David Bowie

Amid the flood of releases – a deluge of albums, books and commemorative articles – put out to mark ten years since the passing of David Bowie, the fiftieth anniversary of one of his most significant works, "Station To Station", slots in with surgical precision. The album first hit shops on January 23, 1976. Bowie was coming off the "plastic soul" turn he'd honed with "Young Americans", and off his first US number one single, the funk-rock of "Fame", co-written with guitarist Carlos Alomar with support from John Lennon. Having packed away the alter ego glam Ziggy Stardust and his "American variant" Aladdin Sane, along with their trappings of mascara, platform boots and sequins, Bowie had also buried the plasticized soulman mentioned above, and was searching for a way to simply be himself. But, paradoxically, he would manage it by playing yet another, brand-new character — the one with which, perhaps more than any other, he would come to be identified: The Thin White Duke. A sickly character born out of the most toxic possible humus: David Jones in the throes of full-blown paranoid crisis during his California period.

LA's via crucis

An artificial portrait of a soulman, "Young Americans" had split critics and thrown fans off balance. Some went so far as to call it "the first black soul record cut by a white musician", but there were no shortage of detractors either, quick to dismiss it as a cold exercise in style. Either way, Bowie had once again been ahead of the curve, tearing down barriers between genres: before long, hordes of white artists would jump aboard the disco bandwagon, starting with the Bee Gees, struck down by Saturday Night Fever. But of course, by the time disco mania exploded, Bowie was already somewhere else. Not physically, though. Because, lured by the sirens of show business and cinema — in which he'd made his debut with the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth" (1976) — he had settled in Los Angeles, the city that would drag him through hell.

North Doheny Drive, Bel Air, a stone's throw from the house where in 1969 Charles Manson's followers murdered five people, including actress Sharon Tate. It's here that the future Thin White Duke sank into full-blown narcotic chaos, prey to dealers and loan sharks as well as his own demons. His marriage was falling apart, his relationships with his managers were stormy, and his very existence seemed on the verge of imploding. Skeletal and emaciated like some urban vampire, he retreated into his apartment, a prisoner of his own phobias and paranoias. During his Los Angeles period, Bowie was taking staggering amounts of cocaine and surviving on a diet of cigarettes, peppers and milk, spending 1975-76 in a state of constant psychic terror. Some accounts from that period, drawn mainly from an interview with reporter Cameron Crowe, describe a Bowie living in an apartment full of ancient Egyptian artifacts and black candles that were kept perpetually lit, surrounded by assorted Nazi iconography, poring over treatises on black magic and keeping his own bottled urine in the fridge, terrified that a coven of witches was trying to steal his sperm for some dark ritual, and convinced he was receiving secret messages from the Rolling Stones and threats from Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin (notoriously a follower of Aleister Crowley). He himself would later recall that ordeal: "I got down to less than 45 kilos. It was really painful. I was paranoid, manic-depressive: the usual emotional backdrop brought on by amphetamine and cocaine abuse and everything else."

Yet it was precisely during those terrible California days that "Station To Station" took shape — the album that would return him to the charts (No. 3 in the US, No. 5 in the UK) and usher in another extraordinary musical era.

A dark, brooding record steeped in unsettling occult symbolism, with numerous references to black magic, the Jewish Kabbalah and the Tree of Life, "Station To Station" bears witness to Bowie's own peculiar American via crucis. "It had a certain magnetism associated with magic," he would recall in 1999. "The words themselves, Station To Station, have a meaning if you take them as referring to the stations of the cross, but I went further: they referred to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life."

Once again, though, the London-born artist felt the need to split himself in two, to conjure up an alter ego onto whom he could offload his burden of suffering and diseased fantasies. For the occasion, a new character stood ready, destined to become his most famous alias. His name is tucked into a line of the title track, which was also the phrase initially chosen as the album's title: The Return Of The Thin White Duke. Slicked-back red-blond hair, waistcoat and white shirt, black pleated trousers — the Thin White Duke is a cold, aristocratic being, intoxicated by drugs, alienated by urban paranoia and isolated within his own world of robotic music. A close relative of the Thomas Newton character Bowie played in "The Man Who Fell To Earth". Onto him he would vent all the obsessions of the period, including a sickly fascination with Nazi mythology. "The Thin White Duke was a pretty nasty character, an ogre. But at bottom the best way to fight an evil force is to reduce it to caricature," he would theorize some years later.

At the court of the Thin White Duke

For the sessions, in October 1975, Bowie gathered a large group of musicians in the studio: Carlos Alomar, Earl Slick, Dennis Davis, Warren Peace, Weldon Irvine, George Murray and Roy Bittan (the pianist from Bruce Springsteen's circle), laying the groundwork for the Murray-Davis-Alomar rhythm section that would play on all his subsequent albums through to "Scary Monsters" in 1980. Recorded at Cherokee and Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles, "Station To Station" inherits the soul spirit of "Young Americans" and hurls it further out, pushing it to breaking point, shattering it.

During the recording sessions, which took place in surreal circumstances in Los Angeles, Bowie was at the peak of his drug dependency, at times even losing touch with reality altogether, to the point that he could barely remember any of it. Later, in an interview given in 1997, he would state: "I remember working with Earl Slick on the guitar sounds, and that's all I remember. I don't even remember the studio. I know it was in Los Angeles because I read about it."

Around that time Bowie had started listening to a great deal of experimental German music, especially from the kraut-rock scene; his gaze was turning back toward Europe, which he intended to embrace again without having to give up American groove and rhythm.

Where “Young Americans” often remained pure formal abstraction, “Station To Station” hits the mark dead on, fusing guitar-driven rock with electronics, the warm, primal pulse of afro/black music with the icy synths of the German outfits Kraftwerk and Neu! (on California's freeways, Bowie drove with “Autobahn” as his permanent soundtrack, dreaming of a return to “his” 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, over a bed of rhythms and noise recreating the sound of a speeding train.

The more than ten minutes of “Station To Station”, built like a miniature prog suite, open with the treated noise of a locomotive, harking back to Kraftwerk's “Autobahn” and anticipating the aesthetic of “Trans Europe Express”, which would come out a year and a half later. And it's in that very definitive suite of theirs that the Teutonic symbionts would return the favor with the lines: “…from station to station, back to Dusseldorf city, meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie…”. This game of cross-references, later continued with “V2 Schneider” on “Heroes”, would prove so dazzling that it decisively broke into the imagination of a new generation of wave musicians (Ultravox, Joy Division, Bauhaus and many others), for whom the Bowie/Kraftwerk pairing would become guiding lights. In the following two “movements” of the title track, Slick's guitar riffs burst in alongside a few scattered synth phrases, before the Thin White Duke takes the stage for the dizzying final crescendo, where Bowie once again proves himself an extraordinarily theatrical performer. If anything, the live version included on “Stage”, the 1978 live album, is even better.

The demon in the screen

With his mind projected into the future, the Thin White Duke writes cryptic lyrics inspired by cybernetics and sci-fi television systems, taken to their extreme in “Tvc15”: vintage piano opens the curtain on an interlocking game of guitar and synth-pop keyboards, seasoned with delirious vocalizing (the “oh oh oh oh” repeated a full 28 times!). The colour TV becomes “a great big friend” who soon reveals demonic traits, ending up devouring even his girlfriend (“Videodrome” would arrive 7 years later): “Up every evening ‘bout half eight or nine/ I give my complete attention/ to a very good friend of mine/ He’s quadraphonic/ he’s got more channels/ So hologramic, oh my T V C one five… Oh, so demonic/ oh, my T V C one five”.

“Golden Years” is the single that “Young Americans” was missing: plastic soul, yes, but a wonderfully evocative one, with seductive backing vocals, handclapping and an incisive melody. It's again a black soul that runs through the grooves of “Stay”, which started out as an attempt at a funk reworking of the 1972 gem “John, I’m Only Dancing”, with Alomar and Slick's guitars duelling against each other.

“Word On A Wing”, on the other hand, was born out of a phase of psychological terror and desperate spiritual searching that Bowie went through during the filming of “The Man Who Fell To Earth”, in a period of acute cocaine dependency: “That was the first time I really thought seriously about Christ and God in any depth, and that song was a protection. It was something I needed to bring out from inside myself to protect me from some of the situations I felt were happening on the set”, revealed the English artist, who around that time began wearing a silver crucifix given to him by his father.

The only non-original track on the album is “Wild Is The Wind”, a cover of a song written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington in 1956 and adapted as the theme for the eponymous western film released a year later, which would become a classic for black icon Nina Simone: amid acoustic guitars and soft keyboards, Bowie intensifies its epic, aching dimension with an acrobatic vocal performance, accentuating that deep Scott Walker-esque crooner tone destined to remain one of his defining traits.

The legacy and the reissue

Despite the troubled sessions that spawned it, “Station To Station” would become one of the most significant projects in Bowie's artistic journey: while on one hand it represents the completion of his “American season” (launched in 1975 with “Young Americans”), on the other it planted the seeds for what would become the “Berlin trilogy”, inaugurated a year later with the double punch of “Low” and “Heroes”.

For the fiftieth anniversary, the limited-edition reissue of “Station To Station” sees the light of day as an Lp half-speed mastered by John Webber at AIR Studios, with no additional treatment applied in the transfer, and as a picture disc pressed from the same master, reproducing a poster used to advertise the album back in 1976.

The first single lifted from this album, “Golden Years”, released in November 1975, would take Bowie into the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic. The second single, “Tvc 15”, a decade later would be heard by nearly two billion people when Bowie chose it to open his set at Live Aid. The title track's fame, meanwhile, would be cemented by Bowie's performance of it as himself in a memorable scene from Uli Edel's cult movie “Christiane F. – We Children from Bahnhof Zoo” (1980).

Ten days after the release of “Station To Station”, David set off on the Isolar Tour, which would take in more than 65 dates across 11 countries. A tour of rarefied elegance that abandoned the excesses of the past, with stark stage sets lit by cold white neon lights, against which images from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì's film “Un Chien Andalou” were projected. “A synthesis of Bertolt Brecht and the Doors”, is how Bowie would describe it, renewing his tribute to Kraftwerk by using their music before taking the stage, and bringing on Iggy Pop, freshly discharged from a psychiatric institution, as his guest. Wrecked by their American adventure, the two former “chemical brothers” would reunite in Europe, where a new life would begin for both of them. The Californian nightmare would in fact officially come to an end during the aborted sessions for the soundtrack to “The Man Who Fell to Earth”. One day, overwhelmed by stress, Bowie collapsed on the studio floor. He then decided to make a radical change in his life, giving up the soundtrack, which would be handed over to John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, and choosing to leave Los Angeles right away. A New Career In A New Town.

At the end of the tour, in fact, after a brief stopover in Switzerland, Bowie would move with his assistant Coco Schwab and with Iggy Pop to Berlin. It was the pull of the Old Continent, of that mother culture in many ways opposed to the American one that was by then devouring him. And he would feel it once and for all during the “Station To Station” tour, when he and Iggy found themselves crossing Eastern Europe by train. The city of the Wall, a searing symbol of the Cold War but also a Mitteleuropean cradle, with its leaden, decadent allure, would exert an irresistible pull on Bowie, pushing him to “discover new forms of writing and develop a new musical language”. And that is precisely what he would manage to achieve with the celebrated trilogy “Low”-“Heroes”-“Lodger”, the fruit of his collaboration with Brian Eno. The final destination of the via crucis that was “Station To Station”.

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28/04/2026