The start of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” where he took himself off to Germany to try to overcome his cocaine addiction. With old collaborators Tony Visconti and Brian Eno on production, this is a very different kind of music even compared to Station To Station.
It almost feels like an Eno album featuring Bowie at some points – Side Two is almost entirely instrumental (barring some vocalisation on the track Warszawa), along the ambient lines of the krautrock groups, especially Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Anybody expecting Ziggy Stardust era rock and rollers will be disappointed, but approach it with an open mind and it’s pretty good.
Bowie apparently wanted to write the soundtrack to The Man Who Fell To Earth but wanted an exclusivity that Nic Roeg was unwilling to grant. The longer instrumentals are in some way a kind of demo of what he would have written (although if he would have done such eerie atmospheric work while high on coke is debatable). I wonder if anyone has done a fan edit splicing this music into the film?
There’s only one single from this, Sound And Vision, which is a lot shorter than I thought. Given that it’s not until about halfway through that the vocals start, after a very Eno intro section, for some reason I thought it then went on for a three-minute full song, but it’s only about three minutes long in total. The bulk of the rest of the Side One tracks are all quite short fragments as well, again with the Eno influence showing through with synth sounds, coming closer to early Roxy Music or Warm Jets than Another Green World – very notable right from the opening track Speed Of Life.
The epitome of the album is probably Always Crashing In The Same Car, slow and hypnotic, and indicative of the musical direction Bowie is heading. It’s about making the same mistakes over and over, itself the theme of the album (such as there is one).
It’s a good start to the Berlin Trilogy, and of you ever wondered why Bowie was referred to as the “Chameleon of Rock”, just compare the art-glam of Aladdin Sane, the soul of Young Americans, and the art-pop of Station To Station to the krautrock of this album. It’s clearly the same person behind them, but also clearly somebody groping for a new sound.
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