David Bowie

Having shaken off the glam intoxication of the early part of the decade and set aside the "plastic soul" experiment of "Young Americans", by the mid-70s David Bowie plunges into an apparently inescapable crisis. He's living in Los Angeles amid total narcotic chaos, ravaged by cocaine and obsessed with black magic. His marriage is falling apart, his relations with his managers are stormy, and his very existence seems on the verge of imploding. Skeletal and emaciated like an urban vampire, he holes up in his apartment, a prisoner of his own phobias. Visiting him, friends John Lennon and Elton John become convinced he's close to death.

Nonetheless, the musical genius in him manages to pull a revolutionary album like “Station to Station” out of the hat, one that masterfully fuses the warmth of rhythm and blues with the chilling German electronics of Kraftwerk and Neu! (on the freeways of California, Bowie travelled with “Autobahn” as his permanent soundtrack, dreaming of a return to his native Europe). “It's not the side effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love”, and again: “the European canon is here”, he cries on the title track. With his mind projected into the future, Bowie writes cryptic lyrics inspired by electronic brains, fantastical television systems and other communication devices. It's the prelude to the Berlin turn, where the former Ziggy Stardust would find his path to redemption. For the occasion, he would put on yet another of his masks: that of the “Thin White Duke”, dressed in pleated black trousers, waistcoat and white shirt, with his red-blond hair slicked back. A cold, robotic being, plagued by urban paranoia and isolated in his world of metallic music.

Bowie moves to Berlin, drawn by its bleakly Mitteleuropean atmosphere, but also by its cultural ferment: the electronic experiments of Kraftwerk, the expressionist cinema of Pabst, the theatre of Brecht, the new German painting (the expressionist school Die Brücke would inspire the covers of Bowie's albums – “Low” and “Heroes” – and those of his friend Iggy Pop – “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life”). During a tour, meeting Brian Eno lays the groundwork for a joint project. Thus begins Bowie's most adventurous journey: a descent into the depths of his own shattered mind. The result is the famous Berlin trilogy “Low-Heroes-Lodger”, a cornerstone of the rock to come.

“Heroes” is the second chapter of the saga, even though it was recorded almost in parallel with its “twin” “Low” (1976-'77). For the occasion, a stellar team assembled at the Hansa by the Wall studios in Berlin: besides Bowie, handling vocals, keyboards, guitars, saxophone and koto, there were Brian Eno (fresh off the electronic experiments of “Another Green World”), Robert Fripp (guitarist and leader of King Crimson, and co-author with Eno himself of two albums that can genuinely be called “time machines”) and Carlos Alomar, the impeccable rhythm guitarist who had long been part of the “Thin White Duke's” entourage; Dennis Davis on percussion and George Murray on bass complete the lineup.

An intoxicating hallucination, caught between dreamlike states, ambient textures, synthesizers and visionary vibrations, “Heroes” also lets a few rays of light shine through here and there, whereas “Low” was pure, unrelenting tragedy. Yet the avant-garde atmospheres remain – tense, claustrophobic, glacial – along with the tracklist's two-part structure, which, as on the previous record, places nearly all the sung tracks on side one and the instrumentals on side two. The link to the following “Lodger” (1978) instead comes with the closing “The Secret Life Of Arabia”, where one can already detect the first hints of the sound Bowie would present two years later: touches of Middle Eastern flavour and “African” sounds.

Bowie's voice cuts deep into the record like a blade, backed by equally piercing guitars and chilling bursts of synth. The subdued opening of the first track, “Beauty And The Beast”, shouldn't fool you: shortly after, an imposing wall of sound rises up, and the rhythm starts racing like a locomotive. The “glam” essences of Roxy Music combine with a hardcore-flavoured guitar riff (courtesy of Fripp) and a “beat” rhythm pierced by Bowie's playful voice, which, as ever, manages to make even the most innocuous chorus sound compelling. The harsh, dissonant singing style isn't too far removed from what Bowie was working on with Iggy Pop at the time, and it marks a break from the fairy-tale mood of the story (and of the eponymous film by Jean Cocteau). The following “Joe The Lion” is another lash of Fripp's guitar, with Bowie “scripting” the protagonist's ravings: “Nail me to my car/ and I'll tell you who you are”(!).

A surreal mood, then, that almost seems designed to distract the listener from the arrival of that hurricane of emotions which is the title track. Built to perfection on the interplay between the magical embroidery of Fripp's guitar and Eno's monotonous, obsessive harmonies, “Heroes” is above all one of the most illuminating essays in Bowie's melodic gift. The “Thin White Duke's” voice reaches heights of anguished intensity. It's the desperate cry of the last romantic on Earth who, amid the rubble of a collapsing world, begs his woman not to leave, not to take the easy way out, because “We can be heroes, just for one day”… The backdrop is the Berlin Wall, an obstacle between the two lovers and a monument to a Europe torn apart by the Cold War. “Heroes” isn't just the album's centrepiece and one of Bowie's signature songs: it may well be the finest rock song ever written.

That the album has by now reached its emotional climax is also clear from the following “Sons Of The Silent Age”: a heart-wrenching ballad, swollen with desperate melancholy. The breathtaking opening, with Bowie using the saxophone in an “alienating” way, almost like a siren, soon gives way to a driving chorus, in a kind of distorted rhythm'n'blues, while a ghostly choir rises in the background. A miracle of balance between sonic abstraction and emotional urgency, “Sons Of The Silent Age” is a gem too often overlooked in Bowie's songbook.

But Bowie also proves himself a prophetic composer: in the harsh “Blackout”, buoyed by unusual vocal harmonies and guitar acrobatics worthy of Fripp's finest work, one can already detect the seeds of much of the new wave to come. A synth whistle and a bass line usher in “V-2 Schneider” (dedicated by Bowie to Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk), in which the Thin White Duke unleashes an extraordinary “dissonant” sax performance. The track, built on bass and drums with a robotic Booker T. & the MG's-style groove, reflects on one hand Bowie's obsession with pop-dance, and on the other Eno's studies in rhythm'n'blues. Almost entirely instrumental (the vocal is limited to mechanically repeating the title), “V-2 Schneider” acts as a watershed between the record's two sections, ferrying the listener into the even icier, foggier scenery of the second half. Synthesizer deliriums, unusual harmonies, swirling sound vortices throw open the doors to a new musical universe.

Eno's funereal keyboards carve out the stunning “Sense Of Doubt”, which drifts with the weight of a Teutonic tragedy, in a sinister, menacing mood. The atmospheres grow ever more abstract, brushing against the ambient music and new age of many years later. The delicate “Moss Garden” finds Bowie engaged in a duet between koto (a traditional Japanese stringed instrument) and synthesizer, in a Zen watercolour of colour and light that exudes the scents of the Orient with ecstatic sensuality. The result isn't far removed from the electronic experiments of Autechre twenty years later. “Neukoln” – whose name comes from a Berlin district where Turkish workers lived in grim tower blocks built facing the Wall – is a dark-hued expressionist fresco, disfigured by the piercing shrieks of an Ornette Coleman-style sax.

The scenery shifts abruptly for the finale: from the mists of Mitteleuropa to the desert of “The Secret Life Of Arabia”. But what changes above all is the music: the atmospheric electronics of the preceding episodes give way to a bizarre dance-rock rhythm, tinged with kitsch, decadent shades. It is at once the most conventional and the most “disorienting” track on the entire album.

Combining Bowie's romantic-decadent sensibility, Eno's oblique genius and Fripp's reckless guitar work, “Heroes” marks a formal milestone in the hybridization of rock and avant-garde electronics. Everything is geared towards building a sonic architecture that is as (apparently) heterogeneous as it is cohesive. Even Bowie's own voice, at the peak of its expressive power, becomes an instrument in service of this project. And in the background remains icy Berlin, the ideal “canvas” for Bowie's therapeutic psychodrama (“It was my clinic,” he would recall), but also a metaphor for his irrepressible sense of anguish and alienation.

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27/10/2006