Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016

Where are you going when you leave Berlin? Far away? Yes, you’re a bird of passage. When I was young I longed to travel, to swallow the whole wide world. Well, it’s damn well happened.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Mary

I’m going away; and wherever I go, I’ll still be the same wild and rather frightened little man. I’m not scared of anybody. I’m just scared of myself. I’m like a traveller. I shed a skin at this place, leave my little message… and move on to another red blot on the map.
— Ray Gosling, Sum Total

It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant.
— Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T

The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today — in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped — always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop!
— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

The Thin White Duke was an isolationist, very much on his own, with no commitment to any society.
— Bowie, 1978

MADMAN
SITTING NEXT TO YOU

(Bowie, Bolan.) Recorded: (“Madman”, unreleased) ca. 4-7 March 1977?, 142 Upper Richmond Road West, East Sheen, London. David Bowie: lead vocal, rhythm guitar; Marc Bolan: lead guitar, backing vocal; (“Sitting Next to You”) 7 September 1977, Granada Studios, Quay Street, Manchester. Bowie: vocal, guitar; Bolan: guitar; Dino Dines: keyboards; Herbie Flowers: bass; Tony Newman: drums. Produced: Muriel Young.

Broadcast: (“Sitting Next to You”) 7 September 1977, Marc.

They met in the summer of 1964. He was still David Jones then, while Mark Feld already had discarded one pseudonym and would soon acquire another. They were prospects of the promoter Leslie Conn, who put them to work painting an office (Conn returned to find them gone, with only half of the walls painted). Born within nine months of each other, Marc Bolan and David Bowie were fast friends, going through discard bins on Carnaby Street for clothes, living on crumbs from the banquet that was mid-Sixties London.

As the decade waned, they made their move. Bowie hit first in 1969 with “Space Oddity,” but Bolan soon swept past him. Ditching the mummery and twenty-word titles of his earlier albums, Bolan became the first pop idol of the Seventies. His success in T. Rex rattled Bowie, who aped Bolan’s singing voice on “Black Country Rock,” had him play lead guitar on “The Prettiest Star,” and in “Lady Stardust” tried to make him a predecessor to his Ziggy Stardust. “I never had any competition. Except Marc Bolan, back in England,” Bowie told the journalist Lisa Robinson in 1976,

I had to find somebody I would have friction with, somebody I could compete with, just to get me off the ground. Someone that would give me motivation to do the thing in the first place. So Marc was perfect; a friend, [who] gets there before me. I fought like a madman to beat him. Knowing theoretically there was no race. But wanting passionately to do it.

In 1972 and 1973, they were on top together — glitter-spackled planet queens of pop. Paupers in the Sixties, they had come into their inheritances.

But when glam faded, Bolan was like a drunken host trying to revive a dying party. An attempt at futuristic R&B, Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow — A Creamed Cage in August (a bad sign that the elephantine titles were back), was the first of several weak-charting albums. He’d alienated his producer Tony Visconti; a taste for brandy and cocaine bloated him. Meanwhile Bowie broke America, where Bolan remained a one-hit wonder.

Their friendship endured. When Bowie came to London for Iggy Pop’s tour in March 1977, he stayed at Bolan’s flat. He offered to co-write a song, and what resulted, a grungy piece called “Madman,” had promise. Built on a one-chord riff that presages the Gang of Four, the best surviving demo of “Madman” has Bolan shredding and Bowie snarling “when a man is a man he’s destructive/ when a man is a man he’s seductive.” Bolan played the tape for friends, saying he’d cut it for his next album.

He’d cleaned up by summer 1977, having recently become a father. The punks revered him and he was out and about in London. Landing a teatime music variety show with Granada TV, Bolan hosted the Jam, Hawkwind, the Boomtown Rats, and Generation X. For the final episode he got Bowie, who was in Britain to promote “Heroes.”

The taping started well, Bowie catching up with the studio band, who included his former drummer Tony Newman and bassist Herbie Flowers. Bowie and Bolan rehearsed a piece to close out the show. It wasn’t much, a twelve-bar blues with a guitar line close to the riff of “Lady Madonna” (as it didn’t have a title, its bootleg name came from a refrain vocal during rehearsals: “what can I do?/sitting next to yoo-hoo”). Then Bowie ran the band through “Heroes,” concentrating on getting feedback for his pre-taping backing track, and it soon became clear there was no place for Bolan in the song. Bolan went to his dressing room while Bowie’s security men and assistants took over the taping, preventing journalists, Bolan’s PR man and even show staffers from entering the studio. Caught up with recording a usable take of “Heroes,” Bowie hadn’t noticed.

By the time Bolan and Bowie taped their closing song, the mood was tense. Mustering himself for the cameras, Bolan introduced a “new song” that Bowie kicked off on guitar. For a minute, they were Leslie Conn’s scruffs again, playing blues, making faces, calling each other out. Bowie missed his cue (he’d struggled with timing during the rehearsal), having to lunge towards the mike to yell “what can I do?” while Bolan, going to strike a guitar hero pose, fell off the stage. The crew, fed up with the afternoon’s shenanigans and under union rules, refused to shoot a retake. The great reunion ended with a flump.

About a week later, Bolan and his girlfriend Gloria Jones went out for the night. At five in the morning, Jones crashed Bolan’s Mini GT into a steel-reinforced concrete fence post on Barnes Common. He died within seconds. A heartbroken Bowie went to his funeral and quietly supported Jones and Bolan’s son for decades. He’d lost a friend, a rival, and someone who’d known him when all he had was ambition.

PEACE ON EARTH/LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

(Kohan, Fraser, Grossman [“Peace”], Simeone, Onorati, Davis [“Drummer”].) Recorded: 11 September 1977, Elstree [ATV] Studios, Clarendon Road, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. Bowie: lead vocal; Bing Crosby: lead vocal; uncredited musicians: piano, bass, drums, strings. Produced: Frank Konigsberg.

First release: 19 November 1982, BOW 12/ PB 13400 (UK #3). Broadcast: 11 September 1977, Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas.

Where he’d done little to sell Low, Bowie agreed to do promotions for “Heroes” in autumn 1977. Days after the Marc Bolan taping, Bowie appeared on a Bing Crosby Christmas special. Its premise had Crosby, in Britain for Christmas, encountering a few stars like Twiggy and Ron Moody. Landing Bowie gave the show a shot in the arm (“Bing was no idiot,” said Ian Fraser, who co-wrote music for the special. “If he didn’t know [who Bowie was] his kids sure did.”) Bowie would get to plug “Heroes” in exchange for singing a Christmas carol with Crosby.

But he balked at the selection, “Little Drummer Boy.” “I hate that song,” he reportedly said, though scriptwriter Buz Kohan said Bowie’s biggest complaint was that “Little Drummer Boy” wasn’t a good showcase for his voice. Kohan, Fraser, and his co-composer Larry Grossman dashed out a counterpoint song in little over an hour on a piano in a studio storage room. “Peace on Earth,” with its mawkish totalitarian sentiments (“every child must be made aware/every child must be made to care”) at least gave Bowie the soaring melody he wanted.

At the time, Bowie said he’d been charmed by Crosby, who died that October after suffering a heart attack on a Madrid golf course (it was a strange period where everyone who Bowie appeared with on television died soon afterward). “He was fantastic,” Bowie said in 1978. “That old man knew everything about everything. He knew rock and roll backwards, even if he didn’t know the music… I’m glad I met him.” His memories had soured by 1999, however, when he described Crosby as “look[ing] like a little old orange sitting on a stool… there was just nobody home at all, you know? It was the most bizarre experience. I didn’t know anything about him. I just knew my mother liked him.” A worse-for-wear Crosby, squatting in a mansion, gets a visit from a freeloading hip neighbor (Bowie namedrops Harry Nilsson). They duet on a pair of Christmas songs and it sounds beautiful. The magic of television.

There was no plan to release “Peace on Earth” (“we never expected to hear about it again,” Kohan said), so the sixteen-track master tape was erased — for its issue as a single in 1982, RCA had to use the on-line mix, in which Bowie and Crosby’s vocals were picked up by a boom mike. A Christmas hit in Britain in 1982, the duet had a second life in America thanks to MTV, which ran the Bowie/Crosby performance throughout the holidays. It looked like your grandfather meeting Han Solo. The internet canonized it, culminating in a word-for-word parody by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in 2010. What had been one-off TV fodder is now a Christmas tradition: one day soon, if not already, kids in holiday pageants will play the Bing and Bowie roles.

PETER AND THE WOLF

(Prokofiev.) Recorded: (music) 8 October 1975, Scottish Rite Temple, 150 North Broad St., Philadelphia; (narration) 17 and 19 November 1977, RCA Studios, 110 W. 44th St., New York. Bowie: narration; Philadelphia Orchestra: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horns (3), trumpet, trombone, tympani, drum, violin (2), viola, celli, basses (conducted: Eugene Ormandy). Produced: Jay David Saks; engineered: Paul Goodman.

First release: 7 April 1978, David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (RCA Red Seal RL-12743/ARL1-2743, US #136).

The last Bowie “all-round entertainer” appearance in 1977 was to narrate Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf for RCA. He did it for his son and to burnish his tarnished standing at his label by doing a prestige recording. He soon learned he was RCA’s third choice for the job, after Peter Ustinov and Alec Guinness (the latter in demand post-Star Wars) had turned them down. Conductor Eugene Ormandy “quite frankly didn’t know who Bowie was, and when he found out he was a rock star he was a little concerned, to say the least,” the album’s producer Jay David Saks said in 1983.

Commissioned by the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow to write a symphony to develop musical taste in children, Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf (Op. 67) in a week and premiered it at the theatre on 2 May 1936, to lukewarm reception. It was in keeping with Soviet art of the Thirties which, during the peak of Stalin’s terror, devoted itself to fairy tales, national legends (see Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky), and promotion of the family, with Stalin as national paterfamilias. During the war Peter and the Wolf went West, its place in the classical repertoire assured after Walt Disney’s animated short in 1946. Classical labels hired any actor with a spare afternoon to record narration. There have been over four hundred recordings of Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, William F. Buckley Jr., Paul Hogan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sirs John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Sean Connery, Dame Edna Everage, and Sharon Stone. (Even Brian Eno’s on a 1975 recording, with Viv Stanshall as narrator and Phil Collins on drums and vibraphone.) “The classical music equivalent of The Vagina Monologues,” as Cynthia Kaplan wrote.

With a lively performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra (recorded two years before, at the now-demolished Scottish Rite Temple), Bowie’s narration is charming, if his voice is mixed low. He always approached children’s material with wit and grace, avoiding condescension. His best role is the pissy-sounding cat: “is it worth climbing up so high? By the time I get there the bird will have flown away!” After hearing “Kooks,” Bowie’s producer Ken Scott said he’d wished Bowie would do an album of kid’s songs. Along with Labyrinth, this is as close as he ever came.

THE REVOLUTIONARY SONG

(Bowie, Fishman.) Recorded: (Bowie vocal, piano) 6 December 1977, Hansa; (further vocals, overdubs) ca. early 1978, West Berlin and/or London (Olympic and/or CBS Studios). Bowie: vocal, piano; uncredited musicians: vocals, guitar, piano?, violin, bass, drums. Produced: Jack Fishman; engineered: Keith Grant.

First release: (as “The Rebels”) ca. 23 February 1979, Just a Gigolo (Schöner Gigolo — Armer Gigolo) OST (Jambo JAM1).

Bowie’s second feature film was 1978’s Just a Gigolo (its official title was Schöner Gigolo, Armer Gigolo, in the tongue of its producer), one of the last postwar multi-national extravaganzas, the sort of film that sank a small fortune yet managed to look cheap, with a few aging stars for the marquee. Boasting the largest budget ($19 million, inflation-adjusted) for a German film since the war, Gigolo died at the German box office and was cut repeatedly until limping into a British release nearly a year later. Bowie washed his hands of the film, calling it all of his Elvis movies in one.

Gigolo was the curious vanity project of British actor David Hemmings, best known for starring in Blow-up. Hemmings wooed Bowie for the lead (he was a hard-drinking rakish storyteller, a type Bowie found irresistible) by stressing convenience, as the West Berlin shoot would wrap by the start of Bowie’s 1978 tour, and by hiring legendary actresses, including Kim Novak and (the clincher) Marlene Dietrich. As Dietrich refused to travel to West Germany, where she’d never felt welcome, Bowie’s “face to face” scene with her was shot with Dietrich on a Paris soundstage and Bowie acting to a chair in West Berlin.

Bowie took the role because his dream project, starring in a biopic of the Expressionist painter Egon Schiele (provisionally titled Wally), faced continual delays in scripting and production; the film would finally collapse in 1979. In Gigolo, Bowie plays Paul, a scion of the German officer class, bred to serve the Fatherland by dying valiantly on the battlefield. When he returns home from the Great War to find a broken republic, he has no idea what to do. Bowie is purely reactive: his character (he often looks like his “Be My Wife” promo film mime) has no inner life. “I feel like a puppet!” he complains, and he’s manhandled throughout the picture. “The whole point about that character is that he is a sponge — he is supposed to be cold and somewhat thick,” Hemmings said years later.

In Gigolo, the fall of Weimar Germany is played for dark laughs. Bowie’s like Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It — the beautiful, oblivious object of desire for the rest of the cast. There’s a slapstick gunfight at a funeral, a Nazi rally out of Blazing Saddles, a Christmas scene where characters fail to kill a struggling goose. Bowie is shot in the street by accident and becomes a Nazi martyr: it’s Horst Wessel Fell to Earth, with the last shot of Bowie in a coffin in Nazi uniform coming off as a trolling of the press and a ridiculous end to his fascist affectations.

As they had a rock star for a lead, the film’s producers wanted something from Bowie on the soundtrack. They got the paltriest thing he recorded in the Seventies: “The Revolutionary Song,” Brecht/Weill mixed with Fiddler on the Roof. The composer Jack Fishman tarted up a doodle Bowie had sung during filming, a “la-la-la-la-la-la-la-LA-la-la” melody possibly derived from his unreleased 1970 song “Miss Peculiar.” Like Bowie and Dietrich’s scene in the film, “Revolutionary Song” was an edit of two incongruous sessions — a Bowie vocal, likely cut as a demo; and a full-band rendition with session singers.

ALABAMA SONG

(Brecht, Weill.) Recorded: (live) either 29 April 1978, Spectrum Arena, Philadelphia, 5 May 1978, Civic Center, Providence, RI, or 6 May 1978, Boston Garden, Boston. Bowie: lead vocal; Adrian Belew: lead guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar, backing vocal; Simon House: electric violin; Sean Mayes: piano, backing vocal; Roger Powell: ARP Odyssey, ARP Solina, Prophet-5; Murray: bass, backing vocal; Davis: drums; (studio) 2 July 1978, Good Earth Studios, 59 Dean Street, London. Bowie: lead and backing vocals; Belew: lead guitar, backing vocal; Alomar: rhythm guitar, backing vocal; House: electric violin; Mayes; piano, backing vocal; Powell: Prophet-5; Murray: bass, backing vocal; Davis: lead drums; Visconti: backing vocal. Produced: Bowie, Visconti.

First release: (studio) 15 February 1980, RCA BOW 5 (UK #23); (live): 11 May 1992, Stage (Ryko RCD 10144/10145). Broadcast: 30 May 1978, Musikladen Extra; 18 September 2002, Live and Exclusive (BBC Radio 2). Live: 1978, 1990, 2002.

“I’m going out as myself this time. No more costumes, no more masks. This time it’s the real thing,” Bowie said of his 1978 tour of North America, Britain, Europe, Australasia, and Japan. He would flesh out Low and “Heroes” tracks for an audience that hadn’t bought them on record, hoping to get Robert Fripp as lead guitarist and Brian Eno on keyboards and treatments, but both turned him down. So he broke “Fripp” into the electric violinist Simon House, a UK progressive rock veteran, and Adrian Belew, a young guitarist nabbed from Frank Zappa’s touring band. “Eno” became keyboardists Roger Powell (avant) and Sean Mayes (garde).

Where Bowie knew House and Mayes from the British touring circuit (Mayes’ revival rock band Fumble had opened for the Spiders from Mars), the ninteen-year-old Belew was an unknown quantity. As was Powell, a brilliant programmer (“a musician seduced into computer programming,” as he later described himself) who built a hand-held controller for a self-rigged sequencer stack and who would create one of the first MIDI sequencers for the Apple II. Bowie said he wanted “to try and play my same music with a band which is not built for it quite the same way.” Mayes wrote that “David had chosen us for our individual abilities and didn’t really interfere with us much.” The bandleader was Carlos Alomar, who ran rehearsals, set tempos, and conducted the band onstage during curtain-raiser performances of “Warszawa.”

His setlists (which hardly varied over five months) were a compromise. Shows opened with an hour of mostly new material, including some “Berlin” instrumentals. After intermission, Bowie returned with a condensed Ziggy Stardust (“Five Years” was greeted by screams), a Berlin entr’acte (“Art Decade,” “Alabama Song”), and closed with Station to Station’s monster songs and a “Rebel Rebel” capper.

With the exception of a reggae “What in the World” (which came out of the band fooling around in rehearsals), the songs were kept close to their studio arrangements, though Powell (who played the ARP Odyssey and Solina, the RMI KC-II, and an early version of the Prophet-5) added a web of textures, entwining synthesizer figures with House’s violin. The 1978 tour was the last great showing of the glam fans, sitting with lightning bolts painted on their faces while Bowie played “Sense of Doubt.”

The tour’s document was Stage, a double LP that compiled performances from the Philadelphia, Boston, and Providence dates. With Tony Visconti committed to cutting an “100% live album” compared to the heavilydoctored David Live, Stage has strong performances of “Warszawa,” “Stay,” and “Station to Station.” It’s Bowie’s band adapting the Low and “Heroes” songs for the stage and creating Lodger in the process. But many uptempo songs pale when compared to their studio originals, in particular those from Ziggy Stardust. The album’s original sequencing was also strange. With Bowie’s approval, Visconti arranged the songs in order of original release, so that the LP began with “Hang Onto Yourself,” had a nearly all-instrumental side, and ended with “Beauty and the Beast.” A 2005 reissue thankfully changed the sequencing to that of a typical 1978 show.

The Next Little Dollar

A few weeks into the US leg of the tour, Bowie started putting Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song” in sets, replacing the larynx-scraping “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.” While negotiations to star in a Threepenny Opera film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder may have inspired him, it was also the theme of his ongoing Berlin adventures (in 2002, he said he’d sung “Alabama Song” at breakfast every morning there). It disclosed the ancestry of some recent songs: compare its phrasing (“FOR–IF–we-don’t-FIND — the-next WHIS-KEY bar”) to his vocals in “What in the World” and “Breaking Glass.” “A pretty strident piece of music,” as he called “Alabama Song” at the time.

With a melody suited to Brecht’s flint-box of a voice, “Alabama Song” was a typical Brecht ballad: “nothing more than a notation of [Brecht’s] speech-rhythm and completely useless as music,” Kurt Weill said. Where Brecht had compressed the start of the refrain, “O moon of Alabama,” into two bars, Weill extended the line over five — making “O” a whole note and having “Alabama” descend an octave. It was their partnership in miniature: Brecht’s depiction of man as a scavenging animal set to a bouncing Weill tune. “Alabama Song” was in their Mahagonny-Songspiel (1927) and its operatic reworking three years later, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Sung by a prostitute and her gang on the road to the fabled city of Mahagonny (Manhattan, though it predicts Las Vegas), “Alabama Song” was “performed by a priestess in the cult of money,” as the critic Daniel Albright wrote. When Lotte Lenya first sang it for Brecht, he told her “‘not so Egyptian,’ turning my palms upward, extending my arms,” she recalled. For his 1978 tour version, Bowie went back to Weimar, singing verses with a blank expression, flattening and deadening his tone, sometimes smoking a cigarette. Then he’d swoon into the refrains, closing his eyes, his band chanting behind him.

Pleased with how “Alabama Song” worked on stage, Bowie brought his touring band into Visconti’s Good Earth Studios in London on the day after his final Earl’s Court show to cut a prospective single. Bowie wanted a fresh arrangement, telling Dennis Davis to play a track-length drum solo. As Davis kept throwing off the band in rehearsals, Visconti started by recording a backing track of Mayes’ piano and Murray’s bass. Davis, freed to play “lead drums” in overdubs, opens with a rumbling run on toms and cymbals, and then makes a stammering off-beat commentary on the refrains. “David wanted that to sound more like a circus,” Alomar recalled in 2017. The final mix was a patchwork, with Mayes writing that “David had us record several verses and choruses, which he edited together later in the order he felt worked best.” Bowie issued “Alabama Song” as his first single of the Eighties, an ode to sex and dollars for a new decade.

MOVE ON

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Recording Studios, Casino Barrière de Montreux, Rue du Théâtre 9, Montreux, Switzerland; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, The Record Plant, Studio D, 321 West 44th St., New York. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Belew: rhythm guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar; Mayes: piano; Murray: bass; Davis: drums; Visconti: backing vocal, rhythm guitar. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, David Richards, Rod O’Brien.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger (RCA BOW LP1/ AFL1-2488, UK #4, US #20).

“I don’t live anywhere, really. I travel 100% of the time.” It was Bowie’s credo of the late Seventies, starting in early 1977 when he took airplanes for the first time in five years. He was bowing to tour logistics — booked to play Japan and Australasia, he could no longer indulge lost weeks of taking an ocean liner to Yokohama. He found that he enjoyed flying again, apart from the take-offs and landings. It let him zip in and out of countries, exploring places he may never have gone to otherwise. In particular Kenya, which he visited in late 1977 and again in early 1978.

He created a new public image: the traveler. “I have never got around to getting myself a piece of land, putting up a house on it, and saying, ‘this is mine, this is home’.” (Barring his house in Switzerland, that is.) A stateless figure without personal ties. “The more I travel, the less sure I am about exactly which political philosophies are commendable,” he said in 1977. “All my traveling is done on the basis of wanting to get my ideas for writing from real events rather than from going back to a system from whence it came.” He was open to fresh experience, like a clean piece of blotting paper. Ziggy Stardust, though he’d appeared to come from Aldebaran, was a product of Sixties suburban Britain. Even the Thin White Duke was a British spin on continental decadence. Now he was transitional. A man who’d once feared airplanes now spent days in them. Bowie of the Let’s Dance era would be another variation: the international businessman counterpart to the bohemian backpacker. In each case, he cast himself as someone moving alone in the world.

Calling his new album Lodger symbolized this attitude — he was just staying week-to-week. As always, there were other forces at play. He was inspired by Roman Polanski’s 1976 film The Tenant, which he paid homage to with a cover image where a sprawled, battered-looking Bowie looks as if he’s pressed under glass. In his film, Polanski plays a lodger who becomes convinced he’s being turned into his room’s former occupant, a woman who attempted suicide by jumping from a window: a fate Polanski’s character ultimately reenacts. The Lodger cover suggested that Bowie would also wind up, like the Tenant, broken and bandaged from his fall, smushed like a bug on a windshield.

Planned Accidents

Lodger is “a certified nonclassic,” as Robert Christgau once wrote. Bowie and Tony Visconti later regretted its production (with Visconti finally remixing it in 2017), and his label and fans didn’t think much of it at the time, as it was one of his poorest-selling records of the decade.

Its inclusion in a trilogy with Low and “Heroes” didn’t help its reputation, as Lodger wound up as the Godfather Part III of the set. It was recorded in a cramped, overheated studio in Switzerland and a second-rate room in New York, a step down from a haunted French château or “Hansa by the Wall.” Where “Heroes” and Low were each finished in about two months, Lodger was a more leisurely affair. Backing tracks were cut in August-September 1978, but Bowie didn’t cut vocals until March of the following year, and the disjunction shows — at times he’s doing avant-garde karaoke over muddy-sounding instrumentals. “There was absolutely no mixing equipment there, maybe two limiters, and we were on a tight deadline. It was make or break. We had to do it; we had no choice,” as Visconti recalled of the overdub sessions at the Record Plant.

Yet it was a record dense with ideas (“Lodger was the sketchpad of all of them,” Bowie said), with a what-the-hell feel of adventure — “African Night Flight” and “Yassassin” remain some of the strangest things he ever recorded. It was, as Jon Savage called Lodger, “self-plagiarism,” with Bowie rewriting lines, recasting players. To return to Polanski, as The Tenant is Polanski’s cover version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, so Lodger is of The Tenant — a misreading upon misreading. A working title for one song was “Emphasis on Repetition,” drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of “repetition” as retracing one’s steps in the hope of finding the new.

“Move On” began when Bowie was listening to tapes on a Revox and accidentally played “All the Young Dudes” backwards. Struck by the resulting strangled melody, he had Carlos Alomar write out the inverted chord progression. He crafted a vocal to dip and push against the new flow, while for backing vocals he and Visconti sang Mott the Hoople’s refrain. “David and I flipped the new version’s tape over and played it backwards and sang the melody of “All the Young Dudes” forwards… and that became ‘Move On,’” Visconti wrote.

A travelogue inspired by recent trips to Kenya, Japan, and Australia, “Move On” (its title recycled from an unfinished Iggy Pop/Bowie collaboration) is a self-assessment by a man who discards friends and lovers as he would an old coat. “He does know the meaning of the words ‘move on’,” the pianist Mike Garson once said of Bowie. “Feeling like a shadow, drifting like a leaf,” Bowie sings, like an actor unsure as to how to play his part, falling back on old stage habits, sounding in shock, then pushing into fervid phrasing. He’s alienated from his own words, devolving into a blur of backwards voices (the 2017 remix all but drowns Bowie’s lead vocal in a maelstrom of them). The track’s earlier titles included “Someone’s Calling Me” and “The Tangled Web We Weave.”

In “Move On,” sex holds as much interest as modes of transportation: “Might take a train (a lift from Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City”)… might take a girl…” Bowie idly imagines who might live in the squares and rectangles on a globe he’s spinning. “Pick a country. Touch a pin to the map,” as he described his travels. “Cyprus… when the going’s rough” is an in-joke — home island of his soon-to-be-ex-wife and where he’d once gotten into a head-on collision while driving.

In D major, its opening verse works more as a refrain that never repeats while the rest of the song alternates between bridges (one of which is the reversed “Dudes” progression). Dennis Davis rumbles on toms; Sean Mayes, as per Bowie’s instructions, plays “something like Dvořák.” George Murray, parked low in the mix, is a secret melodist.

AFRICAN NIGHT FLIGHT

(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: (backing tracks) late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitar?; Alomar: guitar; Mayes: piano; Murray: bass; Davis: drums, percussion; Eno: backing vocal, prepared piano, EMS Synthi AKS, “cricket menace” (Roland CR-78?). Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger.

On Bowie’s “Berlin” records, Brian Eno played “fifth business,” a phrase the novelist Robertson Davies coined to describe a stage role that wasn’t a lead part but “[was] nonetheless essential to bring about the recognition or the denouement.” Eno would push a track off-kilter by treating guitars or suggest that Bowie leave spaces blank by delaying or erasing a vocal. Only on the instrumental sides was he a full collaborator, writing progressions and melodies and crafting arrangements.

This changed for Lodger, where Eno was more creatively aggressive — it has the most Bowie/Eno co-compositions of the trilogy — to the point where Bowie said he’d had to “wrestle back” the album during mixing. (Tony Visconti’s remix of Lodger made it even more “Eno,” with once-marginalized clutter now prominent in the stereo picture — the original mix now appears to be an effort to foreground Bowie’s vocals, an ill-fated attempt to make the album more commercial.) Where Eno came to earlier Bowie sessions after stays in the German countryside, he arrived for Lodger after a spell in New York City, where he was the toast of young bands (there was “Eno Is God” graffiti on Lower East Side walls) and the press, and he’d found in David Byrne an ideal disciple. Doing another Bowie album was a bit old hat for Eno, who’d just recorded No Wave bands like Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.

He began by challenging the process Bowie had used since Young Americans: give his band chords and instructions, have them jam in the studio, get rhythm tracks down, piece together songs, cut vocals last. Finding this predictable, and believing studio improvs inevitably became dreary blues jams, Eno suggested making chord changes at random, writing eight chords on a chalkboard and having everyone play whichever one he hit with a pointer. This sort of thing was especially irritating because the band was Bowie’s touring group, who’d forged a working relationship on the road and was now being deconstructed by a man who called himself a non-musician. While Bowie supported Eno’s “art pranks,” he later admitted they were alienating. It didn’t help that in Mountain Studios the control room was on another floor, with Bowie, Eno and Visconti monitoring players via closed-circuit TV cameras and giving directions via intercom. It made the musicians feel like laboratory animals.

Peak Lodger Eno is “African Night Flight” (“[it’s] almost all Brian,” Visconti told Mark Paytress in 2017), which started life with the band jamming on Dale Hawkins’ “Susie Q.” Eno promoted as lead instrument a clanging John Cage-esque prepared piano on whose strings he placed scissors and other metal objects. There were also blasts of “cricket menace” — “little crickety sounds that Brian produced from a combination of my drum machine [described by Visconti as a “Roland beatbox,” likely the recently-released CR-78] and his ‘briefcase’ synth,” Bowie said in 2001 — and other noises, with one inspiration “Broken Head,” a track Eno had cut with Cluster. “The backing track for “African Night Flight,” with all those looped African chants and animal noises, was originally made by editing, like, six pieces of tape together. It was a terrible way to mix a track,” Visconti later said.

Over this backdrop Bowie devised an Africa inspired by his trips to Kenya, where along with spending a few hours with the Maasai tribe, he’d found some expatriate German pilots drinking in Mombasa bars while still wearing their pilot’s gear. They flew their Cessnas into the bush to smuggle contraband or arm rebels, spending the rest of the time drunk and “always talking about when they are going to leave,” he said.

It was an Africa cooked up in a Swiss hotel and a midtown New York studio, an imaginary continent aligned with experimental novels like Walter Abish’sAlphabetical Africa and Michel Leiris’ L’Afrique Fantôme—an English boy’s colonial landscape, scorching under the equatorial sun (“Burning Eyes” was a working title), with stuffed rhinos and wise orangutans, lost pilots (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flies overhead), mercenaries, and missionaries. A guiding spirit for his herky-jerky, word-choked phrasings are the patter songs of Noël Coward, in particular the colonialist barb “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” See the chant refrain: “asanti habari habari/asanti nabana nabana,” mostly taken from Swahili (“habari,” a common greeting) and Lingala (“na bana,” basically “your kids,” though Bowie apparently intended the latter to be Swahili for “goodbye”). Harping on a single note (usually F) until he makes looping runs across two octaves, with flatted notes for emphases, Bowie cut overdubs that shriek-doubled his lead and gave murmuring undercurrents of distress. As far as he went on this line, “African Night Flight” was more a preview of Eno and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

YASSASSIN

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, synthesizer; Alomar: rhythm guitar, backing vocal; Visconti: acoustic guitar, backing vocal; House: violin, backing vocal; Murray: bass, backing vocal; Davis: drums, tambourine, backing vocal. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger.

Another studio motley, “Yassassin” combines reggae and ersatz Turkish folk into a base of down-mixed funk. The latter was courtesy of George Murray, who front-loads each measure with notes, letting the singers (everyone in the studio) fill out the rest of the bar. (The chords, a shuffle between E7 and F7, are a sparse framework, similar to “Fame.”) The reggae took longer, as Murray, Carlos Alomar, and Dennis Davis allegedly weren’t familiar with the style, at the time more popular with white Brits than black Americans. Tony Visconti claimed he played “Jamaican ‘up-chop’ rhythm guitar” on the off-beats while asking Davis to play kick drum, rather than snare, on backbeats.

The song’s “Turkish” strands include Alomar’s game attempt to imitate a bouzouki on his guitar’s high strings and Simon House’s roving violin — filling in spaces, given the outro to play out. The latter’s work on Hawkwind’s “Hassan I Sahba” is similar in tone and phrasing, to the point where it’s conceivable “Yassassin” started by Bowie having his band spoof the Hawkwind track.

As on “Neuköln,” Bowie was inspired by Turkish immigrants who’d lived in Berlin since the Sixties (“the kind of character you’d find in coffee bars in Turkey”). He’d seen “yaşasın” scrawled on a wall and, intrigued, called the Turkish embassy for a translation (good thing it meant “long live,” though it’s used more like “hooray” in English). Bowie plays a migrant Turk in a Western city that needs his labor but despises him. Walking “proud and lustful,” the refrain shifts between 2/4 and 4/4 and opens with an octave jump (“yas-SASS-in”) that detumesces in repeats to seventh and fifth intervals.

Allegedly influenced by Arabic singers (he tries to ululate on “resonant world” in the first verse and the 2017 mix restored some groaning lines in the outro), Bowie sang hard-edged ranting runs of syllables graced by the occasional rhythmic color, like the undertows of the third verse (“if there’s someone in charrge, then listen to meeee”) deepened by House’s long notes. A thick genre-muck, “Yassassin” is more akin to Bowie’s “Revolutionary Song” than any type of Turkish music. “It was pretty transparent that it was me trying to relate to that particular culture,” he said in 1980 of his various “ethnic” songs. “Not in my wildest dreams would I think I was trying to represent them.”

RED SAILS

(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Belew: lead guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar; House: violin; Mayes: piano; Murray: bass; Davis: drums; Eno: EMS Synthi AKS, guitar treatments, backing vocal; Visconti: backing vocal; Stan Harrison: saxophone. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger. Live: 1983.

Sequenced to close Lodger’s “travel” side, “Red Sails” followed the wandering rock star of “Move On” and expatriate pilots of “African Night Flight” with English mercenaries (“cum swashbuckling Errol Flynn”) foundering in the China Sea (with the jazz standard “Red Sails in the Sunset” spurring the title). Bowie played with fragments — red sails, action, thunder ocean, getting around — racking and scrambling them like Scrabble tiles. “We have a lovely cross reference of cultures. I honestly don’t know what it’s about,” he said in 1979.

It was a crackpot homage to Neu! and Harmonia, with Bowie and Eno having their musicians replicate Klaus Dinger’s motorik drumbeat and Michael Rother’s delay-tinged guitar and soft synthesizer lines, winding up with a near-plagiarism of Harmonia’s 1975 “Monza (Rauf und Runter).” It was American and English cut-ups having a go at being Serious German Musicians.

As usual, Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis execute the manifests, with Davis doing a credible take on Dinger (rolling tom fills, a crash cymbal every four bars). The original mix was a fog (a synthesizer wash, starting at 1:47, blends into violin and saxophone), as if the band had been taped by a bootlegger — in the outro Davis sounds as if he’s on paper drums.

Gone is Bowie’s commanding baritone of “Station to Station” or the octave-leaping nerviness of “Life on Mars?” In “Red Sails,” with its shaky trellises of disjunct melodies, he hits notes that sound chosen at random for him, then layers in squawks, screams, mutters, and Beatle shouts (see the “oooooh!” at 1:35). He’d originally thought to do it as a pseudo-Maoist propaganda song. The second verse finds him spiking to a run of high As and Cs; a juddering series of fourths (“RED-sail-AC-tion”) is answered by hazy “red sail” repetitions, with vocals shifting in and out of phase. The stunts keep coming: Bowie sings “sailor can’t dance like yoooo-oooo” (see Lou Reed’s “Sally Can’t Dance”) by sinking two octaves in a breath and capping it off with a scream. There’s the calm of “life… stands… still… and… stares,” all half or whole notes, very Eno in phrasing. “The HINTER-land” chant — Bowie, Visconti, and Eno as colonial troops pushing upcountry. At last, the song collapses — “it’s a far-far fa-fa da-da da da da-da-DAH,” as if the English language has been infected. Bowie starts counting in, spits out “three four!” (a callback to Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach) and ends with a last Beatle scream.

As with Robert Fripp on “Heroes,” Bowie and Visconti didn’t let Adrian Belew hear any backing tracks before he soloed, then spliced together his solos from multiple takes. Belew tore through three takes apiece, cut off just as he grew familiar with each song. On “Red Sails,” Bowie wanted Belew’s take on Michael Rother, a guitarist who Belew had never heard before, “I didn’t know what was coming, so I started with a long sustained tremolo D. Once I heard a bit of the track I bent things around until I was in the same key,” Belew said. His tremolo-laden skronk on “Red Sails” was an inspired ending: waves of thought voiced on bent strings.

REPETITION

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Belew: lead guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar; House: violin; Mayes: piano; Powell: Prophet-5; Murray: bass; Davis: drums. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger. Broadcast: ca. 6 January 1997, ChangesNowBowie; 20 October 1999, Nulle part ailleurs; 25 October 1999, Mark Radcliffe Show. Live: 1997, 1999.

Though fascinated by identity and power, Bowie had avoided direct commentary on “society” (barring the very occasional likes of “God Knows I’m Good”). So “Repetition,” a song about domestic violence, was something new under the sun for him. In interviews, he sounded incredulous to have discovered that men beat women, which he once claimed was an American phenomenon. It suggested his imaginative reserves were growing depleted, forcing him to live off a land he didn’t recognize.

In typical Lodger fashion, his lyric was a double reference. Its title is from Søren Kierkegaard’s 1843 philosophical novel, in which a Young Man regrets making a marriage proposal, as while love is heaven, marriage can be hell. Yet Bowie’s setting and characters are those of a Fifties Northern drama, with his lead character Johnny suggesting John Osborne’s protagonist Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, a man who terrorizes his wife and sleeps with her friend.

“Repetition” is a piece of confinement, a man pacing in a room. The verses shift between A major and B major chords. George Murray worries root notes, Dennis Davis is relentless except in gaps between verses (Simon House’s violin patches one hole). A key change to A minor after the last verse dims things further. “There’s a numbness to the whole rhythm section that I try to duplicate with a deadpan vocal, as though I’m reading a report rather than witnessing the event,” Bowie said in 1979. He held on a single note and kept a taut rhythm — usually a short phrase for the B major bar (“I guess the”), a longer one for the A major (“bruises won’t show”). There’s the occasional aside: the mocking way he sings “blue silk blouse” as a descending sweep of notes.

He breaks character for a near-spoken “don’t hit her” between Johnny arriving home and beating his wife off-stage. It’s a response to Lou Reed’s deadpan “you better hit her” in the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again.” Another response came in 1981, when the post-punk band the Au Pairs recorded the song. Lesley Woods keeps a similar reserve as Bowie, but her disgust and anger builds as she sifts through the evidence (she sneers “Johnny is a maaan”). The Au Pairs give an indictment pegged on basslines, harried by violin. Bowie’s revision of “Repetition” in 1997, stripping it down to an acoustic guitar figure, was in the shadow of one of the few artists who bettered him on his own song.

D.J.

(Bowie, Eno, Alomar.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, piano?, Chamberlin; Belew: lead guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar; House: violin; Murray: bass; Davis: drums; Eno: EMS Synthi AKS?; Visconti: backing vocal? Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger. Live: 1995-1996.

The disc jockey created rock ‘n’ roll, or so it seemed to the kids. He’d unearthed it and cast it into the air. Rock ‘n’ rollers celebrated and courted DJs, labels were content to bribe them. In “Roll Over Beethoven,” Chuck Berry mails a request, opening his song with a percussive phrase that releases its accumulating tension on the holy word “deejay.” In “Having a Party,” politely making hip requests, Sam Cooke acknowledges the DJ as king of his party. DJs were friends, confidants, liberators.

Not quite the case in Britain. The BBC barely played rock ‘n’ roll until the mid-Sixties. After the Wilson government shuttered pirate radio stations in 1967, a few pirate DJs were scooped up for the newly-formed Radio One, where John Peel was the house oddball. By the late Seventies, a similar shift was underway in America, with “free form” FM stations hardening into “album-oriented-rock” formats. The DJ became a stooge and a philistine. Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio” was a prosecutor’s brief: the DJ is a bought man, his playlists as sterile as he wants to make your life. By the century’s end, industry consolidation and the internet finished DJs off, reducing them to interchangeable cogs, voices to break up an algorithm-generated playlist.

Bowie’s “D.J.” is the voice of an unemployed shut-in whose girl’s left him but who still has listeners. His last power lies in the occasional disco gig, where he can make people move to his commands: seeing his former boss on the floor, the DJ turns him into “a puppet dancer” by playing Bee Gees singles. (The song was originally titled “I Bit You Back.”) The writer Ian Mathers called the song “a horror story about a human being reduced to nothing more than work,” and in a 1979 radio interview, Bowie backed up this reading, saying the DJ’s work had become an ulcer-generating job driven by the war against “dead air.” “If you have thirty seconds’ silence, your whole career is over,” he said. He begins “D.J.” with an acute impersonation of Talking Heads’ David Byrne, whose muses were work and systems (“I’m home! Lost my job!”).

There’s also the sense that the singer’s a sociopath, regarding others as objects to play with. Its video intercuts shots of Bowie as studio exile with those of him walking down Earl’s Court Road in London. Men and women kiss him, he dances with strangers: there’s an electricity, even menace in the shots (one man looks like he’s demanding his wallet). After John Lennon’s shooting, Bowie would never let himself be so openly exposed to the public again. The video ends with him pulling down the blinds of his cave (a tribute to David Lean’s Great Expectations) while the Bowie in the crowd makes his face a mask.

An A minor composition with a neurotic compulsion to move to the parallel major, it was issued as Lodger’s second UK single. While George Murray enforced disco, playing a swinging bassline with popped notes (Blur’s “Girls and Boys” starts here), he’s sunk in the mix along with Dennis Davis’ drums and Carlos Alomar, his guitar shrouded via an Envelope phaser (the 2017 remix, one of Visconti’s best on the reissue, restores Davis and Alomar to center stage). Simon House’s violin mimics Bowie’s vocal in the first verse, then gets run through Eno’s EMS, sometimes replaced by synthesizer altogether (cost-cutting in action). The track peaks with another of Adrian Belew’s forced improvisations (see “Red Sails”). As he later said, it sounds like you’re scanning the radio and grabbing bits of guitar solos here and there along the dial.

Like other Lodger tracks, “D.J.” has a nervous breakdown in its long coda — the collapse of the DJ into dead air, dragging out “time flies when you’re having fun” over four bars and reduced to chanting “I’ve got believers.” At the fade, backing singers call back: leave us, leave us.

FANTASTIC VOYAGE

(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, piano; Belew: mandolin; Alomar: rhythm guitar; House: violin, mandolin; Mayes: piano; Murray: bass; Davis: drums; Eno: “ambient drone” (EMS Synthi AKS?); Visconti: mandolin, backing vocal. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien.

First release: 27 April 1979, RCA BOW 2 (UK #7). Live: 2003-2004, 2006.

One of the last songs Bowie ever performed on stage, in 2006, was “Fantastic Voyage,” Lodger’s lead-off track and cranky humanist manifesto. On record it starts in a daze, as if in a recovery ward, with airy piano and Bowie in mid-thought: “In the event… that this fantastic voyage… should turn to erosion…,” with the formality of a Google translation. Bowie chops words up (“val-you-uh-bul”), flattens them out. A clue is in the middle of the song: the wrong words make you listen. He doesn’t want you to hum along — he’s setting speed bumps to slow you down. “It’s an anxious song, pretending to be a jaunty, poppy thing,” as Rick Moody wrote.

“So many things are out of our own control,” Bowie said in 1979. “It’s just this infuriating thing that you don’t want to have [leaders’] depression ruling your life.” He’d once reveled in the apocalypse, believing it had the potential for transformation. By the time of “Fantastic Voyage,” he had a peasant realism — we are governed by killers and fools, and our lives hang on their arbitrary mercies. To the novelist Yukio Mishima, who wrote of the samurai “there is dignity in clenched teeth and flashing eyes,” Bowie responds cryptically: “Dignity is valuable, but our lives are valuable, too” (see “Heat”). Should survival take precedence? Should it countenance disgraceful acts and submission to power? A resigned “we’ll get by, I suppose” is the only answer he’s got.

It was a premonition, a response to a renewal of Cold War tensions. “I have no doubt that Europe will be the first target in any nuclear strike, because of its comparative poverty and loosening ties with America,” Bowie said in 1977. As usual, he was up on the reading, including Paul Erdman’s The Crash of ’79 (predicting a Middle East war, financial panic and energy crisis) and The Third World War: August 1985, a novel by a former NATO general where West Germany is invaded and Birmingham annihilated in a Soviet nuclear strike. Far more would come in the early Reagan/Thatcher years. What “Final Day” or “99 Luftballons” or War Games share with “Fantastic Voyage” is fatalism and absurdity — knowing that the apocalypse could come thanks to a wrongly identified blip on a radar screen (as nearly happened a few times).

Sharing the D major key and chord progression of “Boys Keep Swinging,” the verses of “Fantastic Voyage” barely scan and rhyme; its refrains disintegrate. Bowie argues until there’s a snap to attention — piano, bass and drums build in crescendo while he makes a slow ascent of nearly an octave, drenching his last notes with extravagant vibrato. Held together by eighth-note patterns on piano and bass, the band becomes waves and sweeps of sound, with Brian Eno providing an “ambient drone” to smoke-shroud them. Hearing similarities between Bowie’s vocal melody and “Love Me Tender,” Visconti scrapped a plan to use strings and wrote lines for mandolin (inspired by a childhood memory of Jackie Gleason’s twenty-mandolin orchestra on his 1955 album Lonesome Echo). Bowie’s driver had to go around Montreux to rent mandolins. Played by Visconti, Simon House, and Adrian Belew, the mandolins were each tracked three times and then, perversely, buried in the original mix; Visconti’s Lodger remix rectified this at last.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Alomar: “lead” rhythm guitar; Mayes: piano; Murray: bass; Davis: drums; Eno: EMS Synthi AKS, “horse trumpet,” French horn (“Eroica horn”); Visconti: backing vocal. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien; (remake) ca. June 1988, Mountain Studios. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, synthesizer; Reeves Gabrels: lead guitar; Kevin Armstrong: rhythm guitar; Erdal Kızılçay: synthesizer, bass, drum programming. Produced: Bowie, Richards; engineered: Richards.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger; (remake) 27 August 1991, Lodger (reissue) RCD 10146. Broadcast: 18 September 2002, Live and Exclusive; 20 September 2002, Later with Jools Holland. Live: 1983, 1988, 1995-1997, 2002.

Robert Fripp said in 1979, describing an older cultural thought process, “Why doesn’t God put it right? Where are these angels descending from the heavens… these angels to put the world right?” His answer was that all we have for saviors are ourselves: “Here we are. It’s up to us.” Around the same time, Bowie was reading Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which theorized humanity once had a split consciousness in which we heard our thoughts, emanating from the right hemisphere of our brains, as the voices of gods. To Jaynes, the emergence of angels in Middle Eastern cultures around 1,000 BC was the first sign of a breakdown in this mind-division — angels were hybrids, intermediaries between man and the gods.

Bowie’s “Look Back in Anger,” a dialogue between a “tatty Angel of Death” and his intended, is an internal conversation, a parry between mental selves. You know who I am, he said. Its refrain is a statement, placed within quotation marks on the LP lyric sheet. But who gets the line? Is it an angel’s order to the doomed, or the words of someone who’s been hoping for death since birth? It’s fitting that the refrain’s a duet. First Tony Visconti’s backing vocals are heard: plaintive, narrow in range, treated to sound like John Lennon’s varisped voice on Sgt. Pepper tracks like “She’s Leaving Home.” Then in the refrain’s fourth bar, Bowie sweeps in; nearly an octave higher, as he’d first appeared on “Space Oddity.” It’s Ground Control talking to Major Tom in space again.

He furthered the split-personality angle in David Mallet’s promo film for the song. In an artist’s loft, Bowie paints a self-portrait as an angel until he, reverse-Dorian Gray style, transforms into a grotesque with encrusted skin. (The song’s original title was “Fury.”) The video refers to The Image, a 1967 short film in which a man paints his doppelganger (Bowie) who comes to life, along with the schizophrenia and role-playing in Polanski’s The Tenant. In the last shot, Bowie crawls under his bed: he’s been made leprous by his art.

The lyric’s narrative ends abruptly, with no more verses after the bridge. In the final refrain Bowie breaks his descending vocal pattern for a push upward — “feel it in my VOICE!” — with his last words a slow surrender. It’s also a comic portrait — take the gravelly way he phrases lines, sounding like a bored Yahweh. He said his inspiration was the shabby Angel of Death being stood up by a soon-to-be deceased man, so he had to kill time instead in a cafe, reading a magazine.

The rhythm section makes “Look Back in Anger” Lodger’s most invigorating track. Sean Mayes pounds the bass end of his piano, Carlos Alomar’s guitar darts and weaves around Dennis Davis’ drums. Kicking off a beat ahead of the band, Davis rings the bell on his ride cymbal, plays a rolling fill under Bowie’s runs of words, works in constant response on hi-hat, snare, and toms. Visconti’s remix turned him into the rightful king of the song.

When Bowie asked for a guitar break to fill a refrain, Alomar thought, “if I am going to take a solo, I’m going to take a rhythm-guitar solo,” as he told David Buckley. Inspired by John Lennon’s rhythm work on Beatles’ records, Alomar’s solo also challenges Nile Rodgers, dominating the charts with Chic at the time. Alomar and Rodgers had been friends as teenagers in New York, both had cut their teeth in session work, and had similar styles — riffing with syncopated chords with shortened tones. On “Look Back in Anger,” the snappy moves between chords, making melodic hooks out of strum patterns, was among Alomar’s greatest moments on a Bowie record.

Other pieces of the track were found randomly. Going through Mountain Studios’ brass collection, Eno discovered a huntsman’s horn (called “horse trumpet” on the LP sleeve) and a French horn he dubbed the “Eroica horn,” a reference to its prominence in Beethoven’s 3^rd Symphony. Barely able to play either, Eno processed the horns until they became distorted washes of sound. There’s also a wail after the final refrain ends.

One of Bowie’s strongest songs of the late Seventies, “Look Back in Anger” was released as a single only in the US and Canada, neither of which took to it. A decade later, he overhauled it for a dance routine with the La La La Human Steps troupe. An innovative reworking, varying and extending the song’s rhythmic centers while keeping the top melody intact, it was the connective tissue between Never Let Me Down and what was soon to come with Tin Machine, whose utility player Kevin Armstrong plays supple rhythm lines. In his debut on a Bowie recording, Reeves Gabrels crashes in with a ferocious run of notes. The pairing works so well — Armstrong keeping the dancers moving, Gabrels tearing up the stage behind them — that it’s a shame their interplay wasn’t more prominent in the band Bowie would soon assemble.

BOYS KEEP SWINGING

(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitar, piano, Chamberlin?; Belew: lead guitar; Eno: piano, EMS Synthi AKS; House: violin; Visconti: bass, backing vocal; Alomar: drums. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Visconti, Richards, O’Brien.

First release: 27 April 1979, RCA BOW 2. Broadcast: 23 April 1979, The Kenny Everett Video Show; 15 December 1979, Saturday Night Live; 14 December 1995, The White Room. Live: 1995-1996.

“Boys Keep Swinging” takes on the Village People, with double-entendres worthy of “In the Navy”: a lustily chanted refrain and a delight in the cartoon masculine. Like Bowie’s Sixties “childhood” songs, it’s a boy’s idea of manhood as being like joining a Scout troop. Uncage the colors! Unfurl the flag! A bisexual man imagining a gay fantasy of straight life. Masculinity as a pose, an absurdity, an act. A club you can join if you swing the right way. A club you can sneak into if you’d like. A song of violent camaraderie, its backing singers dominate on refrains while lead and backing vocals jostle on lines like “you’ll get your share!” “The glory in that song was ironic,” Bowie said in 2000. “I do not feel that there is anything remotely glorious about being either male or female. I was merely playing on the idea of the colonization of a gender.”

Using the same chord progression as “Fantastic Voyage” (“Boys” has more tension, its returns to the home chord packing more of a wallop), it has roughly the same structure — two verses and two refrains, the latter extended by stalling on an A major chord. The sawing background drone, led by Simon House’s violin, is yet another return to the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man.” During early takes, Bowie was frustrated by how well his band was playing. He wanted them to sound like “young kids in the basement [who were] just discovering their instruments,” Carlos Alomar said. So he had them switch instruments, a trick used on Lust for Life’s “Fall in Love With Me.” Alomar competently played drums and Dennis Davis notso-competently bass, requiring Tony Visconti to cut a new bassline during mixing. (He took the opportunity to play a hyperactive line like his work on The Man Who Sold the World, with a touch of the Beach Boys’ “You’re So Good to Me”). George Murray, assigned to keyboards, apparently was wiped from the final mix, as only Bowie and Eno are credited.

Its last ninety seconds are an Adrian Belew guitar solo, again pasted together by Visconti and Bowie from three different takes (the only clue they gave Belew was that Alomar was on drums), with possible additions by Bowie himself: the feedback tone and use of tremolo alters towards the fade. Belew was fresh from Kentucky and had an aw-shucks quality to him that Bowie liked. He kept trying to imitate Belew’s bluegrass accent, which is basically the accent Bowie attempted in the Twin Peaks movie. “Boys Keep Swinging” was inspired by Belew, Bowie told him, because he thought Belew was a “world’s your oyster type of guy.” All the opportunities laid out in front of some young rock guitarist — a platter to feast on. You can do it all. Buy a home of your own, learn to drive and everything.

The “Berlin” albums are chaste: love and sex are compromised, alienated acts. Then there’s “Boys Keep Swinging.” It’s an end to Bowie’s glam years and a look at the Eighties we could have had, not the one we got from him. In David Mallet’s promo film, over Belew’s closing solo, shrieking in its manically phallic way, Bowie does a drag show as his backing singers. It’s the best mime acting of his life — each of his women is her own character: a brassy Sixties belter, an elegant dowager (modeled on Marlene Dietrich), a skeletal high-society vampire. Taking a cue from his lover Romy Haag, at peak moments in Belew’s solo Bowie tears off his wig and smears lipstick across his face with the back of his hand. The dedicated work of hours of gender preparation, erased in a disdainful, magnificent moment.

RED MONEY

(Bowie, Alomar.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 5 June-early July 1976, Château d’Hérouville; (vocals, overdubs) ca. early March 1979, Record Plant. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitar; Belew: lead guitar; Powell: Prophet-5; Alomar: rhythm guitar; Murray: bass; Davis: drums; Visconti: backing vocal. Produced: Bowie, Visconti; engineered: Laurent Thibault, Visconti, O’Brien.

First release: 18 May 1979, Lodger.

The last track on Bowie’s last record of the Seventies, “Red Money” is freighted with symbolism, closing out the Eno, Iggy Pop, and Berlin era by coming full circle and recycling backing tracks from “Sister Midnight,” the opening track of Pop’s The Idiot. “Project cancelled!” is a refrain hook. Asked in 2001 whether it was him drawing the curtain on “the Eno triptych,” Bowie replied, “Not at all. Mere whimsy.”

Never underestimate how many of Bowie’s apparently calculated moves were mere whimsy. Still, “Red Money” elaborates themes Bowie had developed on Lodger: repetition, oblique influence (a provisional album title was Despite Straight Lines), absence, impending obsolescence, weariness with songwriting and performing, a broadening of perspective beyond the repertory theater of the mind. “Red Money” is a palimpsest of a track, with Iggy Pop erased from a song that Bowie gave him. Pop had invoked a muse, raged into an Oedipal nightmare. Bowie processes information: Jackie Wilson and Bob Dylan songs; some recent paintings — see the “small red box” (“must not dropit-stopit-takeitaway!”), an image that kept cropping up in his art and signified “responsibility” to him. Travelers are stranded in diseased landscapes, collecting blood money, aborting missions — there’s a possible reference to Skylab, the space station that crashed to Earth in 1979 to commemorate the shoddy end of the space age: “it will tumble from the sky” (falling Skylab returns in an early version of “Up the Hill Backwards”).

As the Alomar/Murray/Davis band didn’t re-record their performances, this suggests that Bowie came up with the idea of rewriting “Sister Midnight” during the mixing/overdub sessions of March 1979. Bowie and Adrian Belew cut new abrasive guitar parts and Roger Powell added Prophetgenerated noise and clattering electronic percussion. “Red Money” is Bowie reclaiming a property, his melody more adventurous than Pop’s, marked by octave leaps and falls in a single bar (“see it in the sky”), his phrasings working against the verses’ harmonic movement. The vocal arrangement peaks with Bowie singing the title line in stereo-panned four-part harmony with himself. Despite his closing line that “it’s up to you and me,” he’s alone again in his head.

I PRAY, OLÉ

Recorded: (backing tracks?) ca. late August-15 September 1978, Mountain Studios?, ca. early March 1979, Record Plant?; (backing tracks, overdubs, vocals) ca. 1988-1991, Mountain Studios. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, lead guitar? rhythm guitar? Korg M1?; Belew: lead guitar? drums?; House: violin?; Eno: synthesizer?; Murray: bass?; Kızılçay?: Korg, guitar, bass, drums? Produced: Bowie; engineered: Richards.

First release: 27 August 1991, Lodger (Ryko reissue, RCD 10146).

Like other “Berlin” outtakes, little of “I Pray, Olé” hails from its alleged era. Mixed and released during Bowie’s Tin Machine years, its lyric is very Machine (“it’s a god eat god world”) while its guitars suggest Reeves Gabrels, though the wailing towards the fade seems more Adrian Belew’s style. The drumming is almost certainly not Dennis Davis, despite him getting liner-note credit. Candidates are Belew (who started out as a drummer and who reportedly drummed on some March 1979 Lodger overdub sessions) and, far more likely, Bowie’s Eighties studio hand Erdal Kızılçay.

Played the track by Nicholas Pegg, Tony Visconti didn’t recognize “I Pray, Olé,” saying he’d “definitely rule it out of the Lodger/ Scary Monsters sessions… the mixing is not my style,” and guessing it could have started in early 1980 at Mountain Studios with David Richards. Despite its sonic affinities with Tin Machine II, Tin Machine’s producer Tim Palmer also had no memory of recording the track. It’s likely that “I Pray, Olé” started with Bowie’s 1988 remake of “Look Back in Anger,” and that while revising the latter, Bowie listened to Lodger tapes and retrieved a few things — a Simon House violin line, an Eno keyboard (Eno’s credited on synthesizer in the Ryko CD liners) — to mix into the foundation of an otherwise brand-new track. In 2011, Palmer said “it was no coincidence that David was re-working ‘Look Back in Anger’ during the Tin Machine days. I think he missed the excitement of that style of recording.” Whatever Bowie’s motive, he made a cuckoo’s egg: the official outtake of an album it had nothing to do with. Fittingly, “I Pray, Olé” is only found today on the long out-of-print Ryko Lodger. Fabricating a lost song is a very Bowie conceit, foreshadowing his mischief in the Nineties, where he helped to devise the biography of a nonexistent painter.

PLAY IT SAFE

(Bowie, Pop.) Recorded: ca. late August-September 1979, Studio 1, Rockfield Studios, Amberley Court, Monmouth, Gwent, Wales. Iggy Pop: lead vocal; Steve New: lead guitar; Ivan Kral: lead and rhythm guitar; Barry Andrews: keyboards, synthesizer; Glen Matlock: bass, backing vocal?; Klaus Kruger: drums; Bowie, Jim Kerr, Charlie Burchill? Mick MacNeil? Brian McGee? Derek Forbes?: backing vocals. Produced: James Williamson (uncredited), Pat Moran; engineered: Peter Haden.

First release: 8 February 1980, Soldier (Arista SPART 1117/AB 4259, US #125). Live: (Pop) 1979-1980.

Iggy Pop ended his RCA contract with a quickie live album and used an advance from his new Arista deal to spend the latter half of 1978 writing songs. It was domestic life in West Berlin with his girlfriend, the photographer Esther Friedman. He released a fine record in April 1979, New Values, a minor success in Britain. Arista believed the next album could be his commercial breakthrough at last and gave Pop a New Wave supergroup: former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, former Rich Kid Steve New, and Barry Andrews, whose organ playing was a primary color of the first XTC albums. Pop also brought back former Stooge James Williamson, who’d produced New Values. For a studio, Pop chose Rockfield, a converted farmhouse in southeast Wales (Queen had recorded Sheer Heart Attack there).

Having toured for a good chunk of 1979, Pop had to come up with songs in a month’s time. He’d lost Scott Thurston, who’d helped craft New Values, and was relying on Matlock to fill the gap. The sessions alternated between inertia and paranoia. Williamson demanded constant retakes while trying to rig up a forty-eight-track console and chiding Pop whenever he got too outrageous in the vocal booth. Then Bowie arrived, reportedly dressed like the Scarlet Pimpernel in an all-red outfit, “complete with cape,” as per Paul Trynka. Realizing that the studio atmosphere was toxic, Bowie acted as an “Eno” figure, trying to generate fresh ideas. He began spinning tales of London lowlife, particularly the notorious John Bindon, a gangster turned actor (Get Carter, Performance) who had run security for Led Zeppelin and was renowned for having an enormous penis that, Bowie reportedly said, was greatly appreciated by Princess Margaret.

This was enough for Pop, who improvised an obscene rap about Bindon and the Princess. Being a criminal was like being a rock star, it was better than being a rock star: the safest thing to be is a criminal. I’m gonna play it safe! Iggy beamed. The band worked up a groove driven by Andrews’ keyboards and Klaus Kruger’s drums. Bowie encouraged Pop to get wilder. Williamson, believing Bowie was trying to usurp him and still sore about Bowie’s mix of the Stooges’ Raw Power, allegedly retaliated by sending a dose of feedback into Bowie’s headphones. Bowie and Williamson soon departed, leaving the album rudderless — it was pieced together months later in London.

Bowie considered “Play It Safe” as a studio exercise to lead Pop to write better songs, so hearing that it could make the album, he feared Pop would run afoul of British libel laws by slandering the royals. Meeting Pop and Ivan Kral in New York in December 1979, Bowie urged them to axe the track. Instead, Pop reworked “Play It Safe,” cutting the Princess Margaret verses and most of New’s guitar lines — the two were now on the outs. Even bowdlerized, “Play It Safe” stood out on Pop’s album Soldier. The keyboard drone is a base for a pub singalong refrain (hollered by Bowie and most of Simple Minds, who had been working in the adjacent studio). Pop starts with Dwight Eisenhower and ends with the Son of Sam, Jim Jones, and Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” (singing it live in late 1979, he swapped in fresh characters: “Judas played it safe! Tokyo Rose played it safe! Fulgencio Batista! Lucky Luciano — he never got a jaywalking ticket!!”) There’s poignancy in how he sings the title line; it’s the voice of a man trapped in a diminishing legend.

VELVET COUCH PIANO-LA (PIANOLA)

(Bowie, Cale.) Recorded: (unreleased) ca. 5-15 October 1979, Ciarbis Studios (sic), New York. Bowie: vocal; John Cale: piano, vocal.

John Cale first heard of David Bowie during the former’s tenure as “weirdo music” A&R man for Warner Records in the early Seventies. Cale loved Hunky Dory, which he saw as the heir to Lionel Bart and Anthony Newley, but he knew Warner wouldn’t offer Bowie a record deal, as so happened. The two finally met later in the decade, in New York. Bowie was hanging around the underground scene while Cale was playing riotous shows at CBGB (Greil Marcus, on one gig: “from the way Cale took and held the stage, you would have thought war had been declared”).

On April Fool’s Day 1979, Bowie and Cale performed together at a Philip Glass and Steve Reich benefit show promoted as “The First Concert of the Eighties.” Bowie, in a black kimono, attempted to play viola for the first time in his life for Cale’s “Sabotage.” A reviewer noted that “Bowie was unheard in the mix, which was just as well, since he seemed to have no command of the instrument.” That October, when Bowie was back in New York, he “picked me up to go to the Mudd Club and I was in the studio, and we started working, throwing things around,” Cale later wrote. Two demos were later bootlegged. “He could improvise songs very well, which was what that bootleg was all about,” Cale said in 2008,

When we did that bootleg, it was like the good old bad old days. We were partying very hard. It was exciting working with him, as there were a lot of possibilities and everything, but we were our own worst enemies at that point… Did I ever want to produce Bowie? After spending time with him, I realized the answer was no. The way we were then would have made it too dangerous.

“Piano-la,” or “Pianola,” has a barely-audible Bowie singing place-filler notes over Cale’s piano. “Velvet Couch” is more realized, with Bowie tracing together a melody, singing lines like “we won’t do things like that anymore,” “we’ll be as we are” and “they never sleep and they never play guitar.” Having little in common with Bowie’s work on Lodger and Scary Monsters, they’re more in line with Cale pieces like “Chorale.” Was Bowie considering a partnership with Cale for the Eighties, with Cale as his new Eno? All that remains are these shadows of songs.