David Bowie & Iggy Pop’s Berlin Diaries: Spies, speeding cars, and disembowelled fascists
David Bowie and his buddy Iggy Pop sit in a dilapidated German vehicle. After minutes of continually ramming their dealer’s car, seemingly hoping a bag of cocaine would tumble out in a manner akin to giving a shove to a vending machine to free a trapped Mars bar, they admit defeat. But it’s a resignation that Bowie bears with the heaviest of hearts. For the next few minutes, he speeds around the underground hotel car park at 70mph like a Scalextric with a faulty transformer, yelling that he’s about to end it all by smashing into a concrete wall. Suddenly, the car coughs and sputters to a halt: two cultural icons were saved thanks to the limited fuel capacity of a 2L Mercedes-Benz W123. The pair emerged from the exhausted vehicle, cackling maniacally.
A year earlier, Bowie and his acting buddy Dennis Hopper had broken into a mental facility where a beleaguered Iggy Pop was housed following a diagnosis of hypomania. The famed assailants hid their identities by dressing as spacemen, leaving the staff there bewildered but powerless to intervene. Then they proceeded to administer their stricken buddy with the cocaine cache they felt he desperately needed. Around the same time, Bowie had hired a ‘white witch’ to perform an exorcism on his swimming pool after he spotted the devil lurking in its depths. When the narrowest glint of a sober morning arrived in their lives, it was this sort of shit that the duo vowed to get away from.
Thus, in a bid to save their crooked psyches, Bowie and Pop decided to trade the cocaine cornucopia of California for Berlin, the broken and divided heroin capital of the world. This was long before its dystopia had acquired a trendy appeal. The place was resplendent with nothing but naff spies and positively Victorian decay, and the only bountiful facet money couldn’t buy was poverty. This somehow seemed like the perfect escape. In some ways, they were right. The only people hounding them in Berlin were spies who wondered whether this was the most elaborate sting in the history of espionage, but aside from that, the local Turkish population were unbothered by their apparent celebrity status and left them to ramraid dealer’s cars and eat cheap sausages in peace.
In the end, it was the cheap sausages that saved them. Holed up in Hauptstraße 155, a bog-standard apartment on a tree-lined thoroughfare in the Schöneberg district where a small physiotherapy office now resides, the two fried their way through reclaimed meat towards relative sobriety. Between bouts of pork snacks, Bowie would recline in bed beneath a poster of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese writer and multi-hyphenate who tried to overthrow his nation’s government in 1970. When he failed, he simply went back inside and disembowelled himself before being voluntarily beheaded by a comrade—an ancient Samurai manner of suicide known as seppuku. Throughout his life, Mishima had curated his public persona so meticulously that his own autobiography was titled Confessions of a Mask and wasn’t necessarily about the real Yukio at all. Now, Bowie was wondering whether the mask of sobriety would suit him, whether he could return to his true self after years of being a schizophrenic rock star.
By its very nature, this was a less demented pursuit than the Starman and Iggy had been used to. These days, they weren’t trying to ward off strange obsessions with the Third Reich and fears that Deep Purple might put a curse on them; their battle was merely a desperate attempt to avoid being drawn in by the neon lure of the transvestite bar or Joe’s Beer House as they cruised around the empty streets at night having spent the day gorging and reading imported Viz comics. It turned out to be the time of their lives.
It’s impossible to divorce this escape from misadventure and the artistic purple patch that followed for the pair. But it is often overlooked that it was a bid for bromine sobriety that brought it all about. Records like Low and The Idiot might warp reality with an illusory aura in a manner that few other albums have ever matched, but they came precisely at the point when Iggy was giving up on trying to smoke spider webs in a pathetic bid to get high and, instead, simply read Christopher Isherwood with his friend in the next room rustling up yet another fucking Frankfurter.
They’d take weekend train trips to Warsaw with Bowie refusing to fly because he had seen an aerial premonition of his death—another symptom of his ails, which dissipated when sobriety allowed him to take to the skies again. They’d head out on excursions to the Berlin U-Bahn with the photographer Masayoshi Sukita for impromptu fashion shoots. They would write. And when the times was right, between servings of sausage, they’d head into a studio and make a masterpiece, thinner slivers of cocaine than ever before adorning the mixing desks.
