One of Bowie's few breaks away from Berlin in the autumn of 1976 was to go Paris to attend court in his proceedings against Michael Lippman. Another break of an accidental sort was
when he collapsed in late 1976 in Berlin and was rushed to to the British Military Hospital - "He'd just overdone things and was suffering from too much drink" said a spokesman. The
after-effects of this incident were to provide a song on the next album - also made in Berlin - 'Blackout'.
In an interview in 1980, Bowie said of the 'Man Who Fell To Earth' soundtrack album - "actually it did prompt me in another area - to consider my own instrumental capabilities, which
I hadn't really done before. Thats when I first got the inklings of trying to work with with Eno at some point." Formerly with Roxy Music (who had supported Bowie in 1972) Eno was
invited by Bowie to see his shows at Wembley in May and a friendship was soon struck. In interviews on his American tour in 1976, Bowie had talked of alternating a commercial album
with an experimental one and at that time there was no-one better to help him than Brian Eno who had done some pioneering electronic work with Robert Fripp ('No Pussyfooting') and on
his own with LPs like 'Another Green World' . Bowie had been experimenting himself with the abortive soundtrack album and some of the material rejected for the 'Diamond Dogs' album
two years earlier. Bowie and Eno agreed to work together as soon as the tour had finished and went first to France and later to Berlin to make an album with Bowie's touring band and
producer Tony Visconti. The album was orignally to be called 'New Music, Night And Day' but on reflection of what came out of the recordings, it was released as 'Low' in January 1977.
The album can be seen as Bowie's 'Idiot' in that it contains the artist's very personal thoughts and feelings at a given 'low' point in his career; the seven short pieces on side one
tell us much about his state of mind in late 1976 and the four longer instrumentals on the second side show which direction his musical ideas were going in at the time.
The first track 'Speed Of Life' is a short instrumental and a musical reflection on Bowie's life in Los Angeles - rushed, cramped into too short a time and unfinished. The first song
(although of the seven short pieces on the first side, only 'Sound And Vision' can be described as a proper 'song') is 'What In The World' - a short piece with a backing track that
sounds like Kraftwerk played at 78 rpm while Bowie tells that 'something deep inside of me' is 'talking through the gloom'. In fact, Bowie later said of this album "When I left LA,
I tried to find out more about the world. I discovered how little I knew, how little I had to say. The lack of lyrics on 'Low' reflects that I was literally stuck for words". 'Be My
Wife' is an example of this, containing only seven lines. During the making of this album he was apparently going through the trauma of his marriage to Angela breaking up and the song
is presumably a plea to her : 'Please be mine, share my life, stay with me , be my wife..'. 'Sound And Vision' which was a big hit as a single deals again with Bowie's problem of
having nothing to say : 'I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision'. As with the 'Station To Station' album, 'Low' could have been the soundtrack to 'The Man
Who Fell To Earth' and Newton's lonely and depressed life : "I guess there's an element of solitude, loneliness and imprisonment in every album". The last track on side one is
self-explanatory - 'A New Career In A New Town'.
The second side of 'Low' is totally different from the first : "The first side of 'Low' was all about me - all that self-pitying crap" but instead of being very personalised the
second side is "my reaction to certain places". Bowie had travelled behind the Iron Curtain in 1976 to Russia and Poland and was now living in West Berlin and recording in a studio
next to the Berlin Wall, so having got the "self-pitying crap" out of his system he embarked on the experimental electronic work that Eno was to be such an influence on. There are
four pieces on the second side and the highlight is the first 'Warszawa' which features highly-stylized 'vocals' by Bowie chanted over an almost funereal backing by Eno. "Warszawa
is about Warsaw and the very bleak atmosphere I got from that city" he later said. This piece and the next one 'Art Decade' ("about West Berlin, a city cut off from the world") were
surprisingly popular on his 1978 tour - at least in Europe. 'Weeping Wall' is about the Berlin Wall - "the misery of it" - and is the only track to feature Bowie playing all the
instruments. The last piece 'Subterraneans' is another one inspired by his adopted home city but this time about the people on the other side of the Wall - "the faint jazz
saxaphones expressing the memory of what it was". 'Weeping Wall' is apparently the only piece to have survived from the soundtrack to 'The Man Who Fell To Earth'. One thing to
note about 'Art Decade' is that Bowie uses a repetetive two-note keyboard line to represent the imprisonment of West Berlin - the same technique he had used earlier in 'We Are The
Dead' on the 'Diamond Dogs' album. In fact several of the pieces on the second side are similar to parts of the 'Diamond Dogs' album - especially 'Future Legend'. Bowie once said
"my albums are just practice for my movies - just soundtracks" and this would seem nowhere more appropriate than on the second side of 'Low'. In fact when the BBC filmed him in
Berlin in 1978, they used a very similar piece ('NeuKoln' from the 'Heroes' album) to illustrate the city to great effect.
To conclude, 'Low' is an album of great importance to Bowie. It represents a cut-off point from his earlier commercial work and Americanisation and can be seen as the first step
towards the creative and experimental trends which, combined with his commercial instincts, produced such a strong album in 'Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)' in 1980. "I put
a lot of blood and guts into that album. There was a cleansing for me in 'Low'. That album, more than any others we did, was responsible for my cleaning up musically, and my
driving for more positive turns of phrase in my music".
