‘Breaking Glass’: What did David Bowie draw on the floor?
It’s a miracle that David Bowie survived the 1970s. The man was living dangerously, courting controversy everywhere he went, and getting so heavily into drugs that it briefly turned into a full-on bout with psychosis. As incredible as the music that he made during this time was, it absolutely wasn’t worth torturing his mental health over.
Many people have discussed his addiction issues and the boundary-pushing music he made despite it, but one of the most dangerous yet arresting aspects of Bowie during the 1970s was his fascination with the occult. As a born ‘Renaissance Man’ who wanted to be as au fait with the history and practice of Mime as he was with the music of The Velvet Underground, it stands to reason he would have gotten there eventually.
However, the depth of the dark side of his spirituality is something not often commented upon. The closest we get is the oft-parroted story about his cocaine-induced paranoia getting so bad that he left Los Angeles after becoming convinced that a coven of witches was plotting to steal his semen. Possibly at the behest of Jimmy Page, depending on who’s telling the story.
However, this was more than just chemically manufactured madness. David Bowie placed a lot of truck in the world of the occult, as we can see from his song ‘Quicksand’ off his 1971 album Hunky Dory. In it, he sings, “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn / Immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery”. He elaborated on this in an interview conducted with NME in 1995.
He said that in 1976, “my overriding interest was in Cabbala [Kabbalah] and Crowleyism. That whole dark and fearsome never-world of the wrong side of the brain.” Admittedly, any claims that Bowie himself can remember his 1970s should be taken with a pinch of salt, but there’s substance here.
What was David Bowie drawing in the 1970s?
Especially because he sang about this fact on one of his most celebrated albums. In his 1977 masterpiece Low, you’ll find the song ‘Breaking Glass’. A swaggering funk-rock track inspired by how often he had to explain his bad behaviour to his then-wife, Angie. It sees Bowie delivering so much with as few words as possible, especially on the line “Don’t look at the carpet / I drew something awful on it”.
The “something awful” he’s referring to is an almost obsessive compulsion he had at the time to draw The Kabbalistic Tree Of Life on any surface he had to hand. It could be a hotel room, a recording studio or his own home, as ‘Breaking Glass’ implies, and it would almost certainly become a sketch pad for the Thin White Duke’s artistic impulses.
While Bowie’s fascination with the occult in the ’70s flew straight into obsession, it’s actually kind of heartening that two decades later, he was able to look back on it more steadily. He acknowledged both how damaging his preoccupation was at the time, yet was still able to study it in a more controlled, safe, and healthy environment with age.
