The Man Who Sold the World (36 page)

For the first time since “Space Oddity” [1], Bowie reached out beyond the English-speaking audience, recording single-length versions of “Heroes” in French and German. His vocal on the German edition, “Helden,” was astonishingly intense; on the French “Heros,” however, he sounded defeated, by the language as much as the despair.

 

[152] SONS OF THE SILENT AGE

(Bowie)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

Bowie arrived at the sessions for his second Visconti/Eno collaboration with this solitary song, which (perhaps inevitably) he intended as the title track for his successor to
Low
.
“Heroes”
would have been a very different record had he continued in this direction, for “Sons of the Silent Age” revisited themes and sounds from the previous decade, rather than focusing single-mindedly on the contemporary. While some of his references were personal—he provided his best vocal impression of Anthony Newley since 1967, while the robotic characters of his narrative belonged to some hybrid of
Diamond Dogs
and Fritz Lang's (silent age)
Metropolis
—others had surprisingly obvious antecedents. Of these, the Beatles were the most recognizable, with the backing voices in the long melodic descent of the middle section evoking their 1968 recording “Sexy Sadie,” while Bowie's final vocal flourish echoed the closing bars of Paul McCartney's hit single “Jet.” All of which explained, perhaps, the feeling of spiritual emptiness that pervaded the lyrics, as if everything in life were stale and repetitive—whether one was listening to music by Sam Therapy or King Dice (both acts that existed only in Bowie's imagination). The song's chorus reflected that feeling, with its bored drift back and forth between G and F major chords. The only disruption to the mundane (however attractively expressed) was the initial saxophone-driven climb from the A to D major chords, omitting only C# along the way.

 

[153] BLACKOUT

(Bowie)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

As “Beauty and the Beast” had already made clear, Bowie was determined on this record to keep autobiography at bay. “I still incorporate a lot of [William] Burroughs' ideas,” he said, “and I still purposely fracture everything, if it's making too much sense.” That has not prevented biographers from assuming that “Blackout” was inspired by an incident in 1977, when Bowie was hospitalized, believing erroneously that he was suffering a heart attack. Equally intriguing, for those who wanted to conflate life and art, was the fact that this was the fourth consecutive song on
“Heroes”
that referred to drinking: by his own admission, alcohol was one of the pulls on Bowie's addictive personality during the late seventies. Yet searching for a definite meaning was not always a fulfilling pastime: when Bowie declaimed himself to be under Japanese influence, was he revealing the depth of his immersion in Japanese culture? Briefly assuming the persona of Yukio Mishima, the novelist and nationalist who died in a particularly gruesome ritual suicide in 1970? Or merely tossing off the kind of boast that comes easily to the lips of the wit and
bon viveur
when they're being faced with a disgraceful exit from a bar?

Then there were the musical references on this most cacophonous of performances, which began with what sounded like a large shipment of crates being dropped at enormous height from a dockside crane. Wasn't the introduction reminiscent of Paul McCartney's “Beware My Love” (unlikely listening for Bowie and Eno, one would have thought)? Weren't the falsetto vocals at the end a pastiche of the Beatles? And in particular, didn't Bowie's ecstatic cry of “woo-hoo” sound as if it belonged on John Lennon's “I Am the Walrus”? (Maybe John Lennon was the one under Japanese influence . . .) If the Beatles references were too much, then how about the Velvet Underground, and the combination of thin, stabbing guitar and pounded piano in the style of “White Light/White Heat”?

This is where speculation takes you. It was enough to label this a study of someone's psychological decay, and relish the glorious intensity of Bowie's performance—perhaps the most carefree he had sounded on record since “Let's Spend the Night Together” [72] nearly five years earlier. An entire generation of British rock bands was listening closely, as the insistent keyboard motif whining beneath Bowie's procession of different vocal personae recurred throughout records by the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes.

 

[154] V-2 SCHNEIDER

(Bowie)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

Conceptually simple and sly, “V-2 Schneider” combined the name of a German missile from World War II with the surname of a member of Kraftwerk. Though it was a far more disruptive piece than anything the German band would have attempted, its vocal chorus—evolving slowly from the synthetic to the human—added some flesh and blood to the robotic refrains of Kraftwerk songs such as “Autobahn” and “Trans-Europe Express.” Before then, the horror of the V-2 rocket had been represented by howls of feedback (a homage, perhaps, to guitarist Michael Rother of NEU!)—and white noise, supported cinematically by the rat-tat-tat of percussion. Guitars and saxophones maintained the assault over a falling chord sequence, before the vocal respite. But the track ended with another descending roar of sound, symbolizing the murderous advantage held by machine over man. It was a somber message for a phase of Bowie's career on which he was entirely dependent on machinery.

 

[155] SENSE OF DOUBT

(Bowie)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

Brian Eno remembered that this instrumental took shape under the influence of his Oblique Strategies cards. (Eno's cards; Bowie's and Eno's overdubs; Bowie's writing credit.) “It was like a game,” he told Ian MacDonald. “We took turns working on it; he'd do one overdub and I'd do the next. Effectively [my card] said, ‘Try to make everything as similar as possible' . . . and [Bowie's] said, ‘Emphasise differences.' ” That clash of concepts was effectively the whole of the piece: not only was “Sense of Doubt” as unsettling as its title suggested, but it was based around the contrast between a repeated four-note piano motif (echoed on synthesizer) and the constant variations that greeted it. Each repetition prompted a different set of chords as a synthesized fanfare, while across the barren landscape roamed a menagerie of noises and effects—some vaguely human, some purely mechanical, all ominous and unnerving. Before and after it all were washes of sound, as if nature itself had been conquered by the machine, and even the tides and winds survived solely at the whim of a computer.

 

[156] MOSS GARDEN

(Bowie/Eno)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

Eno's biographer, David Sheppard, suggested that Bowie's initial input into “Moss Garden” was “restricted to impressionistic scene-setting”—in this instance, a place of remembrance located in tranquil surroundings in Kyoto, Japan. Though the music that Eno created was appropriately restful, gently drifting between F# and C# with the hum of synthesized strings, it was not entirely idealistic: the world interrupted the reverie in the form of an airplane flying across the channels, a dog barking, the distant throb of a gong slowed and echoed. All these sounds were created electronically. Bowie then augmented the piece with an improvisation on the Japanese instrument the koto, first tracing the downward spiral of a scale, before playing amid the possibilities opened by the prevailing keys. Depending on your point of view, his contribution either reclaimed the “Moss Garden” carefully for humanity or subverted Eno's original concept of an entirely electronic soundscape.

The almost visual textures of this sequence of compositions were indebted to the innovations of the German band NEU!, although their debut album extended the range and impact of ambient sound to include the jarring assault of a pneumatic drill (on the track “Negativland”). In particular, “Leb Wohl” (from
NEU! '75
) anticipated both the mood and the construction of “Moss Garden.” The list of instruments utilized by Bowie and Eno on
Low
and
“Heroes”
also bears comparison with NEU!'s work, as if the two British musicians had set themselves the task of assembling an album using the German band's tools.

 

[157] NEUKÖLN

(Bowie/Eno)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

From Kyoto, Bowie's conceptual camera cut to a district of Berlin where, Bowie explained later, “the Turks are shackled in bad conditions. They're very much an isolated community. It's very sad.” In keeping with the shift from garden to city sprawl, this piece treated Eno's synthesized canvas, with its rain and church bells, more harshly. Sustained guitar feedback created a gently acerbic tone, before the picture was filled out with keyboards and saxophone. The latter was perhaps Bowie's most telling contribution to any of his instrumental collaborations with Eno: using pure emotion to fill the holes left in his rusty technique, he expressed the frustration of the Turkish immigrants with some deliberately harsh flurries of sound, before sounding the retreat with two elongated howls of despair.

 

[158] THE SECRET LIFE OF ARABIA

(Bowie/Eno/Alomar)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

In an uncanny prediction of what awaited him on his next album project, Bowie turned imaginary tourist on this conceptually flawed and creatively hollow piece, which provided a bathetic climax to the
“Heroes”
LP. It also provided a template for the New Romantic movement of the early eighties, which took its inspiration from the surface appearance of Bowie's work rather than its content. The vocals were mannered to the point of distraction; it was certainly difficult to find a rational explanation for his decision to tackle the word
Arabia
with a Cockney accent worthy of Dick Van Dyke. Likewise the combination of Bo Diddley's signature R&B rhythm and “ethnic” instrumentation was curious rather than enlightening. The most exhilarating element of this evocation of Hollywood desert-movie clichés was the hand clapping, and even that was produced artificially—in keeping with the entirely fantastic, but never uplifting, nature of the song.

“HEROES
” LP

H
aving neglected to promote
Low
(the title extending its influence from Bowie's mental state to his public profile), he compensated with an energetic round of publicity interviews when its successor appeared just nine months later. Yet he was far from the egomaniac who had boasted a couple of years earlier that he was incapable of giving a poor performance. Indeed, his comments seemed designed to undercut any expectations about his music, which he described as “just a collection of stuff that I and Eno and Fripp had put together. . . . I could have used any of the songs as the title, because there's no concept to the album.”

To prove that the public always distrusts modesty, “
Heroes
” marked a definite step downward in terms of raw commercial appeal.
Low
had benefited from following not only
Station to Station
but the first Bowie “hits” compilation,
ChangesOneBowie
. “
Heroes
” had to follow
Low
, with which he had signaled that he had no intention of being either a Ziggy Stardust clone or a disco icon. Sales of those two albums were remarkably consistent in Britain, a testament to the loyalty of Bowie's fans. But in America, “
Heroes
” ended a run of eight Top 20 LPs, to become his worst-selling collection of new material since (ironically) the highly commercial
Hunky Dory
. Stranger still, the title track—acclaimed for at least three decades as one of Bowie's greatest songs and performances—failed to touch the mainstream pop audience, peaking at No. 22 in Britain and entirely escaping the US Hot 100 chart. Bowie had effectively destroyed his chances on Top 40 radio in the States when “TVC15” [129] didn't reproduce the dance-floor groove of “Golden Years” [127]. A succession of major British hits (“Sound and Vision” [136], “Boys Keep Swinging” [171], “Ashes to Ashes” [184], “Fashion” [185]) passed American radio by. ( It took a collaboration with Queen for Bowie to make a brief return to the US Top 30, after which “Let's Dance” eradicated the radio producers' misgivings.) Even at its most accessible, this album assembled a barrage of sonic elements that were acutely confrontational. As the
New Musical Express
's Angus MacKinnon noted insightfully, its verbal content was equally abrasive: “instamatic lyric overflow, sense and sentence overcut at every opportunity . . . At first it's impossible to keep up with the phenomenally fast event horizon.”

So dazzling was the assault upon the senses, in fact, that it was easy to overlook a crucial difference between this album and its predecessor. On
Low
, Bowie for once made no attempt to intervene a fictional self (or even an artistic one) between singer and audience. The songs could be interpreted as overtly autobiographical, and Bowie has said nothing since to deflect that interpretation. With “
Heroes
,” however, he reverted to a method that had protected him from intense scrutiny on the
Diamond Dogs
album: using vocals of astonishing physical commitment to voice lyrics that were oblique and often (through the use of the cut-up technique) deliberately evasive. Throughout
Low
, Bowie had rarely been more honest, or sung with less attempt to convey his emotional extremes; here, the positions were exactly reversed.