How the unique Hansa Studio shaped the sound of David Bowie’s ‘Berlin trilogy’
In 1976, the divided city of Berlin welcomed nobody but spies… and two musicians on the edge of derangement. Decadence was the roust for David Bowie and Iggy Pop in the early-1970s. 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. On top of this caustic confluence of cocaine side effects, Bowie believed that his swimming pool was being possessed by the devil. He knew it was time to get the hell out of LA.
But rather than abscond with Iggy to some safe, pastoral haven where the streets are clean and John Denver breezes out on local radio airwaves, he headed to Berlin, the heroin capital of Europe. “It just seemed like such a romantic, historically interesting place,” Bowie said of his decision to move there with Iggy… It wasn’t… to put it bluntly. It was a bullet-holed hellscape still harrowed by its dark history. Playing out on its streets was the lingering ghoul of World War II; beleaguered by spies, division and oppression, it was the remaining stronghold of a dower past amid a Germany that had moved on.
The austerity of the city was stark. The grey malaise of its crumbling brutality was only brightened by the obvious, cartoonish spies in naff gabardine suits pretending to sell newspapers. The rank food and rotten walls were just as bad. When Nick Cave arrived a few years later, following in Bowie’s footsteps as millions of artists continue to do, he was proclaimed that it was “positively Victorian”.
But it wasn’t just this environment that impacted Bowie’s creative workings at the time; there was one scared room that shaped his sound and created the most singular run of records ever. The first way that West Berlin’s Hansa study made this possible was simply by virtue of its off-the-beaten-track location. 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.”
So, in the outsider realm, Bowie could quietly reflect, and he decided to forgo commercialism and focus on pushing music into the future. The dated past of Hansa Studio, an edifice by the Wall, was the perfect foil for this spirituality. It gave the Starman a grand sense of the region and how history wove its way into his work.
The building offered equally grandiose possibilities sonically. It had a massive array of rooms, all available to Bowie, and each offered a different sound. Perhaps the most important breakthrough on this front for the records was the way that the main hall, which could host a little over 150 musicians, sounded when only six players performed in it with a few tactically placed microphones by Brian Eno. It was this effect that offered the hallowed up-swell of tracks like ‘Heroes’.
In fact, ‘Heroes’ offers the perfect indication of how Hansa impacted his work. Not only did the cavernous space, blessed with room for Eno’s synths, offer up a new sonic angle, but Bowie would gaze out of the writing room one day and see his producer, Tony Visconti, kiss the backing singer Antonia Maass “by the wall” as the pair nipped out for a cigarette break. The rest is ancient history.
