The masterpiece David Bowie made in a “dreadful state”
The snow was falling in Warsaw as David Bowie and Iggy Pop departed by train. Full to the brim with cheap sausages, having recently recovered their appetite after years of gorging on a purely nasal diet, they set off into the gloomy post-war city with a sense of artistic mystique abounding. They were in a bad way but recovering, and ideas were in bloom.
The pair had never lost sight of music, even when they were having their swimming pools exorcised or holed in facilities following bouts of drug-induced hypomania. It’s just things were getting in the way of it. Now, nothing was getting in the way of it to an almost bewildering degree. They were free. Addictions still loomed like a shadow, but that strangeness produced artist greatness.
The move to Berlin was a fruitful one. As guitarist Carlos Alomar recalled: “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.” But that didn’t mean that they were in a pretty state.
Thankfully, music kept them busy, and they both viewed as a salvation for the first time. This created a masterpiece. As Bowie told Q magazine: “My concern with Low was not about the music. The music was literally expressing my physical and emotional state… and that was my worry.”
He continued: “So the music was almost therapeutic. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve made an album and it sounds like this.’ But it was a by-product of my life. It just sort of came out. I never spoke to the record company about it. I never talked to anybody about it. I just made this album… in a rehab state. A dreadful state really.”
While these ideas were formulated, he was in a darkened room beneath a picture of the fascist writer Yukio Mishima. While he’d relocate to France and Switzerland in the meantime, somewhat bellying the narrative of the Berlin Trilogy that has subsequently followed, it was in Berlin and these strange trips to Warsaw where the record truly took shape.
For Bowie, the paradigm of this “dreadful state” and his desire to get away from it, came to the fore with one song in particular, an unrivalled piece that illuminates Low. “A very sad song for me is ‘Sound And Vision’. I was trying very hard to drag myself out of an awful period of my life,” he opined of the stunning anthem.”
Adding: “I was locked in a room in Berlin telling myself I was going to straighten up and not do drugs anymore. I was never going to drink again. Only some of it proved to be the case. It was the first time I knew I was killing myself and time to do something about my physical condition. 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.”
When reflecting on the impetus for the track, he told Melody Maker: “That was an ultimate retreat song; actually, the first thing that I wrote with Brian [Eno] in mind. 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.”
The song remains a stunning retreat to this day, and the 2013 version may well be the greatest alternate take in music. It’s the gateway drug into Low, a record that continues to be timeless by catching a mood, that strange October haziness that forever feels so fascinatingly relatable by the fact it’s so weird that it shouldn’t really be relatable at all.
