Books & Poetry

David Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’ of albums represented an acute reaction to an LA lifestyle which, as early as 1975, had brought the singer to the brink of full-blown cocaine psychosis – witness his toe-curling appearance on ‘Soul Train’ that November, rambling on about how ‘we have street corners in London’ and the delights of ‘poppin’ em’ as a teenager. Recognising that all the most interesting new music (Can, Kraftwerk, Faust, Neu!) was German, and believing Berlin to be ‘the centre of everything that is happening and will happen in Europe over the next few years’, he moved to the city in 1976 with his assistant Coco Schwab and old mucker Iggy Pop, who he’d scooped up towards the end of that year’s ‘Station to Station’ tour.

Bowie’s first task was to detox, sort of. His second was to produce an album for Pop which might serve as a template for the sort of music he himself wanted to make. However, as Thomas Jerome Seabrook reminds us in this rigorous and frequently fascinating cuttings job, ‘The Idiot’ was mostly recorded at Château d’Hérouville in the south of France, as was the bulk of the first ‘Berlin’ album, ‘Low’ (though it was mixed at the famous Hansa Tonstudio 2). ‘Heroes’ was both recorded and mixed at Hansa, while the underrated ‘Lodger’, which Seabrook covers relatively cursorily, was finished off in  New York almost five months after it had been committed to tape in not-very-bohemian Montreaux.

Seabrook is happiest – and at his best – when discussing studio technique. Look away now if you don’t care about Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (a set of cards, each containing a random instruction designed to help overcome a creative block), or Bowie’s habit of recording all the backing tracks really quickly, or producer Tony Visconti’s use of a device called an Eventide Harmoniser to achieve the celebrated compressed drum sound on ‘Low’.

A more atmospheric account of life at 155 Hauptstrasse can be found in Paul Trynka’s recent Iggy Pop biography ‘Open Up and Bleed’. But ‘Bowie in Berlin’ has distinct strengths, notably its telling excavation of contemporary critical responses to the albums. ‘Will the ’80s be this boring?’ wondered Jon Savage in Melody Maker, reviewing ‘Lodger’. For Bowie fans, the answer would be: Oh yes.