Neil Stewart looks at the Thin White Duke’s time in Berlin…and the dark records he made here.
It’s the most famous salute in rock. Returning to London’s Victoria Station in May 1976, after a spell in Berlin, David Bowie, world-famous, stood up in the back of his open-top Mercedes and saluted the crowd: his right arm extended unbent, his hand flat palm-down.
Though he’s since denied this was a Nazi salute, Bowie had spoken so much of immersing himself in the occult, in Nazism, in the trappings if not the ideology of fascism that it was an understandable conclusion for onlookers to reach.
A few years before, Bowie had inhabited the persona of Major Tom, an astronaut cut adrift in space. Now, like the possessed astronauts of 1950s film The Quatermass Xperiment, the unwitting vectors to Earth of a lethal alien infection, people might have wondered: Bowie may have come home, but what had he brought with him?
“I am a photostat machine”
He’d gone there because of Christopher Isherwood. The author, who had lived in Berlin in the years before World War II, witnessing (and chronicling, in his diaries and his fiction) the rise of the Nazi party, had coined the phrase “I am a camera” to describe his working methods: a pure reportage, unmediated by his own opinions on what he saw. Bowie liked to paraphrase Isherwood’s axiom, satirizing his own ability to hop and distill genres as “photostatting”.
When Bowie met him backstage at an LA concert in the mid-1970s he pumped Isherwood for information about the city, about the decadence of 1920s Weimar, and the gloom of the economic collapse of the 30s—then as now, the downturn was blamed on outsiders and immigrants, xenophobia exploited by the Nazi Party in its rise to power.
It became clear to Bowie that his curiosity about the city could only be assuaged by a spell living there, but he’d have to wait until 1976 to get there. Split by a wall guarded by armed soldiers, the prosperous West Berlin accessed via the East half, a Soviet-administered zone stuck, as it would be for nearly half a century after the end of World War II, in the Cold War doldrums.
Even before he took up his eighteen-month residence in Berlin, Bowie had developed the character he’d play there. For previous records and tours, he had created and played, variously, lone space cadet Major Tom, the outlandish Ziggy Stardust, the pop-culture vampire Aladdin Sane.
Now here was a new Bowie: pained, pared-back, skeletal, his eyes glittering deep in a face made frightful by the near starvation diet he was on (famously he subsisted at this time on his own version of the four major food groups: cocaine, cigarettes, milk and red peppers), a death mask brought to pained life by the Crowley-ish magic alluded to in the lyrics of the first song this Thin White Duke character would sing, “Station to Station”.
“I really meant it so badly this time”
Station to Station (1976) was actually recorded in Los Angeles, where Bowie was living in 1975–6 after a stint in Santa Fe, filming Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Despite its geographical separateness, it suits being matched, thematically, with Low (1977) and “Heroes” (1978) as part of the so-called “Berlin Trilogy’ far more than does Lodger (1979), a record that’s scrappily enjoyable, but tonally and thematically very different from the preceding three records.
Lodger dabbles faintly dubiously in “world music” rather than exploring the esoteric any further; and while Low was conceived and “Heroes” recorded in Berlin, Lodger has no connection to the city; it’s Brian Eno’s contribution that binds these three records, rather than their forming a Berlin triptych.
Station to Station, though, prefigures some of the af…