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33 1/3 #26: David Bowie’s Low

$14.95

by Hugo Wilcken

Los Angeles, 1976. David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into drug-induced paranoia and confusion. Obsessed with black magic and the Holy Grail, he’s built an altar in the living room and keeps his fingernail clippings in the fridge.

Continuum
ISBN: 9780826416841
SKU: 9780826416841 Categories: , Product ID: 77004

Description

Los Angeles, 1976. David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into drug-induced paranoia and confusion. Obsessed with black magic and the Holy Grail, he’s built an altar in the living room and keeps his fingernail clippings in the fridge. There are occasional trips out to visit his friend Iggy Pop in a mental institution. His latest album is the cocaine-fuelled Station To Station (Bowie: “I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was”), which welds R&B rhythms to lyrics that mix the occult with a yearning for Europe, after three mad years in the New World.

Bowie has long been haunted by the angst-ridden, emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and after a chaotic world tour, Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on Low, his own expressionist mood-piece.

“No record exists in a vacuum-especially not one of David Bowie’s from the 1970s. Low is the first in his famed Berlin Trilogy … Wilcken doesn’t get around to discussing Low until nearly halfway through the book, and while such a lengthy prelude could easily descend into aimlessness or self-indulgence, here it shows the extent that Low works as both a comment on Bowie’s previous records and a guide for his subsequent ones” –Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork

Hugo Wilcken is a Paris-based, Australian-born writer and translator. His first novel, The Execution, was published by HarperCollins in 2002. (“A remarkably accomplished debut heralding the arrival of a noteworthy talent” —Publishers Weekly.) It was well reviewed, and has since been translated into Dutch and German. A second novel, Colony, was published in August 2007.

144 page paperback
Continuum, 2005

Additional information

Weight 5 oz
Dimensions 7 × 5 × 0.25 in