Ashes to Ashes by Chris O'Leary

Author:Chris O'Leary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

The Electrician and the Lodger

The Walker Brothers reunited in 1975, to fleeting success. With enough label money left to fund a last record in 1978, they cut their own songs. Scott brought “Heroes” to the studio, where it became “the reference album when we were making Nite Flights,” the engineer Steve Parker told Reynolds. “If we’d had an Eno character in there, it would have been even more stunning, I think.” Nite Flights’ peak was Scott’s “The Electrician,” where he pushed beyond Bowie and Eno. In its refrain, he corrodes his voice, hanging between being sharp and on the note. It suited the lyric, a love song about American complicity in Central American torture regimes. There was nothing of its like in 1978. Released as a single, “The Electrician” was a future no one wanted (see “The Motel”).

In September 1978, Eno brought Nite Flights to Montreux, where he and Bowie were recording Lodger. Bowie was stunned. One can’t blame him. Imagine if a great stone face you’ve been making offerings to for years rumbles up a response. Over a decade later, Bowie returned the volley by covering Nite Flights’ title track.

Bowie said he chose “Nite Flights” to symbolize the unease and danger he and Iman had felt upon embarking on a new marriage relatively late in life. As with “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday,” there was also vanity in his choice — “Nite Flights” is the closest Walker ever came to sounding like Bowie, from its “Heroes” callbacks (“we will be gods”) to its arrangement. Bowie and Nile Rodgers smoothed Walker’s insistent disco by slowing the tempo and letting the song groove, freed from the piano, snare, and hi-hat pulse of the Walker track. They wove a thick curtain of sound. Where Walker makes the chord change to B-flat major on “blood-lite” portend something awful, Bowie breezes through it. He sings Walker’s bizarre, violent lines (“the dark dug up by dogs!… the raw meat fist you choke!) with cool poise, taking the first octave leap — “it’s so cold!” — without blinking.

“Nite Flights,” Bowie covering Walker’s most Bowie-colored song, was an exception for two artists who usually stood at an influential imbalance. Bowie was a Scott Walker fan (hearing a recording of Walker wishing him a happy fiftieth birthday nearly made Bowie weep, saying “I see God in the window”). Walker, whenever he mentioned Bowie (rarely), did so with gracious reserve, the quiet complimentary manner of an artist to a distant patron. They were two planets in the same system: one more favored by the sun, a rich world with a host of satellites wheeling around it; the other smaller, less hospitable, given to long, elliptical orbits. Sometimes the two have been in sync, or have eclipsed the other. But their dance is over. The larger world has stopped moving; it hangs suspended now, a preservation of its best days. The lesser orb still goes on its way.

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