50Tracksuit Jacks
00:50:52Works at Jim O'Sullivan
00:50:54Tracksuit Jacks
00:50:56Is steady employment
00:50:58Tracksuit Jacks
00:51:00Well, he's a golfing fanatic
00:51:02Tracksuit Jacks
00:51:04Well, he's not into boxing
00:51:06Tracksuit Jacks
00:51:13Please be mine
00:51:17Share my life
00:51:21Stay with me
00:51:26Be my wife
00:51:29In terms of influencing Britpop,
00:51:31maybe there's a percussive edge to it, the piano and so forth,
00:51:35but I think it has an emotional tug that most Britpop didn't.
00:51:39Most Britpop was very tongue-in-cheek,
00:51:41and whereas Bowie is no stranger to tongue-in-cheek,
00:51:44on this track I think he actually is putting a hand on heart.
00:51:48It's not that Bowie creates a new music, he doesn't,
00:51:51he's working in the shadow of real innovators in other ways,
00:51:55but he's this tremendous catalyst,
00:51:57and I think the gesture that he makes,
00:51:59the artistic gesture that represents that Berlin era
00:52:02is something that will go on to be hugely influential.
00:52:05Although Law was seen as a monumental artistic leap,
00:52:08Bowie refused to rest on his laurels.
00:52:11Acting as keyboard player on an Iggy Pop tour,
00:52:14a further attempt to seek anonymity,
00:52:16Bowie's startling productivity rate
00:52:18meant that he had already begun work on his next album.
00:52:22The idea of somebody producing two albums in one year,
00:52:27which are substantial pieces of work, is quite remarkable.
00:52:31People used to do it all the time.
00:52:33Given that he was trying to come down from cocaine at the time,
00:52:36you wonder how quickly he'd have worked if he hadn't done that.
00:52:39But maybe it was a displacement thing,
00:52:41it was a cathartic thing, he needed to work through some ideas.
00:52:44But yeah, I mean, Low and here is both immersed in 77,
00:52:47The Lodge was released by 79,
00:52:49the stage live double album was out in 78,
00:52:52he toured with Iggy Pop as his keyboard player,
00:52:56Bowie's incredibly fast.
00:52:58People might not realise how fast Bowie is.
00:53:00Bowie can come in, write a song, record everything in an hour,
00:53:03and he's gone, there's no messing around.
00:53:05He knows what he's doing.
00:53:07And Eno is very slow.
00:53:09He's very slow in that he thinks a lot about what he's doing
00:53:12and he's very, very meticulous about how things are done.
00:53:15So it's a combination of loads of ideas,
00:53:17something he's really thorough and good at, meticulous in the studio.
00:53:21In October 1977, the same year as the release of Low,
00:53:25Bowie would release the second part of his Berlin Trilogy.
00:53:29Heroes, while equally as experimental as its predecessor,
00:53:32featured a notorious title track,
00:53:35a song which many have come to see
00:53:37as Bowie's most triumphant musical moment.
00:53:41MUSIC PLAYS
00:53:59If you said to me, you can take one David Bowie song and that's it,
00:54:02it would have to be Heroes.
00:54:04It's just an amazing song, you know, and this whole thing,
00:54:07this whole period to me is worthwhile just for that song.
00:54:10If Low had been a complete shit album,
00:54:12if all he'd come out of is Heroes, out of that session,
00:54:16out of those sessions, then that to me excuses everything.
00:54:20I've probably heard that track about 500 times now in my life.
00:54:23And I put it on this morning,
00:54:25and it's as if you've never heard it before, every time,
00:54:28because it just sounds different.
00:54:30I don't know how that was achieved,
00:54:32for a record to always sound different.
00:54:34What people don't realise about Heroes is it's an incredibly long song.
00:54:37I mean, it's almost as long as Stairway To Heaven,
00:54:40and people don't realise that, and it's bloody long,
00:54:43and yet it doesn't sound long.
00:54:45It's coming closer to pop music, I think,
00:54:49popular music, but it's still very ambitious pop music.
00:54:55MUSIC CONTINUES
00:55:05MUSIC CONTINUES
00:55:09I think what it does have is Robert Fripp,
00:55:12who is one of the greatest guitarists that Britain's ever produced,
00:55:17who had retired from music at that point.
00:55:21He just absolutely had enough of music
00:55:24with the demise of King Crimson in 1974.
00:55:28And he'd been sort of living in a retreat,
00:55:31and he was phoned up by his old mate Eno to come over to the sessions.
00:55:36He got a phone call from Brian.
00:55:39He said, we'd like you to come and help us make a record.
00:55:43And Robert said, I'm not in the music business anymore,
00:55:45I'm sick of it, I'm fed up.
00:55:47No, no, but David Bowie's here and he wants you to...
00:55:50And I put him on the phone.
00:55:52So David said, Robert, can you come?
00:55:54And Robert said, well, he said, now.
00:55:56And they said, what do you mean, now?
00:55:59Get on the plane, I'll pay for everything.
00:56:01And he arrived with his Gibson, his guitar,
00:56:04at Handsome by the Wall at night time.
00:56:06And they said, OK, let's go.
00:56:08They said, let's go what?
00:56:09He said, let's go, just play.
00:56:11They said, play what? Just play anything.
00:56:13And what he played was the riff to Heroes.
00:56:15I bet you if you asked Bowie, he'd say it's one of those songs
00:56:18that just came through him.
00:56:20Like McCartney with Yesterday, he woke up and it was in his mind.
00:56:23Keith Richards with Satisfaction, woke up with that riff.
00:56:26And I bet you if you asked Bowie, Heroes would be...
00:56:29I bet you he didn't sweat over that song, I bet it just flowed.
00:56:32And that's why musicians are the luckiest fuckers on earth,
00:56:35cos I don't get it and you don't get it and he don't get it.
00:56:38But it just comes to them and they just...
00:56:42And then they make millions of pounds and go and live in Berlin.
00:56:45Bastards.
00:56:51We can be heroes
00:56:57You've got this great sound.
00:57:00You've got Fripp's guitar, which is incredible.
00:57:03Visconti's back-up vocals.
00:57:05You know, the whole thing is...
00:57:10..perfect, really.
00:57:11As an album, Heroes took on a similar approach to Low.
00:57:15One-half fractured pop music, one-half dark ambient soundscapes.
00:57:27MUSIC CONTINUES
00:57:44In my mind, Low and Heroes are the same record.
00:57:47They're continuations of the same record.
00:57:49I always see them together, I always play them together,
00:57:52I always listen to them together.
00:57:54They always be slightly more cohesive than Low,
00:57:58only in the sense that you sort of knew what to expect.
00:58:02And it sounds like Low again with a different set of tunes.
00:58:06Those albums, you know, they're very polarised in a way.
00:58:11They're a strange mixture of the hysterical and the innovating.
00:58:17And...
00:58:20..they have very commercial songs on them
00:58:23and they have these moody tone poems.
00:58:45Because they came out in the days of vinyl,
00:58:48you could more or less choose a mood
00:58:51or you could choose, you know,
00:58:53maybe the instrumentals were a bit too much for you,
00:58:58so you didn't listen to those, you listened to the songs.
00:59:01And I think that's one of the reasons
00:59:03why those albums were so hugely influential,
00:59:07because people took whatever they wanted from them.
00:59:11Neukölln is on that album
00:59:13and that is something that is quite evocative of Berlin,
00:59:16especially with the kind of use of saxophone there,
00:59:19which you could see on one level as like, you know,
00:59:22metaphor for the kind of lonely sort of voices on either side,
00:59:25the estranged people on either side of the wall.
00:59:28It also has this kind of slightly Muslim,
00:59:30if that's the word to pronounce, feel.
00:59:50DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
01:00:01It is like he had absorbed his surroundings.
01:00:03I mean, I think, you know, Bowie's always been a comedian.
01:00:06He's able to do it as he was able to do it with Philadelphia
01:00:09for young Americans and in London for his early sides and things like that.
01:00:13I think here he was positioning himself in the heart of it,
01:00:16in, you know, allegedly an old Nazi dining room,
01:00:21where he could see the Berlin Wall,
01:00:23and he created that, all that feeling in one tune, really.
01:00:30And I think the whole album feels like that,
01:00:32but that song, you know, is destined to be a sort of...
01:00:37accompany 1,000 documentaries about that era.
01:00:40Heroes also contained Bowie's first explicit reference
01:00:43to the artists that had influenced him so much,
01:00:46the track V2 Schneider being an open dedication
01:00:49to Kraftwerk member Florian Schneider.
01:00:52DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
01:00:56DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
01:01:10V2 Schneider, of course,
01:01:12is a reference to Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk.
01:01:15Personally, I don't think it's a great track. It's OK.
01:01:19But the name check is fabulous.
01:01:21V2 Schneider, where there's a nod in the title to Mr Schneider,
01:01:24of Kraftwerk, is perhaps the most,
01:01:26the biggest Kraftwerk link of those tracks.
01:01:28None of these tracks really sound like Kraftwerk,
01:01:31even though people often say they do.
01:01:33Bowie had listened to Kraftwerk.
01:01:35He was particularly taken with their ideas
01:01:37and the use of synthesizers,
01:01:39and sometimes the use of minimal rhythms and repetition.
01:01:42But he took those ideas to vastly new and different places.
01:01:46DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
01:01:54DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
01:02:03Well, it has a very Germanic feel.
01:02:05I think the cliche is that Heroes is the Berlin album,
01:02:08the German album, and it is.
01:02:10It's very easy, therefore, to hear any kind of link to Germany
01:02:13and think, ooh, German theme.
01:02:15I know that David Bowie liked Noise 75 very much.
01:02:20He said so in many interviews.
01:02:23And especially, I think, the two tracks After Eight and Hero.
01:02:30And so it was a bit awkward to find a David Bowie album
01:02:36called Heroes two years later,
01:02:39but I think he hasn't made a secret of his respect
01:02:45and admiration and inspiration he got from our music,
01:02:49so that's all right.
01:02:51The second half of Heroes followed the same ambient path as Low.
01:02:54The last track, The Secret Life of Arabia,
01:02:57was a surprising foray into completely different territory.
01:03:01DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
01:03:09The secret life of Arabia
01:03:17Secret, secret, never seen
01:03:23I've always had a very soft spot for The Secret Life of Arabia
01:03:27because it's just, it's tucked away there.
01:03:29And I think that, you know, there's been criticism over the years
01:03:32that it should have not been on the second side,
01:03:35they should have found it on the first, left it there,
01:03:38because, you know, you end really down,
01:03:40you're taking off on this sort of desperate journey
01:03:43through Eastern Europe, if you like, on there,
01:03:46and then suddenly this funk tune appears out of nowhere.
01:03:50You would expect the album to kind of, you know,
01:03:53to peter out with one of the instrumentals,
01:03:55perhaps with a still shot of Bowie staring into the kind of middle distance
01:03:59in the middle of a plaza in Berlin or something like that.
01:04:02But I think that's just kind of what...
01:04:04I think it makes a statement, really.
01:04:06Again, it goes back to this idea of, like, there's always a track
01:04:09on a band that tells about what he's going to do next,
01:04:12and by the end of the album, he's already thinking about the next step.
01:04:28Thematically, he's again imagining himself as a character in a movie,
01:04:32which is something he would often do.
01:04:34He's almost like Rudy Valentino, he's the sheik in the desert,
01:04:38you know, hearing the desert song.
01:04:40It's a very durable track, and it does lead on nicely to Lodger,
01:04:45where travel was the order of the day.
01:04:47With heroes still fresh in the public mind,
01:04:50David Bowie's next move would be yet another typically unpredictable one,
01:04:54a televised Christmas duet with All-American crooner Bing Crosby.
01:05:00I guess he's changing.
01:05:02Yeah, he does that a lot, doesn't he?
01:05:04I'm David Bowie, I live down the road.
01:05:06Sir Percival lets me use his piano when he's not around.
01:05:09He's not around, is he?
01:05:10I can honestly say I haven't seen him, but come on in.
01:05:13I'm in.
01:05:14Come on in.
01:05:16Bing Crosby, perhaps not one of his most avant-garde,
01:05:18experimental, pushing-the-envelope moments,
01:05:21but at least he was out there promoting the work,
01:05:23and because he hadn't promoted Lowe at all,
01:05:26he really felt the need to promote heroes
01:05:28to show that he was really into this new direction in his music.
01:05:31Our finest gifts we bring of glory
01:05:38Saviour, day in, day out
01:05:41At the bell, you will be told
01:05:45I suppose it's just the idea that it would, like,
01:05:47confound anybody who develops an expectation of him
01:05:50just based on what he'd been doing the last two or three years.
01:05:53So I think he just enjoyed the perversity of that.
01:05:56On the other hand, maybe these things,
01:05:58they just drove up with a truckload of money,
01:06:00and I mean, you know, in David Bowie's management,
01:06:02he was a very hard-node, money-minded people,
01:06:05and, you know, that's not entirely to be discounted.
01:06:08Our view of Bing Crosby in this country
01:06:11is one of this kind of, you know, really vacuous entertainer,
01:06:14but he was really important in America in the 30s and 40s.
01:06:17Can it be?
01:06:24Can it be?
01:06:30It's a pretty thing, isn't it?
01:06:31He guested with Bing Crosby.
01:06:33He also guested on the short-lived Mark Boland TV show.
01:06:37This is a new song.
01:06:40One, two, three, yeah!
01:06:53Interestingly, the first time he ever performed Heroes live
01:06:57was on the Mark Boland TV show, which is quite poignant,
01:07:00because, you know, Boland died shortly after that,
01:07:03you know, after the day that was filmed.
01:07:05It seemed that Bowie's relatively reclusive streak
01:07:08was coming to an end,
01:07:10something that was further implied in January of 1978
01:07:13when he embarked on a year-long worldwide tour.
01:07:16A good deal of his more experimental material, however,
01:07:19did not receive such a warm reception from paying crowds.
01:07:23So the stage live tour
01:07:27involved playing most of the low-end Heroes material first
01:07:30and then the crowd-pleasers second,
01:07:32which perhaps wasn't the smart way to go about it,
01:07:35because perhaps you could have pleased the layman first
01:07:38and then kept your die-hard fans with you for the second half.
01:07:42This was the era where stadium rock started, as we know it, arena rock,
01:07:48and obviously Bowie was the size of artists to fill stadiums,
01:07:54and, you know, the talk that Visconti had to get the booing removed
01:07:59from Sense of Doubt on stage and things like that.
01:08:03ORGAN PLAYS
01:08:20What Visconti cleverly did on the live double album
01:08:23was put the hits on the first album
01:08:25and the more experimental material on the second album,
01:08:28and in Visconti's defence he says
01:08:30that's why he had to do some editing,
01:08:32because he was shifting around the order of the set
01:08:35to put the crowd-pleasing stuff first.
01:08:37Maybe there was some sort of crowd noise edited out,
01:08:40but I think that's common practice
01:08:42and I can't think of one album ever
01:08:44where any producer ever would or has left in booing on an album,
01:08:48so let's not be too harsh on Visconti for that.
01:08:51Having released both Low and Heroes in such close proximity,
01:08:55it would be almost two years until Bowie released his follow-up.
01:08:59Backed by a marketing campaign which claimed
01:09:01there's new wave, there's old wave and there's David Bowie,
01:09:05Lodger hit the shelves in May 1979.
01:09:08MUSIC PLAYS
01:09:30The fascinating thing with Lodger
01:09:33is it's very unlike any other David Bowie record.
01:09:37It has this feel that's sort of quite remarkable.
01:09:41You've got this sort of travelogue,
01:09:43it's almost like David Bowie's rough guide to the world
01:09:46and he's name-checking Cyprus and Russia
01:09:49and all these places that he's seen.
01:09:51People talk about that trilogy of albums
01:09:54as being very much to do with Germany,
01:09:57but when I listen to them, I hear influences of Arab music,
01:10:02I hear influences of African music,
01:10:05I hear some Japanese influences.
01:10:08A lot of the music actually sounds very French to me,
01:10:11it doesn't sound German at all.
01:10:13African Night Flight is quite an interesting track.
01:10:16MUSIC PLAYS
01:10:20MUSIC CONTINUES
01:10:26Again, it hybridises a lot of strange ideas,
01:10:30this odd, very theatrical vocal,
01:10:34and then the rhythm, the feel of the rhythm track
01:10:38is very similar to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.
01:10:43MUSIC CONTINUES
01:11:04MUSIC CONTINUES
01:11:13It's interesting that just after that,
01:11:15you get Eno and Vern doing My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
01:11:18and you get them talking heads,
01:11:20just beginning to sort of take on what can be talked about
01:11:24as ethnological forgery, making their own version of world music.
01:11:27Bowie's not really going all the way with that,
01:11:30but he's cocking an eye in that direction.
01:11:33MUSIC CONTINUES
01:11:43MUSIC CONTINUES
01:11:51In some respects, that album had a lot more influence
01:11:55on the sound of talking heads
01:11:58and then the white funk that was coming out in the years afterwards.
01:12:03So Bowie had all this going on.
01:12:07But it had more of a sort of structure to it.
01:12:12There weren't instrumentals on it, for one thing.
01:12:15And it also had Boys Keep Swinging.
01:12:17MUSIC CONTINUES
01:12:29Boys Keep Swinging put him back in the charts,
01:12:32and the song itself can be taken on many different levels.
01:12:35People interpret it as gender-bending clichés
01:12:38or as a sort of a spoof of a kind of macho anthem.
01:12:41Bowie had said to the rhythm section,
01:12:43why don't you play each other's instruments and mess about?
01:12:46So you get a very sort of messy garage rock track,
01:12:49which is blended with elements of disco
01:12:52and a very arch motif and chorus.
01:12:54It's an extraordinary track.
01:12:56MUSIC CONTINUES
01:13:06Boys Keep Swinging was promoted by this inventive pop video,
01:13:10a creative streak which Bowie would continue throughout the next decade.
01:13:14Bowie was beginning to be one of the pioneers in the video medium
01:13:18and he soon became one of the champions of the medium.
01:13:21He really did push it to another level.
01:13:24Boys Keep Swinging was an interesting experiment in the area.
01:13:27And then, of course, Ashes to Ashes was one of the great videos,
01:13:30probably of its era.
01:13:33With a notably more traditional song-based structure,
01:13:36Lodger would mark the final stages of the original Bowie-Eno collaboration.
01:13:42Bowie felt that he'd learned all of Eno's methods
01:13:45and Eno had nothing more to teach him
01:13:47and Eno felt that it was getting very boring.
01:13:50I think there are still ideas in there that are full of potential.
01:13:55But, yeah, it doesn't have the same impact.
01:13:59I think Lodger can be dismissed because it's not the other two albums.
01:14:04I just think it wasn't those records.
01:14:07I think it's almost as simple as that.
01:14:09And it's not an easy record to love.
01:14:12It's quite significant as well that when...
01:14:14I think the day that Lodger came out,
01:14:17he upped the stakes and left Hausstrasse,
01:14:19which was a depressing, damp flat on the first floor
01:14:23of some old, crumbling building,
01:14:25which had, like, carpets and stuff stuck on the windows
01:14:28and it was always blacked out.
01:14:30It was a horrible place.
01:14:31It was basically a junkie's paradise, basically.
01:14:34And he just wanted to be out of that.
01:14:36Red Money, the final track,
01:14:38was the same song, Assist the Midnight,
01:14:41which was almost the first song recorded in the whole Berlin period,
01:14:46which was on Iggy's nightclubbing album.
01:14:49And there was a feeling, you know,
01:14:52the Refrain Project cancelled in it,
01:14:55that this was the end of this era.
01:15:02Calling assist the midnight
01:15:06You got me reaching for the moon
01:15:11Calling assist the midnight
01:15:15You got me playing the fool
01:15:26Oh, can you feel it in the way
01:15:31That the night is not mine
01:15:36Can you see it in the sky
01:15:41The more commercial slant of Lodger
01:15:43even led some to imply that Bowie was now sinking into self-parody,
01:15:47citing tracks such as Move On,
01:15:49which consisted of his earlier songwriting hit
01:15:52All The Young Dudes Played Backwards.
01:15:54Oh, brother, again, I'm a dude now
01:16:00All the young dudes
01:16:02Hey, dudes!
01:16:03Carry the news
01:16:05Where are ya?
01:16:06All the young dudes
01:16:08Stand up!
01:16:09Carry the news
01:16:17Somewhere someone's calling me
01:16:20And when the chips are down
01:16:22I'm just a travelling man
01:16:26Maybe it's just a trick of the mind
01:16:29But somewhere...
01:16:30It was really the first time he started to look backwards
01:16:34at his own career and, you know,
01:16:36giving it a bit of the old self-reverence.
01:16:39I wouldn't say this album descends to self-parody.
01:16:41I think that would be a very harsh thing to say.
01:16:43I think the main theme of Lodger is travelling and the world,
01:16:46and he was a peripatetic man, he's a restless man,
01:16:49he was so prolific during this period
01:16:51that he's a constant traveller.
01:16:53Certainly the first half of the album
01:16:55deals with the Eastern world more so,
01:16:57and the second half is about the Western society
01:17:00and its corruption and sins.
01:17:02The first side is this bizarre, skew-iff travelogue,
01:17:05and then the second side are these really robust funk songs,
01:17:10all dealing with alienation,
01:17:12but you've got DJ, which is, you know, incredible,
01:17:17and DJ, I Am A DJ, DJ David Jones,
01:17:20and Is It Maybe, Who Knows?
01:17:22I am a DJ, I am what I play
01:17:26Can't turn around, can't turn around
01:17:29While the other singles from Lodger
01:17:31had been top 30 hits in his native country,
01:17:34Bowie would fail altogether to chart in America
01:17:37with the single Look Back In Anger.
01:17:39I've been waiting so long
01:17:41I've been waiting so wait
01:17:44Look back in anger
01:17:47Driven by the night till you come
01:17:53Waiting so long
01:17:55I've been waiting so wait
01:17:59Look back in anger
01:18:02See it in my eyes
01:18:04Look Back In Anger is a deeply undervalued track.
01:18:07Eno was involved very much in the rhythms there
01:18:11and was urging the rhythm section on
01:18:14to play harder and stranger, and it's a really powerful track
01:18:18with a great vocal, As Ever, by Bowie,
01:18:20who even on this trilogy, which is not about vocals so much,
01:18:24remains one of the great vocalists in the history of rock.
01:18:27There are other albums where he's sung more and better,
01:18:30but he's still an incredibly effective vocalist on this trilogy,
01:18:34and on Look Back In Anger, his vocals are intense.
01:18:37Look back in anger
01:18:39Hear it in my voice
01:18:41Till you come
01:18:44Waiting so long
01:18:48I've been waiting so wait
01:18:53Fantastic rock song, and a great tune,
01:18:56and again, I don't think many people have taken the time
01:18:59to really get to love it enough.
01:19:01Despite their drifting apart during the recording of Lodger,
01:19:05they reunite to collaborate again,
01:19:0716 years later, on the 1995 album Outside,
01:19:11a concept piece which had the subtitle
01:19:14The Diary Of Nathan Adler.
01:19:16Heart's filthiness
01:19:18Heart's filthiness
01:19:20Heart's filthiness
01:19:30The conversation for years used to be,
01:19:33wouldn't it be great if Eno and Bowie got back together again?
01:19:37And it's an interesting record.
01:19:39It didn't work, really, is the truth.
01:19:41It was brave of them to have a go,
01:19:43and it's certainly more credible
01:19:45than trotting out a plodding MOR album,
01:19:48but it was very difficult.
01:19:50In its credit, you certainly couldn't accuse it of playing safe.
01:19:54It was a very experimental record, very difficult.
01:19:57The concept was so overblown, wasn't it?
01:20:00The Diary Of Nathan Adler, it's a book,
01:20:02I think it was an online thing on the Internet.
01:20:05It was this, it was that, it was too many things.
01:20:08But moondust will cover you
01:20:12Cover you
01:20:14So bye-bye, love
01:20:16I just thought the record was far too long,
01:20:19it was just too complicated.
01:20:21It was just, it was just, I think,
01:20:23it was trying to be too many things.
01:20:25The greatest thing about Lone Heroes,
01:20:27they weren't trying to be anything with themselves,
01:20:31From the late 80s onwards,
01:20:33he's like this slightly old geezer playing catch-up,
01:20:36and I think by that stage,
01:20:38Eno is still doing pretty interesting things,
01:20:40but I think neither are on the stage
01:20:42where they're likely to make this great revolutionary leap,
01:20:45and so much else is happening in music.
01:20:47A lot of it inspired by there.
01:20:49Nothing they're ever going to do in the midnight
01:20:51is ever going to have the same impact as, say, Lowe.
01:20:53You know what, I kind of think sometimes,
01:20:56with certain artists,
01:20:58David Bowie's obviously one of them.
01:21:00They've done so much.
01:21:02You know, they've written so many great songs,
01:21:05and they've created so much great art,
01:21:09that whether he's trying to reclaim past glories or not,
01:21:13I just kind of salute him.
01:21:15I just think, good for you.
01:21:17You wrote heroes.
01:21:19That's enough for me.
01:21:21Another 1990s reprise for Bowie's Berlin work
01:21:24came in the form of a unique tribute,
01:21:27a reinterpretation in two symphonies by Philip Glass.
01:21:43Philip Glass is absolutely vital.
01:21:45I mean, Philip Glass was one of the first people to come out
01:21:48and say that Lowe is a great record.
01:21:50I really endorsed it, in fact, at the time he did,
01:21:52when everybody was slagging it off.
01:21:54There's a very close connection there,
01:21:56and of course, I think the Lowe and Heroes symphonies
01:21:58are wonderful records, yes, I think they're excellent.
01:22:00The fact that he embraced the work of Bowie and Eno
01:22:03gave them a kudos, really,
01:22:05that was what they perhaps would have been looking for to start with,
01:22:09because they had been influenced by his and others'
01:22:12use of minimalism and repetition,
01:22:14repetition that doesn't bore,
01:22:16which is a very hard thing to pull off.
01:22:18So for him to give them the thumbs-up and say, yeah, good work,
01:22:22and to go as far as doing his own reading of it
01:22:25was one of the happy days for all concerns, really.
01:22:39It's a testament to how durable those instrumental pieces were
01:22:43that Philip Glass turned them into symphonies.
01:22:47And I think they're very bold statements.
01:22:51You could tell that Bowie was thrilled
01:22:54that his work has been turned into symphonies
01:22:56by someone who he admires so deeply.
01:22:5930 years since the release of Lowe,
01:23:01the resonance of Bowie's Berlin period
01:23:03is still stretching as far and wide as ever,
01:23:06a cultural legacy put into place
01:23:08by one man's constant desire for reinvention.
01:23:16We could be heroes
01:23:20Just for one day
01:23:25I think the legacy of those three records
01:23:29is that they...
01:23:34..helped place Britain within Europe...
01:23:41..which was a necessary step.
01:23:44But the influences spread in all directions.
01:23:48I think for David Bowie himself, he grew up,
01:23:51he lost the political rubbish,
01:23:53the neo-Nazi, Nietzschean, Wagnerian fixations,
01:23:56which was absolutely thankful,
01:23:58because he didn't want that coming into mainstream music.
01:24:01He didn't want a whole movement of neo-Nazi bands and Nazi
01:24:04and sort of tainting punk with this kind of racism.
01:24:07He didn't want that.
01:24:09But more importantly, I mean, the most important thing,
01:24:12legacy of it all, was it brought the avant-garde into the mainstream.
01:24:15The Berlin period is continually fascinating,
01:24:19that it sits sort of...
01:24:23..inside, yet almost entirely outside of Bowie's career trajectory.
01:24:30And that it shows, you know, you can...
01:24:33..successfully sort of reinvent yourself
01:24:36by actually not doing very much.
01:24:40It did things with the form of pop music.
01:24:45It brought experimentation into the centre ground.
01:24:50And...
01:24:52..I think for that, it will, for me,
01:24:55always be the most interesting period of Bowie's career.
01:25:00CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
01:25:14CHEERING CONTINUES