“It’s love back to front on two sides”
January 14 1977 saw the release of the first instalment of what came to be known as Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. That album was the Bowie/Visconti produced Low and it was followed later the same year by "Heroes" with the trilogy completed in 1979 by the arrival of Lodger.
Most of the music across the three albums wasn't even recorded in Berlin, the unifying factor actually being Bowie, Visconti and Eno.
The evolution of the Low album sleeve started with a couple of sketch artwork ideas David created for the album when it was still called New Music: Night And Day. And before that he was toying with an altogether different title again, providing another example of his fondness for recycling.
Steve Schapiro produced the artwork which became Low following the poster/advert he created for the US release of the The Man Who Fell To Earth utilising David’s character, TJ Newton, in a still from the film.
In the event, it seems the name change to Low was truly last minute. The album was already mentioned in various forthcoming release lists for January 1977 as New Music: Night And Day and allocated the same catalogue number as Low.
The stickered back as opposed to a proper printed tracklist on the sleeve also suggested a rush job. It seems there was no press kit or even a press release for Low and RCA’s advertising campaign was non-existent before the release. Adverts only appeared after the album had already charted in the UK.
This may be down to the fact that RCA didn’t seem too keen to release the album, suggesting it seemed unfinished and needed more work. By all accounts one RCA exec even offered Bowie a house in Philadelphia if he made another Young Americans. Thankfully, Bowie stood by the finished work and insisted that was what would be released.
Anyway, it’s a great sleeve even if not everybody got the visual pun of Low profile. Here's Bowie shortly after the release:
“You see the album, has a profile of me on it, and on the album itself I keep a very 'low profile'. I was very disappointed no one picked up on that. I thought it would've been obvious.”
Much has been written about the brilliance and braveness of the music on Low, and rightly so. It’s probably hard to imagine with the ears of today how utterly unique the record sounded back in 1977.
Apart from the obvious slicing of the album into two distinct sides (reflected better in the original working title of New Music Night And Day), Visconti gifted Low that distinctive drum sound, among other things, via his latest gadget, the Evantide Harmonizer. The Eventide was a machine that Visconti described to Bowie and Eno in a conference call before the sessions, thus: “It fucks with the fabric of time.”
Though Low was a record purportedly informed by the likes of Kraftwerk and other German musicians of the time, it sounded far more organic and not at all mechanised. This was in no small measure due to the nucleus of the band Bowie had favoured during this whole period (starting with Station To Station), of Dennis Davis (drums), Carlos Alomar (guitar) and George Murray (bass), otherwise known as The DAM Trio.
Despite a very mixed press reaction to Low, the album was a commercial success, peaking at #2 on the UK Albums Chart and #11 on the US Billboard Pop Albums chart. "Sound and Vision" and "Be My Wife" were released as singles; the former reaching #3 on the UK Singles Chart.
Low sounds as fresh today as it ever did...thirty nine minutes of untouchable genius.
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