“I was a casualty”: The era that David Bowie regretted the most
Every artist is going to have those handful of moments in their career that they find difficult to revisit. Whether it’s photos of them doing something ridiculous or trying to make the most pretentious artistic statement of all time, it’s a lot easier to poke fun at something with years of hindsight rather than having someone tell it to their face in the moment. While David Bowie never once apologised for trying to push rock and roll forward, he did at least acknowledge when he could go a bit too far off the rails.
Because as much as Bowie may have loved the androgyny behind rock and roll, he always knew in the back of his head that it wasn’t a place he wanted to stay for too long. He had already spent time doing folksy tunes before Ziggy Stardust hit, so it was only natural for him to move into different genres whenever he made a new record. But that doesn’t mean every experiment worked out great.
A record like Young Americans is a brilliant introduction to Bowie as a soul artist, and even albums like Earthling have their fair share of surprises by going down the rabbit hole of industrial rock, but the pop years are when things get really spotty. ‘The Starman’ usually referred to this period as his ‘Phil Collins years’, and judging by how little he had to say about it, it’s not like he looked back on it lovingly, especially considering how poorly the ideas on Never Let Me Down were executed.
This was Bowie trying on sonic outfits that didn’t fit him, but that was never out of the question for him. Since he had made his living in the early days playing acoustic guitar, no one would have ever thought that he would eventually work with someone like Brian Eno to craft some of his greatest work, but looking back on the era of Station to Station, Bowie was a fantastic kraut-rock artist as well.
Everything about this era is absolutely spellbinding and deserves its place in rock and roll history, but it also marks a bit of a rock bottom for Bowie’s personal life. He had started to make different troubling claims about Hitler during this time, and seeing how he was helplessly addicted to cocaine during this time, he had reached a point where the sexually-charged alien from a few years before had shrunken down to a husk of himself.
Bowie always stood by the music he made, but he admitted that he finds that era of his career difficult to watch, saying, “From that period onwards, I was a real casualty. I’ve not met many people that… I was in a very serious state. You just have to look at some of the photographs of me, I cannot believe I actually survived it. You can see me at the Grammys, for instance, with Lennon, it terrifies me. It’s a skull. There’s not an ounce on me. I’m just a skeleton.”
Even though he was itching to get away from California after making Station to Station, his way of drying out in Berlin led to some of the best music of his career. Looking through albums like “Heroes”, he was taking all the bits and pieces of ambient music he started on Low and pushing them even further, to the point where the instrumental tracks are equally as important as everything else on the record.
‘The Thin White Duke’ had faded from memory and would never be seen again, but that doesn’t mean that people still can’t remember what Bowie gave them during that time. He may not have been taking care of himself, but his music from this period has helped many people take care of themselves later on.
