On Some Faraway Beach by David Sheppard

Author:David Sheppard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409105930
Publisher: Orion

10. Distributed Being

‘You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.’ (Salvador Dali)

West Berlin in the 1970s was an enigmatic anomaly of a city. A quirk of post-World War II superpower spoils-sharing, the neon-lit metropolis to the west of the infamous dividing wall was effectively a landlocked island of capitalist excess entirely encircled by Communist-command economy austerity. To live in West Berlin was to live in bourgeois denial; the looming Eastern Bloc blotted out with droll Berlinerwitze wit and, for the majority, disposable Deutschmarks – this being the peak of the German Democratic Republic’s thirty-year ‘Wirtschaftswunder’, its ‘economic miracle’, or what contemporary anticapitalist cell the Red Army Faction preferred to call ‘the reign of consumer terror’.

David Bowie, himself caught between sybaritic self-indulgence and penitent abstemiousness, felt perfectly at home in Berlin’s ambiguous, twilight buffer zone. He and Tony Visconti had decamped to Köthener Strasse’s Die Hansa Tonstudio the previous October to mix Low, immediately falling for its decaying charms, if not its overpowering stench of stale, ingrained hashish smoke. Bowie and his ever-present sidekick Iggy Pop were now living in a rented, black-walled apartment above a pipe shop at 155 Hauptstrasse, in the city’s mainly Turkish Schöneberg district. Just a short stroll from Hansa, the flat had been picked out by Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese, partly for its anonymity. In it, Bowie and Iggy would adopt matching, short ‘peasant’ haircuts (Bowie even affected an unlikely moustache), and hoped that afternoons spent painting, and in Bowie’s case making innumerable lithographs, or simply grocery-shopping, would wean them off their various dependencies. Although rumours of backsliding cocaine use circulated, Bowie and Iggy’s main tipple was now lager, which they frequently guzzled until they puked, just like regular, mustachioed Berliners.

Just as work on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot had preceded the sessions for Low, so the June recording of the diminutive rocker’s rumbustious Lust for Life – produced by Bowie and Colin Thurston – would first test the studio facilities. Bowie and Visconti favoured Hansa’s cavernous Studio 2, which had once been a grand ballroom frequented by Gestapo officers, and which looked out on a site close to Hitler’s final redoubt, the Führerbunker. Contemporary German totalitarianism was also in evidence as the Berliner Mauer, the infamous, iconic wall which had brutally segregated the city since 1961, was only a few hundred metres to the east. Proximity to the Cold War frontline added a frontier frisson to recording sessions – especially as one East German guard-post looked, menacingly, straight into Studio 2’s control room window.

Eno arrived in early July 1977, along with those members of Bowie’s band who hadn’t played on Iggy’s sessions. He was consumed by Hansa’s unique atmosphere and the looming east. ‘Myself and David used to joke about the fact that the East had billboards, but nothing to advertise, so there’d be huge posters with slogans like, “Eat Potatoes”.’*

While Eno, Bowie and Visconti oversaw proceedings from Studio 2, the band set up in the yawning Studio

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