On 'Low' by David Bowie

Before David Bowie moved to Berlin, he was a mess. He’d shrunk into paranoid seclusion, and was famously reported to have for a time subsisted only on milk, red peppers, and cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine. The Thin White Duke, who openly threw darts in lovers’ eyes, was a dark persona which Bowie ran with during the time of his album Station to Station, getting in hot water for interviews in which he made uncomfortable remarks about Adolf Hitler and the degradation of society. It was ‘performance art’, sure; Bowie was playing the role of this sinister, drug-addled character, but it was also true that at this point in his life, Bowie was himself consumed by druglust while seeming to hold an unhealthily loose grip on the real world. He would later admit to hardly remembering entire years during which his cocaine abuse was particularly extreme.

Moving to Berlin, Bowie wanted a fresh start. He needed to get away from the coke-crusted web in which he was ensnared in Los Angeles, but he also needed to find a way to deal with possessing an alienated soul. Bowie considered one of the perks of living in West Berlin to be a newfound sense of anonymity – the locals didn’t bother him as much as he was used to, and he found he could retreat from the psychedelic excess that his superstardom had brought him, and have a chance to recuperate, and to come to terms with himself. The work that eventually arose from this fresh, undoubtedly life-saving, new chapter in his life was the 1977 album Low, and it’s my favourite of all his many, many, many masterpieces. Rather than speaking from fantastical detachment, as with his time living as the Thin White Duke, this feels more like an album where Bowie expresses himself personally about the miseries he was facing, both with glamorous veneer, and from vulnerable depths of emotion.

You could, if you wanted to, see this album as a bridge of sorts between the smokey guitar-rock of the 70s and the dawning electronic adventure of the 80s and beyond. With the inclusion of Brian Eno to the creative roster, and with Bowie drawing influence from the characteristically chic Berlin underground, the album’s sound is datedly futuristic. Its synth leads sound individually perfect in complementing whichever track they’re on, such as the scally horn-blasts on ‘Breaking Glass’, adding disruption to a song about destruction, or the warm rainbow-falls of ‘Sound and Vision’, or the popcorn texture brought to ‘What in the World’. They give these tracks a flair so as to distinguish these naturally excellent compositions as belonging entirely to Low. On the latter half of the album, of course, the synth moves from a strong supporting role to the dominant ideology, and Eno’s luscious sounds build worlds outside the expected Bowie brand of verse-chorus-verse art-rock.

Indeed, this is an album of two very distinct halves, so let’s talk about the first half, the accessible one with all the hits, the one that sounds like a David Bowie album. Roaring in like a stereophonic train, we open with ‘Speed of Life’, an instrumental, swaggering figment of the sound of the 1970s, acting as the album’s overture, something drunken and braggish, still flagrantly hedonistic, but every now and then pausing in a lull of hesitation, symptomatic of the album’s nervous mentality. This duality of more conventional rock assertiveness with a gaping vulnerability carries on throughout the rest of the first half. ‘Breaking Glass’, again a song with a brusque confidence in its stomping central rhythm, gives way to a faltering moment where the confidence evaporates and the song sounds suddenly unsure of itself, Bowie’s singing turning from brash to simpering. The lyrics are a mix of admissions of failure and begging for affection, with Bowie sounding maybe a little pathetic, or at the very least, desperate.

And this desperation continues, with ‘What in the World’ talking of a downtrodden girl, a depressed creature trapped in hermitage, with Bowie on the sidelines feeling powerless, ‘talking through the gloom’ of his maybe not-entirely-selfless desire. The brevity of these songs magnifies how well-carved they sound, begging for repeat listens, feeling ever-complete but still somehow much too short. I guess there was plenty of space for ponderousness on the other side of the record. But that’s for later. Let’s talk about ‘Sound and Vision’, one of the album’s especially beloved pieces, sporting doo-dooing backing singers, sax, synth, jovial bass work and bright, sighing guitar strums. One of my favourite things in the world is happy-sounding music with miserable subject matter, and I think it’d be tough to find a better example than ‘Sound and Vision’, gorgeously spirited in its instrumental as meanwhile Bowie switches between theatrical vibrato and a monotonous, drab apathy, as he sings of being sunk in a mire of sadness, titularly Low, hoping for sudden inspiration to pull him back into the world of the living.

‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ is a spooky one, dreamy and flange-laden, a song about I think a repeating dream Bowie had of crashing his car, the lyrics describing him literally driving round in circles, comically still checking for oncoming cars and being in the middle of what sounds like a complete mental breakdown. Bowie’s voice is weak with lamentation, and he sounds in no better mood on ‘Be My Wife’, the ragtime-soul screamer that’s a personal favourite of mine. ‘I’ve lived all over the world. I’ve left every place.’ This is Bowie at his most disillusioned-sounding, at least thus far in his career, about the towering spectacle of fame, knowing how he lives a life of luxury and yet is lost with his romantic relationships. It’s got that end-credits dramatic energy that I adore completely, loud and soaring and retrospective. But the real closer of Side A is ‘New Career in a New Town’, another instrumental, with a foggy nostalgic harmonica sailing over a gleeful skip of synth and piano, blowing with the wind and sounding out with a woolly exhaustion, off into the distance in some optimistic direction.

And then – there’s a shift, firm and sudden as the pull of a handbrake. At the break of the ominous hum, we enter Low’s strange, polarising second phase. Until now, Bowie’s expressions of personal alienation have come garbed in catchy, accessible verve. Sad lyrics, fun music. With the Side B opener, ‘Warszawa’, all irony is jettisoned and a sincere, sometimes otherworldly composition emerges from black clouds. Mournful, spiralling, soaring synthesisers tell a tale of woe, completely instrumental unless you count Bowie’s meaningless hums and cries, eerily religious. The entire song sounds like a red sun rising over a dejected landscape. This is the moment the album often loses people, those who came for earthly pleasures of ‘Sound and Vision’, and reading a few contemporary reviews I saw that critics of the time were befuddled by this extreme change of pace, but when considering the album’s spinal conceit, the feelings Bowie wishes to explore on this album, it makes a lot of creative sense, and this sorrowful opener, along with its three successors, bring something wordless and primal to the experience, lending something beyond the rock parameters Bowie is more than comfortable in.

‘Art Decade’ is pensive, atmospheric, a little space-age, signalling maybe a sense of alienation, certainly a feeling of weightlessness, being anchorless, floating above weird, milky sounds and organic calls beyond comprehension. Inherently, it’s hard to get a handle on, and it’s a slow-burner of sorts, with what I’d call a planetarium aesthetic. Marimba clunks and stylophonic synths begin ‘Weeping Wall’, a dreamy blend of wood and steel that gets especially trippy when phrases of ‘Scarborough Fair’ creep into the equation, and the weightlessness started in ‘Art Decade’ rises further from any recognisable surface. If my read of these songs as a continuation of the first half’s concept is valid, this might instil images of a Bowie completely adrift from the world, maybe still beneath the covers as his disappointed mind flutters elsewhere.

Finally it’s ‘Subterraneans’, a dejected elegy of sorts, hissing synths acting as string sections before Bowie’s monastic hums enter the frame and the sound becomes a kind of hymn, spacious and grand, but with that essential humility which accompanies prayer. A little midnight saxophone arrives, along with more unintelligible but purposeful chanting, rising and falling, sounding as if directed towards the sky. And then it ends, rather abruptly, and I turn back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing again. To me, Low has it all – maudlin bangers, strong wailers, surreal loomers – and its cohesive theme, history and attitude are all striking. It’s always such a pleasure to hear a sorrowful album that’s so instantly gripping, in the way that only Bowie (plus Visconti, plus Eno) could make possible. And though Side A’s all-night party might suck you in, it’s the elusive magic comedown of Side B that returns me, as if every time I hear it I’m a different person than forty minutes ago.