Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Beat Instrumental DECEMBER 1977 - by Peter Douglas

DAVID BOWIE: "HEROES"

Some albums you can review after the first few bars of track one, side one. Lazy reviewers, like myself, prefer the job of writing about them - it's a cinch. Just stuff the music into this or that bag, find a boxful of adjectives appropriate to the particular genre and away you go. Easy.

So what the hell do you do when Bowie comes out with a new one? Well, first you listen to it carefully for six months, then check back through his previous albums for reference points, reread The Man Who Fell To Earth, ask your friends, your colleagues, what they think of it, and maybe a few weeks later you'll be in a position to make some sort of hesitant assessment in print.

At this rate, I'm almost ready to review Low. Unfortunately, "Heroes" is turning at a steady 33⅓ on the deck, waiting for the rattle of typewriter keys.

OK - for a start, it's very much the matching segment of an idea that began with the last album. The white bits are black, and vice-versa. Or maybe it's more like a negative of the Low photograph - somehow more sinister. The more conventional the music appears to be, as on Sons Of The Silent Age, for example, the more chilling its effect. It's alright when Brian Eno's synthesizers are whining eerily in the background, because that spells desolation, it's a recognizable formula, we know what he means by it.

But what does he mean in Blackout? What's all this talk of cages, ice, rain, panthers? "Get me off the streets / Get me on my feet / Hot air gets me into a blackout / Get me off the streets /Get some protection / Oh get me on my feet / While the streets block off /Getting some skin exposure to the blackout / Get me on my feet..." What the hell is he on about? And why does it sound so bloody terrifying?

This album seems to have been recorded around the same period as Low. The musicians are the same, with the addition of Robert Fripp. And as before it was largely recorded within the grim, grey Teutonic wasteland of Berlin, at Hansa Ton studios. Tony Visconti is again the co-producer. A continuing story, you might say. Fine - just don't ask me about the plot.

Bowie has been elusiveness personified for almost as long as he's been making albums. Every time you think you've got him in sight, he slides out of focus, slips to one side, dissolves, like some kind of amoeba endowed with an infuriating and inscrutable intelligence, a completely alien form. You can only describe your fleeting impression of what he looked like. And even that's no guarantee that he won't look entirely different next time. Last time I heard, he was dressing up like Hitler.

And the music? Strange, evocative, haunting, chilling, relentless... the crappy old adjectives tumble wearily from their box. Forget 'em. It's hard enough trying to describe music you like, let alone music you think is important.