“I was locked in a room in Berlin”: David Bowie hit his lowest ebb and made ‘Sound and Vision’
Decadence, madness and the production of dreams ruled the roost for David Bowie in the mid-1970s in a way that is only comparable to some crazed king of old. Thus, it would seem that Los Angeles was the perfect place for him; however, things would turn out rather different.
The West Coast had long been a haven for rock and roll creatives. The access to LA studios was certainly part of it, as Hollywood money overflowed into the Golden State to provide a serious amount of cartistic ballast to attach yourself to. But while the studios were good, the drugs were even better. With it, Bowie seemed to fall off a cliff and begin a downward spiral that threatened to take over his entire life.
Behind an artistic purple patch was a cocaine addiction measurable by the tonne, a bizarre diet of bell peppers and milk befitting of a cable TV documentary, and an unwavering obsession with the Third Reich. It was the epitome of the American Dream turned nightmare. On top of this caustic confluence of cocaine side-effects, was what Bowie believed to be a harrowing attack by demonic hell beasts, most notably in the form of his friend, musical collaborator and apparent phantasm, Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes. All of this madness unravelled in the City of Angels.
Here, he simultaneous fell into the clutches of gaudy LA’s debauched side and revelled in the way that images could be crafted there in an instant. He would relish the notion of, “I’m an instant star, just add water,” and the sense of the American pop culture dream while also seeing through the whole thing as a plastic facsimile. This odd mix proved maddening to Bowie in both senses.
Thus, Berlin beckoned to Bowie like a beacon of salvation. Considering that in 1976 the divided city was welcoming to nobody but spies, you get a decent understanding of his mindset. However, this clandestine space of barely populated, crumbling cafes was ideal for the star. As Tony Visconti recalls: “[It] was a hipsters city. Because it was cheap to live there. Nobody wanted to live inside the Wall.”
What’s more, it had an added benefit for the renegade duo, as guitarist Carlos Alomar states: “David went to Berlin with Iggy for isolation. It was to humanise his condition, to say, ‘I’d like to forget my world, go to a café, have a coffee and read the newspaper.’ They couldn’t do that in America. Sometimes you just need to be by yourself with your problems. Sometimes you just wanna shut up.”
Bowie even took this notion of salvation into his music at the time. As he told Q magazine: “My concern with Low was not about the music. The music was literally expressing my physical and emotional state… and that was my worry. So the music was almost therapeutic. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve made an album and it sounds like this.’ But it was a by-product of my life. It just sort of came out. I never spoke to the record company about it. I never talked to anybody about it. I just made this album… in a rehab state. A dreadful state really.”
For Bowie, the paradigm of this “dreadful state” and his desire to get away from it, came to the fore with one song in particular. “A very sad song for me is ‘Sound And Vision’. I was trying very hard to drag myself out of an awful period of my life,” he opined of the stunning anthem.”
Adding: “I was locked in a room in Berlin telling myself I was going to straighten up and not do drugs anymore. I was never going to drink again. Only some of it proved to be the case. It was the first time I knew I was killing myself and time to do something about my physical condition. I had a few scares and thought, ‘Well, I got through that by the skin of my teeth.’ Serious haemorrhaging from the nose, passing out… awful stuff.”
When reflecting on the impetus for the track, he told Melody Maker: “That was an ultimate retreat song; actually, the first thing that I wrote with Brian [Eno] in mind. It was just the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.” The song remains a stunning retreat to this day, and the 2013 version may well be the greatest alternate take in music
A permanent fixture in some people’s top ten lists, the song is an archetypal piece from the Thin White Duke as he uses abstract lyrical constructs shaped by incessantly groove-filled instrumentals to bamboozle and entrance. It’s a song that showed Bowie was always an artist before he was a pop star and, when it could’ve been so easy to conform and write pop ballads forevermore, he showed that artistic evolution was always paramount.
But while it might be assumed that the best work an artist can provide comes from the lofty heights of an LA penthouse, the truth is that one must often plumb the depths of their soul to truly find the right tools to fight back. ‘Sound and Vision’ might have been the sound of Bowie wailing into the wind and hoping for them change in his favour, but it became the beacon of his resurgence.
