‘The Leon Suites’: The story of Brian Eno & David Bowie’s weirdest work
When leaks of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s 1994 collaboration started leaking online, fans assumed they were Outside demos. In reality, The Leon Suites was a complete concept album Bowie and Eno had worked on together until Bowie’s management decided it wasn’t commercial enough.
Eno and Bowie were two of music’s most avant-garde figures, and throughout their lifelong friendship, they often collaborated, most notably on Bowie’s Berlin records. After reuniting at Bowie’s 1992 wedding, they started emailing each other emails about what they felt was missing from music. In a bid to reignite some artistic bravery they clearly felt was lacking, they decided to embark on an album together without so much as “a gnat of an idea”.
The resulting album was far more fleshed out than its initial beginnings, a narrative-focused cyberpunk curiosity built largely off of interviews the pair conducted with patients at a wing of a Vienna psychiatric hospital, who were well-known for their outsider art. The Leon Suites was a bold attempt to bring more conceptual artistry to the modern album, a bizarre offering that was influenced by murder, Twin Peaks, and hospital interviews.
Bowie and Eno put together a three-hour recording consisting of mainly spoken word passages and strange jams. The two infused the cut-up technique employed by William Burroughs and Brian Gysin, relying on an app Bowie had co-developed for Macs, called the Verbasizer. It allowed him to auto-generate random sentences to bulk out tracks or use its words to trigger an idea that formed the shape of a song.
Eno was said to hand out cards to backing musicians each morning with their unique backstory, which contained instructions like: “You are the disgruntled member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that were suppressed.” He also used the Oblique Strategies cards that he and artist Peter Schmidt had pioneered in 1975, which involved using a series of prompts on cards drawn only when faced with a creative roadblock.
Everything was highly improvised and written by Bowie in studio, and what emerged he described as “an almost obsessive” interest in ritualistic, outsider artists. He told Vox magazine: “It’s like a replacement for a spiritual starvation that’s going on, like a tribe with dim memories of what their rituals used to be. They’re sort of being dragged back again in this new, mutated, deviant way, with so-called gratuitous sex and violence in popular culture and people cutting bits off themselves. For me, it seems like a natural kind of thing.”
After the record company rejected their initial vision, Bowie and Eno began working on a version that would later become Outside. Snippets from The Leon Suites, including some of its narrative arcs and characters, would end up reappearing on Outside, and the album remains an impressive lunge into a murkier, more art-focused album.
