LOW: A CREATIVE HIGH

Born in Brixton, South London, David Robert Jones—known to the world as David Bowie—was a creative child who formed his first band in 1952 at the age of fifteen. After an unsuccessful debut album in 1967, Bowie stepped back from pop music for a while and studied mime and drama with Lindsay Kemp.

When he returned to music, it was to record another album simply called David Bowie. To the confusion of many, this LP was called Man of Words / Man of Music in the USA and later re-issued as Space Oddity. The latter at least made sense. Bowie’s single of the same name, released in 1969 at the time of the Apollo 11 mission, was a feature of the album. It created both a hit single and a character, Major Tom who would weave in and out of Bowie’s story for decades.

The early 1970s saw Bowie exploring and developing as a songwriter, a process which came together in 1972’s epochal The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, whose verbose title owed much to Marc Bolan’s extravagantly named albums of that period. The persona of Ziggy created a star on stage and stardom for its creator; late in 1973 Bowie had a remarkable six albums in the UK charts.

By the mid-1970s, however, Bowie was in the grip of a serious cocaine addiction while the controversies around his sexuality and theatrical antics had taken a darker turn with addled pronouncements regarding the benefits of fascism. Welcome to the era of The Thin White Duke, expressed hypnotically on the 1976 album Station To Station. This landmark Bowie album retained some of the soul-funk sounds of Young Americans but, more importantly, showed how closely Bowie had been listening to major players in the German alternate rock scene. The pulsing electronica of Tangerine Dream, the driving rhythms of Neu! and the repetitive beats of Kraftwerk are all to be heard on Station To Station, leading Bowie directly into his "Berlin period".

The time living in Germany’s divided city and recording at Hansa Studios near the Berlin wall manifested musically on one of Bowie’s most striking and important records, Low.

With significant contributions from guitarist Carlos Alomar and Brian Eno, the album may not have blitzed the charts (it had one charting single, "Sound and Vision", a UK #3) but it wowed the critics and has continued to delight fans who explore its strange, evocative sonic world.

Opening with an instrumental overture—the upbeat "Speed of Life"—the album moves immediately into darker territory with the unsettling lyric of "Breaking Glass". The songs that follow illustrate Bowie’s strengths… the hummable refrains and choruses, deft use of layered vocals, slashing guitar solos. There are also echoes of the soul sounds he was leaving behind and indicators of the 'krautrock’ bands he’d been listening to in the restrained yet potent use of synthesisers.  Rhythmically, producers Bowie and Tony Visconti manipulate the drum sounds to make the rhythm bed exotic and strange. The first side of Low is full of energy and invention, and ends with another buoyant instrumental, "A New Career in a New Town".

On side two Bowie’s avant-garde musicianship explores a wider canvas. Drawing on the ambient explorations of collaborator Brian Eno, Bowie offers us a mesmerising platter of (largely) instrumental music, as captivating and evocative as any film soundtrack. Many of the influences mentioned earlier are on clear display—Kraftwerk’s electronic rhythms and Tangerine Dream’s atmospheres, for example—while "Weeping Wall" clearly draws inspiration from the minimalist sounds of Philip Glass.

Maybe that’s what Low is: the soundtrack of an artist absorbing influences, testing boundaries, pushing forward into new territory.

The musical chameleon was on a roll. In October 1977, just eight months after Low was released, he produced "Heroes", an album that developed and further refined many of the musical ideas heard on Low. Berlin was clearly a place of inspiration for the restless whisperings of David Bowie’s muse.

© Bruce Jenkins 2022