And it certainly wasn’t ‘Dancing in the Street’, Bowie’s commercially successful but critically disastrous 1985 collaboration with Mick Jagger. It’s not even side 2 of 'Low', one of Bowie’s hitherto most experimental works. That’s because Bowie chose to kick off his set that evening with ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, the industrial metal headbanger from his recently released album, ‘1. There isn’t the usual frugging and nodding one might expect from a Jools crowd – instead their faces seem to be stunned into immobility. If you look closely, you can see that the audience were not watching quite what they’d been expecting. On December 2, 1995, David Bowie appeared on the BBC’s live music programme ‘Later… With Jools Holland’. Even now, with Bowie no longer with us, ‘Low’ still sounds as if he is ahead, beckoning us towards it.Īnthony Dhanendran has picked an album that came out in what I call my dark years, mainly because I had somehow forgotten my musical tastes and swapped them for a wife and two kids and had no money to buy anywhere near the same amount of music I had become accustomed to. I recall Charles Shaar Murray’s 'NME' critical review concluding with something along the lines of “We feel low enough already Couldn’t Bowie have produced something more uplifting?” Yet for all that much of ‘Low’ stems from feelings of melancholy and alienation, there is a reaching out for contact, warmth as well (‘Sound and Vision’, ’Be My Wife’), and a drive towards some kind of future in ‘A New Career in a New Town’. I’m sure this generous aspect of Bowie’s legacy can be said of many musicians. Adrian was led to both Iggy and Lou by Bowie’s enthusiasm for them, and all three always remained touchstones for him. Also at that previously mentioned rehearsal was Adrian Borland, then our band’s singer/guitarist and later to find a measure of fame in the 1980s with The Sound. ‘What in the World’ features the ragged harmonizing of Iggy Pop, who along with Lou Reed was probably the key character in Bowie’s personal firmament. Many of those who followed took only the electronic strand, and so oftenīowie’s influence was two-fold, embracing not just the music he created but the fact that he too was a fan and made his own influences known to his fans. However where Bowie and Eno blended synths in a rich mixture with the more traditional guitars, sax, piano, and strings, But it’s an instance of Bowie’s wider influence, as was the growth in the use of synths, especially important on the album’s almost wholly instrumental second side. Unfortunately a lot of unimaginative bands and producers must have had the same idea, given the boom in booming drums on tracks during the next decade. As the drummer, I especially loved the fantastically powerful percussive sound that Bowie and Eno had created for the first side, on tracks like ‘Breaking Glass’ and ‘What in the World’.Īt the time I thought how great it would be if all drum sounds were so strong. Immersed as we were in the mounting flood of punk and punk-related records, we all agreed on its unique greatness. The second memory is of taking a break in rehearsal of the band I was then in to listen to it all. But also how apt, one tastemaker honoring another.
Peel obviously recognized what a groundbreaking record it was, to give it this unprecedented exposure. Firstly, hearing it played straight through one night on John Peel’s show, especially the haunting ‘wordless vocals’, strings and electronica of ‘Warszawa’. Two main memories of this tremendous album.
Our fellow writer Adrian Janes recalls that album fondly. Admittedly it was and still is a little, let's say, tired looking but it plays well. I managed to pick a copy up at one of Nottingham's oldest record shops Rob Smith's up in Hurts Yard. With that came 'Warszawa' and 'Always Crashing in the Same Car' which started to broaden my Bowie outlook, although I figured I was just a little too young at that time to appreciate it.
A David Bowie album that I discovered early on was 'Low', mainly because I stumbled across the ultra cool 'Sound and Vision'.
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