Read David Bowie's Low Online

Authors: Hugo Wilcken

David Bowie's Low

Low

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Also available in this series:

Dusty in Memphis
by Warren Zanes

Forever Changes
by Andrew Hultkrans

Harvest
by Sam Inglis

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
by Andy Miller

Meat Is Murder
by Joe Pernice

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
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Abba Gold
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Electric Ladyland
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Let It Be
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Live at the Apollo
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Aqualung
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OK Computer
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Let It Be
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Led Zeppelin IV
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Armed Forces
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Exile on Main Street
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Grace
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Murmur
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Pet Sounds
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Ramones
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Born in the U.S.A
. by Geoffrey Himes

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. . . by Eliot Wilder

Kick Out the Jams
by Don McLeese

In the Aeroplane over the Sea
by Kim Cooper

Music from Big Pink
by John Niven

The Notorious Byrd Brothers
by Ric Menck

Loveless
by Mike McGonigal

Doolittle
by Ben Sisario

Daydream Nation
by Matthew Stearns

There’s a Riot Goin’On
by Miles Marshall Lewis

Stone Roses
by Alex Green

Court and Spark
by Sean Nelson

Forthcoming in this series:
London Calling
by David L. Ulin

Low

Hugo Wilcken

2011

Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

© 2005 by Hugo Wilcken

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-3129-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilcken, Hugo.
Low / Hugo Wilcken.
p.cm. -- (33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
1. Bowie, David. 2. Bowie, David. Low. I. Title. II. Series.
ML420.B754W55 2005
782.42166′092--dc22
2005018992

Printed and bound in the United States of America

CONTENTS

acknowledgements

introduction

from kether to melkuth

the visitor

one magical movement

talking through the gloom

what can i do about my dreams?

waiting for the gift

through morning’s thoughts

i’ll never touch you

je est un autre

a little girl with grey eyes

nothing to do, nothing to say

round and round

sometimes you get nowhere

moving on

honky château

city of ghosts

do you remember that dream?

all that fall

pulsations

afterlife

homesick blues

crash your plane, walk away

bibliography

acknowledgements

Thanks to my family, particularly Patrick Wilcken, for his help with research and critical reading of the text. Thanks also to David Barker, for commissioning the book; to Nick Currie, for an interesting exchange of e-mails; to Chris from menofmusic.com, for locating and sending me material; and to everyone else who helped in the writing of the work. And a special thank you to Julie Street, for her significant editorial input and all-round support.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend
Peter Meyer (1964–2003).

introduction

I first heard
Low
in late 1979, soon after my fifteenth birthday. One of my older brothers had sent me a cassette, home-taped from the vinyl. I was far from my family and my native Australia doing a term of school in Dunkirk in northern France, ostensibly to learn French. Dunkirk was a grey simulacrum of a city. It had been destroyed during the Second World War, and entirely rebuilt afterwards according to the original plans. Every building contained the ghost of its bombed-out twin. At the city’s edge, a wide desolate beach stretched out for miles. At low tide, you could see the wrecks of boats that had never made it across the Channel, during the desperate evacuation of Allied troops in 1940. Flanders is only twelve kilometres to the east, and the landscape around Dunkirk is similar—fluorescent green fields that are unrelentingly flat, quite disorientating for someone from hilly Sydney. In winter, the northern, pewter skies hung oppressively low, and the drizzle
was constant. My French was approximate and communication difficult, accentuating the sense of isolation that is the natural state for a fifteen-year-old boy. Of course,
Low
was the perfect soundtrack.

Fifteen is the age of bedroom retreat, and three of the five
Low
songs with lyrics use withdrawal to a bedroom as a symbol for isolation. It’s also the age of ravenous intellectual curiosity, of devouring books and art and music to access new worlds of the imagination.
Low
seemed to be a glimpse into such a world, one that I didn’t really understand, subverting my expectations of what I’d understood a pop record should be. “Always Crashing in the Same Car” had the spooked feeling of a recurring dream; “A New Career in a New Town” had a yearning about it that looked both forward and back. The instrumentals on the second side weren’t pop music at all, and had allusive titles such as the punning “Art Decade,” “Weeping Wall” or “Subterraneans,” which suggested fading civilisations gone to ground. The album left a haunting impression.

In the eighties, David Bowie forfeited a fair chunk of his artistic mystique in exchange for megastardom as a stadium entertainer, and my interest moved on to other things. Lately, he’s redeemed himself somewhat, but it’s only in the past few years that my attention turned back to what now seems to me to be a fascinating moment in the mid-seventies, when people like Bowie, Brian Eno or Kraftwerk were redefining what it meant to engage with
the pop and rock genres. It was partly about injecting an experimental, European sensibility into a medium that was largely American in its conception. Of course, high and low art had been collapsing into each other ever since Warhol, Lichtenstein and the other pop art innovators had emerged in the early sixties. But if in the sixties it was art that was slumming it with pop aesthetics, the reverse was happening in the mid-seventies. Pop went arty. And
Low
marks the highpoint of this development, with its atmosphere of modernist alienation, its expressionism, its eclectic blend of R&B rhythms, electronics, minimalism and process-driven techniques, its suspicion of narrative.

I don’t want to put
Low
into any sort of canon of great works. That seems to me to be imposing notions of worth from another age and a different cultural enterprise. Not a lot of modern culture can be treated in that way any more, and pop culture certainly can’t. No single album can bear the weight of greatness, torn away from the support of all the other songs and all the other albums, the whole fabric of the hybrid culture that produced it. That’s pop culture’s strength, not its weakness. And that’s why in this book I’m going to talk around
Low
almost as much as I talk about it—looking at how it relates to the other points on the cultural matrix, where it came from, how it fits with Bowie’s artistic development. In short, what ingredients went into making an LP that Bowie once said captured “a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass.”

from kether to melkuth

As far as the music goes,
Low
and its siblings were a direct follow-on from the title track of
Station to Station
. It’s often struck me that there will usually be one track on any given album of mine which will be a fair indicator of the intent of the following album.

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