David Bowie FAQ by Ian Chapman

Author:Ian Chapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2020-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

Bye-Bye to Glam Rock and Hello to Soul and Ambient-Electronic Music

With four albums firmly situated within the glam camp, things were about to change dramatically. In 1975, Bowie entered his self-named and very fleeting “Plastic Soul Man” phase, relocating to the United States and recruiting a band of top Philadelphia soul musicians and convincingly swapping the guitars of glam for the brass of soul. It was his first big stylistic change since becoming a star, and while it bamboozled his glam fans, so convincing was his white-boy-from-London facsimile of the soul style that it brought him to the attention of a whole raft of new fans. It especially brought him significant success in the United States, where the album reached the top ten—far higher than any of his previous efforts stateside—and even more notably provided him with his first number one hit in “Fame.”

As quickly as he’d reinvented himself as a soul singer, he dropped both the role and, for the most part, the style in the following Station to Station (1976).

On an album consisting of only six songs, Bowie became the Thin White Duke and began his European canon. Dense, long, technologically driven songs, such as the title track and “TVC15,” are juxtaposed against beautiful ballads, such as “Wild Is the Wind” or the beautifully crafted “Word on a Wing.”

If the technology evident in the instrumentation of Station to Station warned of a future direction, then it all came to pass on Low (1977). Here, in the most daring stylistic change ever made by any rock artist, Bowie entered the world of ambient electronic music. In collaboration with electronic whiz kid Brian Eno, the album suggested music-for-robots-performed-by-robots and bleak, impersonal postapocalyptic wastelands, especially on the remarkable second side of the record. The human voice was mostly secondary and subsumed, used only sparingly in the traditional role of singer-of-words and more as just another sound flavor, often found making unintelligible utterings and strange colors to enhance, not dominate, the ambient instrumental soundscapes. Having recently featured in the leading role of Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg’s groundbreaking science-fiction movie The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), David Bowie had also worked on a potential sound track. While this music wasn’t used in the movie in the end (see chapter 14), the experience certainly influenced the music of Low and beyond.

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