1976: David Bowie and Iggy Pop move to Berlin
Divided, isolated, and simmering with ideas, 1970s Berlin was the perfect city for outsiders. Those hoping to soak up the atmosphere of Weimer Germany, make the most of generous government subsidies and revel in genuine anarchy were inevitably drawn to the city, establishing it as an incubator for artists hoping to push the boundaries of their art. It is perhaps this that attracted two of Berlin’s most famed temporary residents: David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who decided to travel to the “heroin capital of the world” in late 1976 in an effort to get clean and reinvent themselves in the process.
By ’76, the space-age exuberance of Bowie’s early career had given way to a severe cocaine addiction, a bizarre diet of bell peppers and milk, and a rather worrying obsession with the Third Reich. The culmination of these influences gave birth to the Thin White Duke, the faintly demonic embodiment of minimalist glamour and wild excess. When not making provocative remarks on love television or contorting classic American soul into new and unruly shapes, Bowie was wracked by thoughts of demonic possession. “He felt the pool in his LA home was haunted. He felt the devil was in the pool,” Glenn Hughes explains in David Bowie: A Life. “The wind was howling, [and the pool started to] bubble like a Jacuzzi […] I swear to you I have a pool, and I have never seen it bubble before. That pool was fucking bubbling.”
By this time, Bowie’s close friend Iggy Pop had already been institutionalised once and had no intention of returning. Having come to the realisation that this was perhaps the time to get clean, the pair decided to travel to Berlin, where they hoped they would be far too busy even to consider getting high. It just seemed like such a romantic, historically interesting place,” Bowie said of his decision to relocate. “You had the Christopher Isherwood thing and it being the gateway to Europe with all the artforms going in and out of there, and dada being there, and the Baader-Meinhof and all that. We felt conflict and tension in the air, and we thought, ‘God if we can’t write in this place, we can’t write anywhere!’…And we’d get cleaned up.”
There was undoubtedly a lot to keep Bowie occupied on a cultural level, but if he thought he would remove himself from temptation by moving to Berlin, he was very wrong. On arrival in 1976, he quickly fell back onto old habits. He spent his first evening in the divided city cruising the city streets with Iggy, drinking KöPi at Joe’s Beer House, trying his luck at drag bars and clubbing at Dschungel. During one particularly unhinged outing, the two friends spent five minutes ramming their dealer’s car before heading down to their hotel’s underground car park to drive into a wall at 70mph. Their attempt to end it all was thwarted when, quite suddenly, the car ran out of fuel, leaving Iggy and Bowie to collapse into hysterics.
What Bowie needed more than anything was stability. His assistant Coco Schwab gave him a head start by finding the musician a first-floor apartment in leafy Schöneberg, where he slept under a giant portrait of the Japanese novelist, actor and nationalist Yukio Mishima. Slowly but surely, Bowie’s cocaine psychosis began to recede. All that remained was normality, which is precisely what he needed. “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,’ says guitarist Carlos Alomar. They couldn’t do that in America. Sometimes you just need to be by yourself with your problems. Sometimes you just wanna shut up.”
In a city where he was utterly unknown, Bowie “felt a joy of life and a great feeling of release and healing” [quotes via The Guardian]. He soon realised that to make something genuinely new, he would need to reinvent himself. By the summer of ’77, that process was well underway. Bowie was making music with such rapidity that he and Iggy were sleeping just a few hours a night before returning to the studio for yet another mammoth recording session. It was during this time Bowie helped write and produce The Idiot and Lust For Life for Iggy.
He’d also set to work on the first album in his Berlin Trilogy, 1977’s Heroes, the title track of which had started life as an instrumental recording but was transformed, with the help of Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, into the cavernous anthem we know and love today. From then on, the pace didn’t let up for a minute, with Bowie crafting two more albums suffused with the hum of Berlin’s fractured streets: Low (1977) and Lodger (1979). When played in sequence, the three records form a document of regeneration and renewal. From 1977 to 1980, Bowie transitioned from a semi-psychotic addict to an independant creative powerhouse. And it was all thanks to Berlin.
