Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Rip It Up NOVEMBER 1978 - by George Kay

BOWIE: STATION TO STATION

When it comes to talking about the seventies the general critical consensus opts for the view that there was nothing happening until last year. Most people were either clutching at the fraying strands of the sixties' superstars or submerging in the excesses of the Glitter Rock era which arose as a reaction to the faded jean generation. David Bowie fits in here somewhere, at the time cursed with the title of King of The Glitter Scene as a result of his effeminate intellectual posturing on Hunky Dory and his role playing on Ziggy Stardust and subsequent live guitar sucking technique with Mick Ronson. He continued to project himself through various mock personalities as each new album emerged Aladdin Sane, Cracked Actor, Diamond Dawg prophet of Doom, Thomas Jerome Newton, Thin White Duke... He changed so regularly that there was nothing tangible or predictable within his personalities or music that could objectively lead rock out of the fickle chaos of the '70s.

Another problem was he was more of an assimilator of styles than a true innovator. He had the uncanny ability of being able to transform the rock fad of the day into his own particular often abstract vision. He juxtaposes what he has absorbed with his own peculiar ideas, and the results are often discordant: "I will take something, look at it, and then say okay now let's bend it out of focus and see what that does to our very comfortable positions. A little bit of unease."

He has used this discordant method of writing fairly conspicuously since Station To Station when he deliberately contrasted "very unsoully lyrics with very soul-influenced music. It's always taking something and just twisting it."

Generally speaking Bowie's albums can be divided into three phases, each phase determined by the environment he was in at the time: (a) the Glitter period in which he was a reflection of the overall aimlessness, and includes the albums Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold The World, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Pin Ups and David Live the last will and testament of this stage of his career. (b) the Philadelphia/New York soul-disco hustle of Young Americans and Station To Station and (c) the Berlin landscapes of Low, "Heroes" and now Stage.

His earlier stuff is the most confusing. He was what he calls "synthesising styles" from Space Oddity through to Diamond Dogs and this approach peaked with the peerless Ziggy Stardust and gradually disintegrated to the bleak melodrama of Diamond Dogs, an album nevertheless Bowie feels "gains potency with time".

The music-according-to-place theory really arrived with the recording of Young Americans in the Philadelphia Sigma Sound Studios at a time, coincidentally of course, when soul-disco was favoured to lead rock out of the '70s' confusion. Bowie was no longer writing for a particular generation, his music instead was "a statement of the emotive forces that one feels in particular environments. It's no longer an age thing with me, it's a place thing, and place applies to any age." But Young Americans was a welcome change and it stands beside the great second Average White Band album as successful white boy ventures into soul.

Station To Station recorded in ten days in Los Angeles after the completion of The Man Who Fell To Earth, marked the beginning of a very difficult and self-indulgent time for Bowie. He became heavily involved with various drugs and he began to depend on people "who indulged his ego". The album itself was a cross-blend of plastic soul and de-vocalisation that anticipated Low and "Heroes", but it sold poorly despite excellent reviews. It was, as NME's Steve Dlarke said at the time, the first truly '70s album. Couldn't agree more.

Bowie managed to pull himself together, moved to Berlin and worked with Brian Eno to produce his most dramatic musical change, Low, the story of the disintegration of his personal life on one side and a chilling instrumental picture of his views of Poland (Warszawa) and West Berlin on the second side. "Heroes" was a further development of this "environmental music" but in a more hopeful, positive way, the result of having lived independently and undisturbed in Berlin for a year. The title track was especially moving inspired by Bowie's actual observation of two lovers meeting daily under a gun turret at the Wall. The album was apparently recorded during much hilarity but it marks a serious and finely attuned maturity in not only his music but also in his life. That is until the next change.

He has recently completed David Hemming's Just A Gigolo and in July he began Wally, the film of the life of Egon Schiele, Expressionist painter. During the filming of Gigolo he admitted that he felt "incredibly divorced from rock, and it's a genuine striving to be that way," yet this may only be the beginning of another phase which, if it yields only a hint of what he has already achieved, I for one would be more than grateful. I hope he keeps going from station to station.