“A little cold room”: How did the throes of addiction change David Bowie’s writing?
By the latter months of 1975, David Bowie was a drug-addled mess. His Martian-mulleted glam era long behind him, the perennial ‘cracked actor’ poured a growing fascination with West Germany’s cluster of avant-garde electronic artists bubbling away in the country’s music fringes, an uneasy obsession with the occult, and a diet consisting primarily of red peppers and cocaine by the bucketloads yielded 1976’s chillingly brilliant Station to Station—a record Bowie professed little memory of making.
An icy swirl of detached romance and alienated anti-rock inspired another of Bowie’s gallery of alter-egos. Donning a vampiric cabaret attire and exuding cold delusions of Aryan supremacy, The Thin White Duke would arrive on stage bathed in fluorescent white light and sparse black backdrops during the Isolar Tour to further illustrate the hollow aristocrat’s frigid view of humanity.
It was a role Bowie would immerse himself in too deeply. Imbuing his creation with a queasy fascism, and coupled with a private fixation on Nazi Germany’s Völkisch mysticism, remarks made to the press implying sympathies for The Third Reich landed him in hot water as to where his political convictions lay.
As the year rolled on and bouts of psychosis started rearing its head, Bowie knew he had to stake his Thin White Duke in the heart for good. Escaping Los Angeles’ grubby glitz, Bowie decamped to Switzerland before joining Iggy Pop in West Berlin and staying put for the next two years. With Pop mired in a heroin habit, the pair sought to get clean, pronto. “It was the first time I knew I was killing myself and time to do something about my physical condition,” Bowie confessed to Q in 2003. “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”.
David Bowie’s Berlin transformation: From addiction to artistic rebirth
Mentally weathered and spiritually battered, rock’s strutting gyrations felt from a distant universe in Bowie and Pop’s fragile psyches. Looking further to the electronic experiments conjured by the likes of Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, and Neu!, Bowie stepped into the producer’s chair and swapped feral garage rock for mechanised drum machines and eerie synthesizers on Pop’s brittle 1977 gem The Idiot. Lost in the new world of haunted ambient textures and shimmering art-pop deconstructions, Bowie headed to France’s Château d’Hérouville to begin work on his 11th studio LP.
The first of his so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’, 1977’s Low corralled Tony Visconti for production duties and Brian Eno as collaborator and creative muse to exorcise Bowie’s rehabilitative turmoil into a record charged with unnerving electronics and post-punk expanse. An aural detox, Low documents the inner state of an artist staving off the residual ghosts and dealers that lurked in LA’s seamy underbelly. Leading the album was ‘Sound and Vision’, the fizzy pop cut that sprightly bounces across its charming 3 minutes with a buoyant zest atypical of the record’s glacial atmosphere.
“That was an ultimate retreat song,” Bowie divulged to Melody Maker the following year. “The first thing that I wrote with Brian in mind when we were working at the Château. 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”.
Perhaps ‘Sound and Vision’s lighter tone reflects its author’s relief at shaking off the leaden demons of addiction that had plagued his mental health. In a career of calculated personas and thematic lenses for every album, it’s Low more than any of Bowie’s voluminous LPs that stands as his most unveiled and naked, a voyeuristic insight into a troubled mind on the cautious road to recovery.
