The one musician David Bowie immediately fell in love with: “I knew instantly”
Getting the attention of David Bowie was going to be virtually impossible for anyone who wasn’t the most experimental artist in the world.
The Starman didn’t look for music that was normal every time he made a record, and even when making some of the more mainstream music of his career, he was more interested in making songs that piqued people’s ears and made everyone take notice of what was happening, aside from the obvious hooks. It was about giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted half the time, and sometimes his best musical partners were the ones willing to think as outside the box as he did.
But it’s not like Bowie was the first person to challenge his audience whenever he made a record. John Lennon was already a bit of a maverick when making The Beatles’ masterpieces, and even though he had a great deal of respect for someone like Mick Jagger whenever he made one of The Rolling Stones’ masterpieces, he was much more in tune with what was happening on the fringes of society with artists like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop whenever he performed.
Those artists were taking genuine risks, and when Bowie first debuted, no one had really heard anything like him. He truly felt like an alien plopped down here on Earth, and communicating with the outside world, and while the rest of us were more than happy to go for a musical joyride every time he played, it’s not like the rest of the art rock world wasn’t taking notice whenever they got their hands on new technology.
Bowie was already looking to change his sound around the time of Diamond Dogs, and Roxy Music seemed to be one of the next best things on the circuit when he listened to records like For Your Pleasure. Bryan Ferry wasn’t afraid to make tunes that sounded a little bit odd, but a lot of that initial strange ambience on their early records came from Brian Eno turning their sound inside out whenever he played the synthesiser.
Most people were only using it as a keyboard, but Eno was looking for strange sounds that seemed to colour the song in a different way. And from the moment that Bowie laid eyes on Eno after a show, he realised that he had found more than another great artist. Here was someone who understood exactly what he needed to do with his songs, and he was going to do anything he could to work with him.
Which is strange, because according to Bowie, part of Eno’s praise was also a bit of a backhanded compliment, saying, “He said, ‘That’s an interesting concept you’ve got there. Have you thought about putting another band up there in entirely different clothes and see if anybody would notice the difference?’ I knew instantly that I was going to get on with this man and that we would work together one day, and indeed we did.”
Their collaboration may have been a blow to Bowie’s relationship with Tony Visconti, but Eno was already trying to find different ways of working on music that Visconti wouldn’t have thought of. His entire motivation was based on making songs that were a little bit odd compared to everything else, and even if they were a little bit too far out for what Roxy Music was doing, rock’s resident alien wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to work with him for a second.
And listening to records like Low, you can hear Bowie taking all of the lessons that he had to both teach and impart to Eno at work. Both of them were like two creative magnets pulling towards each other, and when they untethered, the rest of us were left with music that seemed to point towards the future every time they pressed ‘record’.
