David Bowie's Low (9 page)

But it would be way too reductive to suggest that Bowie made a schizophrenic album because he was schizophrenic. The connections are a little more interesting than that. Bowie certainly drugged himself into a state in which schizophrenic-like behaviour emerged, although even through the worst of it he never totally spun out of orbit, as his professionalism and work rate testify. There’s a part of his drug addiction that falls into cliché. After all, Bowie was hardly the only rock star in mid-seventies LA burning himself out on cocaine. Each era has its drug which translates its myth—in the mid-sixties, LSD reflected a naïve optimism about the possibility of change; and in the mid-seventies, cocaine echoed the grandiose nihilism of post-Manson LA. And Bowie fell into that trap.

Above and beyond all that, Bowie had long had a fascination with and horror of madness. It had informed most
of his work to date,
The Man Who Sold the World
in particular. In the mid-seventies, Bowie often talked about the strain of madness that ran through his family, and his fear of inheriting it. His half-brother, Terry Burns, really was a schizophrenic. Terry was nine years older, and someone Bowie clearly looked up to as he was growing up. “It was Terry who started everything for me” he has said; their relationship was “extremely close.” His brother was also artistically inclined (as many schizophrenics are), and acted as a mentor to Bowie, introducing him to jazz and rock, suggesting books to read—including Burroughs and Kerouac, with their Beat message of enlightenment through excess. Bowie’s interest in Buddhism, which can perhaps be felt on
Low
, was also initially triggered by his brother. Terry’s schizophrenia developed in the mid-sixties and he spent most of the rest of his life institutionalised. Bowie visited him at the Cane Hill psychiatric hospital in 1982, after which Terry developed a fixation on him, convinced that Bowie would return to rescue him. They didn’t meet again, and Terry committed suicide in 1985. Bowie’s 1970 track “All the Madmen” and his 1993 single “Jump They Say” are both about Terry, as is “The Bewlay Brothers” (1971) in all likelihood.

Bowie’s interest in schizophrenia goes beyond the fact that his half-brother had the illness. At around this time Bowie was enthusiastically reading Julian Jaynes’s
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
, a work
that posits the essential schizophrenic nature of prehistoric man, and man’s religious impulse as a direct result of it. Bowie has also had an abiding interest in “outsider art”—art produced by people with mental illness (hence the title of the nineties Bowie-Eno collaboration
Outside
). While making the Berlin trilogy, he and Eno visited Gugging, an Austrian psychiatric hospital-cum-art studio that encourages patients to paint. What Bowie derived from the experience was the artists’ lack of self-consciousness. “None of them knew they were artists,” he told journalist Tim de Lisle in 1995. “It’s compelling and sometimes quite frightening to see this honesty. There’s no awareness of embarrassment.”

The subtext seems to be about regaining lost innocence through new ways of expression, unshackled by the conventions of “normal” society. Bowie’s outsider art enthusiasm is reminiscent of the appropriation of primitive art by early 20th century modernists like Picasso. And to me there is something distinctly modernist about the schizophrenic world—in the alienation, the affectlessness, the fragmentation, the form over content, the hyper-subjectivity. There are clear similarities between the wordplay and disjointedness of modernist literature and schizophrenic discourse (the psychiatrist of James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia is reputed to have told him that the difference between the two was that “you dived to the bottom of the pool; she sank”). That wordplay is all over the songs of the schizophrenic Syd Barrett—a significant influence on Bowie—
reaching the highwater mark with his haunting “Word Song,” which literally is just a jumble of alliterative words strung together. Bowie’s cut-up writing style, derived from William S. Burroughs (yet another diagnosed schizophrenic), often has a similar feel to it, where the lyrics become a game of association and alliteration to the point of abstraction.

Schizophrenia stretches the personality in both directions. The schizophrenic is both less of a person and more of a person. Negative symptoms send him to a grey limbo of autistic disconnection; positive symptoms overstimulate the imagination, leading to a conflation of myth and reality. Since art is myth and performance is exaggeration, it’s not too hard to draw the parallels. The rock celebrity world in particular is one of myth and fantasy, where behaviour that might normally be thought strange can be written off as just another personality trait. There aren’t the same social brakes as in the “real” world. And all the more so for Bowie, whose coping strategy was to hive off characters that were fantasies of himself. But performance as therapy can be dangerous. Invented characters can take on a life of their own; masks and faces blur into one. The strategies used to avoid madness might ultimately be the ones that bring it on—eventually turning you into the thing you’re fleeing from.

Back to
Low
, and on to the third track, “What in the World”—according to Laurent Thibault a hold-over from the
Idiot
sessions. Clocking in at 2:23, it’s barely any longer than “Breaking Glass.” In a way, it’s a composite of the two tracks that preceded it. Sonically, the cool rock menace of “Breaking Glass” is replaced with the compressed, synthetic frenzy of “Speed of Life,” while lyrically the song plays the same game of projecting alienation on to another. If it’s another fragment with no real verse/chorus structure, it nonetheless sounds a little more rounded than “Breaking Glass,” less circular than “Speed of Life.”

We’re back with the crashing drums (with an even more pronounced disco flavour), while texturally, there’s a synth-generated bubbling noise right up in the mix, sounding as though something’s just about to boil over. Carlos Alomar’s rhythm guitar has a soft, jazzy feel to it, jarring with Ricky
Gardiner’s scratchy, neurotic lead work. The lead sounds eerily like Robert Fripp here, although he wasn’t present at the
Low
sessions according to Bowie. But that messy, drunken guitar line (played elsewhere by Fripp) is a signature of Bowie albums from
Low
through to
Scary Monsters
.

Everything sounds speeded up—there’s a building, manic quality to the song that is like the euphoric upswing of bipolar disorder. Bowie’s voice remains flat and unengaged, and breaks down into a disturbing, wordless drone by the end of the song. The lyric is another cut-up jumble, with its juxtapositions of contradictory images, its meanings left behind in the hidden and unsaid. It’s addressed to another girl with “problems”: she’s a reflection of the protagonist—withdrawn (“deep in your room, you never leave your room”), silent (“never mind, say something”), affectless (“love won’t make you cry”). There’s the disconnection of the previous song, from both the supposed interlocutor (“I’m just a little bit afraid of you”) and from the self (“what you gonna say to the real me”).

Bowie has said that at this period, “I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity,” but that “overall, I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from
Low
. I can hear myself really struggling to get well.” And perhaps you catch glimpses of that struggle in “What in the World.” If it’s impossible to take a lyric like “I’m in the mood for your love” at face value—it’s too much of a rock cliché, especially
with Bowie singing it in ironic rock mode—there might be something more mixed up and heartfelt in the “something deep inside of me, yearning deep inside of me, talking through the gloom.”

In retrospect, it seems strange that an album like
Low
could have singles culled from it, but it had two, one of which was a sizeable hit in the UK, reaching number three (although it failed to make much impression on the other side of the Atlantic). Fractionally over three minutes long, “Sound and Vision” is at least the perfect length for a single, and it’s also the song that most plays off a pop sensibility. The resemblances with a conventional pop hit of the time stop there, though. For a start, the intro is actually longer than the body of the song. It’s almost like an instrumental with a lyric fragment tacked on at the end as an afterthought. “Sound and Vision” was the first song Bowie wrote at the Château specifically with Eno in mind, and this holding back of the vocals was Eno’s idea, in order to create tension. It also returns us to lyric restraint after the garrulousness (by
Low
’s standards) of “What in the World.”

On top of the Harmonized drums you can hear a hissing noise (actually a heavily gated snare), sitting strangely with a jaunty, jangly rhythm guitar riff and some synth melody lines that veer towards the cheesy. The “doo-doo” backing vocals, by Eno and Visconti’s then wife Mary Hopkin (of “Those Were the Days” fame), add to the pastichey, ironic feel to the track: “I was out in France when they were recording
Low
and Brian Eno was there doing all the basic tracks for David to write songs around,” Mary Hopkin later recalled. “Brian asked me to do some backing vocals with him, just a little riff. He promised me it’d be way back in the mix with tons of echo, but when David heard it he boosted it right up and it’s very prominent, much to our embarrassment because it was such a corny little riff!” The sonic effect is that of a pop song with quotation marks, not quite sure whether it’s a part of the genre or merely referencing it.

The backing vocals and instrumentation were “all recorded before there was even a lyric, title or melody,” says Visconti. And the lyrics, when they finally did come, played against the skewed yet chipper concoction Eno had dreamed up. “Sound and Vision” was “the ultimate retreat song,” according to Bowie. “It was just the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.” The song is at the literal and the
matic centre of the first side. After failing to connect with female others in “Breaking Glass” and “What in the World,” the lyrics here are addressed only to the self, “drifting into my solitude,” presaging the wordless, inward turn of the second side.

Bowie’s transformations of the seventies were progressive stages of escape.
Ziggy Stardust
was a very English sort of Houdini act, slipping free from the dour constrictions of lower-middle-class life; from the suburbs; from England; and most of all from the self.
Low
’s key image of the room as refuge symbolises that other kind of escape, striking out for the interior, like Thomas Jerome Newton’s “astronaut of inner space,” and calling to mind Dostoevsky’s dictum that “Life is in ourselves, and not in the external.” The neurotic travel (“I’ve lived all over the world, I’ve left every place”) is exchanged for the blankness of immobility.

“That’s the colour of my room, where I will live”: it’s a room in a new town, Berlin, to which Bowie would move near the end of the
Low
sessions. Not a mansion with a swimming pool, but a first-floor flat in a slightly run-down building, in an immigrant area of a city of ghosts. After the razzle of glam rock, after the constant reinventions, the gaudy theatre of Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke, it was something of a shock that Bowie could turn around and make an album that was so empty and private, with lyrics so sparse and simple, with “nothing to do, nothing to say.” An album of waiting, of seeming nihilism. That shock and surprise
is pretty evident in the music reviews of the day (which now come over as rather hysterical in themselves). In the
NME
, for instance, Charles Shaar Murray was writing about an album “so negative it doesn’t even contain emptiness or the void,” an album that is “futility and death-wish glorified, an elaborate embalming job for a suicide’s grave.”

That’s to ignore the fact that there had always been a heavy dose of nihilism in most of Bowie’s work—whether in his Nietzchean mode (
The Man Who Sold the World
), or in the gothic romances of doomed rock messiahs and Orwellian dystopias. Hedonism in the face of impending doom is a constant theme, reaching its elegiac peak in the title track of
Aladdin Sane
. Even the mostly euphoric
Young Americans
has a nihilistic undercurrent; the album is “the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey,” Bowie told Cameron Crowe in 1976. After all those rock star games, there was perhaps something liberating about declaring the essential emptiness of things—a declaration that may be related to Bowie’s Buddhist enthusiasms of the 1960s.

That’s not to say that Bowie was totally through with star games. Throughout the album, irony and sincerity are confused and blended. A creepy song like “Breaking Glass” has a jokey edge; “Sound and Vision” is both pop pastiche and an existential portrait; we’re not quite sure whether to take the anguished entreaties of “Be My Wife” seriously or not. More to the point, we’re not sure whether even Bowie is
sure. He’s the unreliable narrator, performing an eternal balancing act between sincerity and irony, even in the midst of personal crisis. His angst is at once genuine, and a modish pose. After all, “Bowie in Berlin”—with the studio by the Wall, escapades with partner-in-crime Iggy Pop, the Expressionist paintings, the Isherwood-ish life of decadence and dilettantism—all that is probably his most enduring myth of all, beating Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust and the rest of them hands down. If Berlin was genuinely a sanctuary after his mad years in the New World, it was no less a fantasy, something he himself understood well enough: “I thought I’d take the stage set, throw it away, and go and live in the real thing.”