Authors: Hugo Wilcken
From Munich, the
Idiot
sessions moved on to Berlin, and the Hansa-by-the-wall studios. The nucleus of the
Low
team assembled there for some final work on
The Idiot—
rhythm section Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davis and George Murray, as well as producer Tony Visconti, whom Bowie had called in to mix the
Idiot
tapes. He’d wanted Visconti to produce, but he hadn’t been available, so Bowie had done the job himself aided by Laurent Thibault. Visconti found the tape quality to be fairly poor—a “salvage job”—and did the best he could with what he was given. (In retrospect,
The Idiot
’s slightly muddy sound adds to rather than detracts from the album.)
This was the first time Bowie had worked at Hansa-by-the-wall, where he and Visconti would later mix
Low
and then record its follow-up
“Heroes”
. The studio was only twenty or thirty metres from the Wall: “From the control room we could see the Wall and we could also see over the Wall and over the barbed wire to the Red Guards in their gun turrets,” recalled Visconti of his time working at Hansa. “They had enormous binoculars and they would look into the control room and watch us work, because they were as star-struck as anyone. We asked the engineer one day whether he felt a bit uncomfortable with the guards staring at him all day. They could easily have shot us from the East, it was that close. With a good telescopic sight, they could have put us out. He said you get used to it after a while and then he turned, took an overhead light and pointed it at the
guards, sticking his tongue out and jumping up and down generally hassling them. David and I just dived right under the recording desk. ‘Don’t do that,’ we said because we were scared to death!”
It was the charged, John Le Carré aspect of Berlin as it was then. “The thing about all those Bowie/Eno/Iggy/ Hansa albums was the mythology that went with their creation,” mused New Order drummer Stephen Morris in 2001. “Why was a studio overlooking the Berlin Wall so important?” The Wall provided almost too much symbolism for one city to bear. All cities construct myths around them-selves—but in the Berlin of the sixties and seventies, the myth was in danger of smothering the city under it. This was Berlin as the decadent outpost of the West—dangerously cut off and etiolated, frozen in the aftermath of disaster, a city that continued to pay for its sins, where paranoia was not a sign of madness but the correct response to the situation. The symbolism of the Wall was as much psychological as it was political. Not only was it a microcosm of the Cold War, it was also a mirror you could gaze into and see a looking-glass world, utterly like yours but utterly different as well. It divided mentalities, and expanded schizophrenia to the size of a city. And the Wall was just one of many layers of the myth of Berlin.
With
The Idiot
mixed, Bowie retreated to his home in Switzerland, where Eno shortly joined him. Together they started writing and throwing around ideas for the new album, then provisionally called
New Music: Night and Day
(a title that caught the concept of the two different sides, but which sounded rather pompously like the work of a minimalist composer). A few weeks before the sessions got under way, Bowie had put in a call to Visconti: “He phoned me up, it was actually a conference call, he had Brian on one line, himself on another,” Visconti later told Australian broadcaster Allan Calleja. “I was in London, and David and Brian were in Switzerland I think, where David used to live. David said: ‘We have this conceptual album here, we want to make it really different, we’re writing these strange songs, these very short songs.’ It was conceived right from the beginning that one side was going to
be pop songs and the other side was going to be ambient music in the style of Brian and Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk.” Actually, it seemed that the original idea had been not so much pop songs for the first side but raw rock songs, with minimal studio intervention. That would have emphasised two completely different approaches, probably at the expense of any sonic unity at all. But perhaps Bowie had got the raw rock idea out of his system with
The Idiot
, and working with Eno was always going to be more about pop.
The idea was radical experimentation. Visconti again: “The three of us agreed to record with no promise that
Low
would ever be released. David had asked me if I didn’t mind wasting a month of my life on this experiment if it didn’t go well. Hey, we were in a French château for the month of September and the weather was great!” Bowie asked Visconti what he thought he could contribute to the sessions; Visconti mentioned the pitch-shifting Eventide Harmonizer he’d just got. Bowie asked what it did, and Visconti famously replied that “it fucks with the fabric of time!” Bowie was delighted, and “Eno went berserk. He said: ‘We’ve got to have it!’”
Brooklyn-born, Tony Visconti had started out playing in various bands in New York and elsewhere across the country, carving out a reputation on the circuit as a proficient bass player and guitarist. He’d put out a couple of singles as part of a duo with his wife Siegrid, but when the last single flopped he took up a job as a house producer with a New
York label. Shortly after, he relocated to London, where he met a not-yet-successful David Bowie at the early stages of his career. Together they recorded
Space Oddity
(excluding the title track) and
The Man Who Sold the World
, although Visconti missed out on the albums that propelled Bowie into bona fide rock stardom (
Ziggy Stardust
,
Aladdin Sane
). But he’d hooked up with Bowie again to mix
Diamond Dogs
and produce
Young Americans
, Bowie’s first smash hit in the States.
Visconti had come of age as a producer in late sixties London, a crossover period where producers were becoming a lot less like lab technicians and more like an invisible member of the band, the one with a handle on the technology that would drive experimentation. George Martin’s mid-sixties work with the Beatles was clearly one kind of template for Visconti. Instead of the live takes of the early Beatles albums, Martin would take different instrumental, vocal and percussion tracks and build them up, layer upon layer, over a number of sessions. In other words, the process started having a more direct influence on the content. Visconti has singled out “Strawberry Fields” as the moment where “George showed us once and for all that the recording studio itself was a musical instrument.” The Beatles had recorded two versions of the song, one more psychedelic, and one more understated, with classically inspired instrumentation. Lennon liked the beginning of the first and the end of the second; the trouble was they were recorded at
slightly different speeds, and the keys differed by a semitone. Martin speeded up one version, slowed down the other, then spliced the two together. “This track was the dividing line of those who recorded more or less live and those who wanted to take recorded music to the extremes of creativity,” Visconti later commented to
Billboard
. Here, you can already see the intersection of Visconti’s and Eno’s vision of the studio, even if they’re converging from different standpoints.
The fact that Visconti hadn’t come up through the ranks at a studio but had started off as a musician also gave him a different, more hybrid take on the duties of a producer. He could play several instruments, and was excellent at arrangements. It was another area where he had at first looked to George Martin: “I would read Beethoven and Mozart and learn the voicings from how they voiced the string section, and I’d apply that. And then I’d listen to George Martin, and I’d say, ‘That’s what he did. He listened to Bach.…’ He’s taking something classical and old and tried and true and putting it in a pop context, so I just worked it out. And I just imitated him for a few years until I developed some tricks of my own.” All this cross-disciplinary expertise meant that Visconti tended to play a greater role in the studio than most producers. On Bowie albums, Visconti is not only sound engineer and mixer, but often scores the arrangements (the cello part on “Art Decade,” for instance), and sometimes sings and plays various instruments as well.
The
Low
sessions kicked off at the Château on September 1st, without Eno for the first few days. The assembled band was the R&B rhythm section Bowie had had since
Young Americans
, namely Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis. On lead guitar was Ricky Gardiner, a suggestion of Visconti’s, after Bowie’s other choices had fallen through (Visconti and Gardiner had been working on demos for what would become Visconti’s only solo album,
Inventory
). The main keyboardist was Roy Young, formerly of the Rebel Rousers; he’d also played with the Beatles in the early sixties. Young had first met Bowie in 1972 when they’d played on the same bill; Bowie had wanted him for
Station to Station
, but had given him too short notice. Then, in the summer of ’76, Young had been playing in London when Bowie had called him from Berlin, asking him to come over. Apparently Bowie had originally wanted to do
Low
at Hansa, but then changed his mind, probably because he’d already paid upfront for studio time in France. In any case, a few days later he called Young again to switch the venue to the Château.
Bowie’s and Visconti’s working methods crystallised on the
Low
sessions. They would start late. (Eno: “It was all overnight, so I was in a kind of daze a lot of the time, days drifting into one another.”) As with
The Idiot
, Bowie came into the studio with various bits and pieces on tape—
The Man Who Fell to Earth
material; leftovers from the
Idiot
sessions; stuff he’d recorded at his home in Switzerland—but
no complete songs written, and no lyrics. In other words, the studio was very much part of the writing process. To begin with, the rhythm section would be told to jam with a loose chord progression. There might be minimal direction from Bowie or Visconti, and some experimenting with different styles, but basically they’d simply keep kicking the progression around until something emerged that developed into an arrangement. Carlos Alomar: “I’d get together with the drummer and the bass player and we’d work on a song, maybe reggae, maybe slow or fast or up-tempo, and we’d let David hear it three or four different ways, and whichever way he wanted to do it, we just did it.… Basically he says: ‘How about something like this?’ ‘OK fine.’ I just start grooving and start playing until I came up with something, and that ability has been like the saving grace.” The rhythm section provided the seed bed for most of the first side, and Bowie was generous with writing credits if he thought one of the musicians had come up with a defining element of the song. Alomar already had credits for his riffs on “Fame” and “Sister Midnight.” On
Low
, Bowie cut credits for “Breaking Glass” three ways with bass player George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis.
This initial backing-track phase was very quick and in the case of
Low
took only five days, after which Dennis Davis and George Murray played no further part in the proceedings (in fact, by the time Eno turned up at the Château, they’d already left). Once Bowie was happy with the backing
tracks, work with the overdubs could begin—essentially recording guitar and other solos. Alomar would normally have come up with an initial solo to hold the rhythm section together, but then record a new one later. Ricky Gardiner and Roy Young would be recording their parts too. On
Low
, these were generally further electronically treated by Visconti, Eno or Bowie (there’s not a lot of “natural” sound on
Low
), so this is where the sessions would enter a more experimental, nebulous phase. Some of it was about treating instruments as the musicians were playing, with Visconti using the Harmonizer, various tone filters, reverbs and a panoply of other studio tricks.
Eno would mostly be using a portable synth he’d brought along with him. Visconti: “He has an old synthesiser that fits into a briefcase made by a defunct company called EMS. It didn’t have a piano keyboard like modern synths. It did have a lot of little knobs, a peg board and little pegs, like an old telephone switch board to connect the various parameters to one another. But its
pièce de résistance
was a little ‘joystick’ that you find on arcade games. He would pan that joystick around in circles and make swirling sounds.” (This synth lives on, and Bowie even used it on a recent album,
Heathen:
“Some years ago, a friend very kindly bought me the original EMS AKS briefcase synth that Eno used on so many of those classic records of the seventies. In fact, it was the one he used on
Low
and
“Heroes”
. It was up for auction, and I got it for my fiftieth birthday.…
Taking it through customs has always been a stomach-turning affair as it looks like a briefcase bomb in the x-ray. Eno got pulled out of the line on several occasions. I wouldn’t even dream of taking it through these days.”)
This was also the phase where Eno would often be left alone in the studio to lay down a “sonic bed.” Eno: “I was trying to give some kind of sonic character to the track so that the thing had a distinct textural feel that gave it a mood to begin with.… It’s hard to describe that because it was never the same twice, and it’s not susceptible to description very easily in ordinary musical terms. It would just be doing the thing that you can do with tape so that you can treat the music as malleable. You have something down there but then you can start squeezing it around and changing the colour of this and putting this thing much further in front of something else and so on.”
Where the rhythm section was about finding the groove that worked—in other words, locating the pattern—Eno was more concerned with breaking those patterns that the mind instinctively slotted into, when left to its own devices. One of the methods that he and Bowie used on
Low
was the “Oblique Strategies” he’d created with artist Peter Schmidt the year before. It was a deck of cards, and each card was inscribed with a command or an observation. When you got into a creative impasse, you were to turn up one of the cards and act upon it. The commands went from the sweetly banal (“Do the washing up”) to the more technical (“Feedback
recordings into an acoustic situation”; “The tape is now the music”). Some cards contradict each other (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities”; “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). Some use Wildean substitution (“Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”). And several veer towards the Freudian (“Your mistake was a hidden intention”; “Emphasise the flaws”). The stress is on capitalising on error as a way of drawing in randomness, tricking yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can’t be explained—an element that every work of art needs.