'Station To Station' is regarded by many fans as his finest album. Every song on it is a favourite and all have been regular features in his live set - right up to the 'Sound And Vision' tour in 1990. For the 1983 'Serious Moonlight' tour five of the six songs were in the original set so it seems certain that they are some of Bowie's favourites as well. Particularly the title track which has been a mainstay of his live set - being featured as an opening number (1976), a closing number (1978) and a visual centrepiece (1983). 'Stay' is another song that has stood up well as a popular encore and forming a showpiece for his current guitarist - most notably Adrian Belew in 1978 and 1990. 'Golden Years' was a top ten single in both Britain and America and has been released twice as a single in Britain as well as appearing on numerous compilation albums. The album was recorded in two months at a small studio called Cherokee Studios in Hollywood and was produced by Bowie and Harry Maslin who had previously worked with him on the 'Young Americans' album in Philadelphia. Of the album Bowie has said "It was like a plea to come back to Europe to me. It was a terribly traumatic time. I was in a terrible state." Bowie had been living in Los Angeles for six months after moving there in the spring of 1975 to record with Iggy Pop and was surrounded by a clique of hangers-on, groupies and music business types : "I was surrounded by people who indulged my ego, who treated me as Ziggy Stardust or one of my other characters." Wherever he went the American press referred to him as some sort of weird bisexual orange-haired freak and his American popularity was at it's peak after his number one hit with 'Fame' (ironically, a song about the perils of notoriety). He was doing the rounds of celebrity parties and using cocaine in increasing quantities : "I was skeletal . I was destroying my body." "I was absolutely infuriated that I was still in rock'n'roll ... there I was in Los Angeles right in the middle of it." A few close friends had stayed with him and let it be known that he was getting out of control so "I physically opened a wardrobe door one day and mentally put all my characters into the wardrobe and closed the door ... and left Los Angeles."
Initially his destination was to Jamaica to rehearse for his forthcoming tour but the end result of his period in Los Angeles was to be a character who was later to be known as 'The Thin White Duke' about and by whom all but one of the songs on 'Station To Station' could have been written. This idea can be felt in other Bowie projects - for example the 'Ziggy Stardust' album was composed of songs written about or by the Ziggy character and the bulk of 'Diamond Dogs' was a vehicle for the character of Halloween Jack - himself an alter-ego for the character of Winston Smith who the album is based around. It is a frequent theme through Bowie's work in the seventies that he used the idea of a character to express whatever his own thoughts and feelings were. Probably the first album to be completely his 'own' work (for the first time since the 'Space Oddity' album) was the 'Low' album of 1977. Perhaps Bowie didn't feel strong enough to voice his own feelings and had to put the words into the mouth of a third-party character. It could be argued that the first time Bowie produced an album that was entirely his own personal work , it was to be his finest - the 'Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)' album in 1980. Bowie had spent the summer of 1975 in New Mexico making his first full-length film - 'The Man Who fell To Earth' and the effects the film had on him were far-reaching. He had spent so long playing the part of someone else that all the traits of that character had become interwoven with his own personality : "Nicholas Roeg told me after we had finished that it would take me a long time to get out of the role and he was dead right. After four months playing the role I was Newton for six months afterwards." For many fans 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' is the Bowie film because the character he plays in it - Thomas Jerome Newton - is the closest both in looks and character to Bowie himself, or as he was at the time that the film was made. In the film Newton is a lonely alien imprisoned on a hostile planet who, while waiting to return home, spends hours watching dozens of TV sets simultaneously churning out images of contemporary America. To Bowie the role must have seemed tailor-made except that his isolation was fuelled by more than just gin and television - to the extent of what he called 'hard drugs' - namely cocaine. The character that he used on the subsequent LP - the Thin White Duke - was an extension of Bowie himself and parts of Newton's character. Without detracting from the rest of the album, three songs in particular are of particular interest due to their personal nature - the title track, 'Word On A Wing' and 'Stay'.
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