Bowie-Eno Berlin thread

hard to believe the kick-ass rockin' Sales brothers are the sons of this guy!

As referred to accurately in "Rip It Up..." these albums were key for whole swathes of post punk activity, and in many ways invented much of the 80s tropes that were to follow. Whilst you can point to Krautrock as being the underlying influence for these records, the way they twist a post-60s post-hippy strand into something clearly different is to be noted-- the mixture of rock and electronics whilst not original in and of itself is achieved in a different way...

Influence falls everywhere around that time, from Scott Walker to Magazine, Joy Division, The Associates even less cool acts like Gary Numan and Billy Idol... then all 80s stuff (gated drums sounds! Icicle synths mixed with rocking guitars! ... tho obviously done really tastelessly)

I love these albums especially "Low" and "The Idiot", both evocative of a certain time and place (especially the Wiemar on bad drugs feel of "The Idiot") and also curiously universal... (especially the exquisite fragmented sadness and absurd dislocation of "Low").

Indeed "Low" pretty much nails lyrically a lot of post punk lyrical content to come... the borrowed Ballard trope of cars for a start ("Always Crashing in the Same Car", and also that nervy, depressive feel ("Breaking Glass" et al).

Something which is often missed out is the way these albums still have the feel of Bowie's forays into funk-soul about them, but obviously placed into a new context. That sense of funkiness and rhythmically inventive grooviness is another thing which shifts it from Krautrock in a way (whilst Can were very much afrofunk/James Brown influenced, and others had a certain propulsive motorik funk, Bowie seems to be on a more 70s funk tip) which again points towards the future of funk inflected white-boy art-rock.

There is also the possible indirect John Foxx/Ultravox! influence via Eno on these.
Foxx also being a friend (?) of Czukay -
there's a thank you to Foxx on the sleevenotes to "Movies" -
which again has sections pointing to "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts".

From Q Magazine's special on synthpop a year ago,

Electronic stuff was considered to be something you wouldn’t touch,” says Foxx. “It was too close to Pink Floyd, forbidden by Johnny Lydon, declared ungood.” In fact, Ultravox! were post-punk before punk had played itself out. This confused people. Their use of electronics, extended song structures, keyboards and un-punk instruments like violin previewed what Magazine and Wire, as well as Gary Numan and The Human League, would be doing in two years’ time. Equally, a year prior to Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine, Foxx was exploring the same idea in I Want To Be A Machine, while his alienated Euro-romanticism also pre-empted Bowie’s Berlin trilogy (Foxx recalls Bowie phoning Eno to suggest the collaboration during recording), Foxx hymning the city in The Wild, The Beautiful And The Damned. Most importantly, neither Kraftwerk nor Bowie had yet created anything quite like My Sex’s mix of the electronic and the classical, or as detached as Foxx’s robotic yet romantic chant. “I was very interested in the pull and push of romanticism and alienation,” says Foxx.

Click to expand...

Hey, what was the story with the covers of Heroes and The Idiot? They're poses from Egon Schiele paintings or something? Google is not my friend on this one...

Heroes/Idiot covers = Roquairol by Erich Heckel

I'm dubious about a John Foxx influence on these albums. I'd say that in the mid-seventies there were all these people - Bowie, Eno, Foxx included - who were circling around similar ideas drawn in part from the modernism of the early to mid-20th c. It comes through in the fashions (Kraftwerk's Man Machine cover, Bowie's Weimar pinched fedora look, Joy Division overcoats etc), but also in the interest in experimentation (Cage and Stockhausen with an overlay of George Martin) and above all the modernist themes of alienation, suspicion of narrative, form over content etc. I guess this retro-modernism follows on logically from the retro-romanticism of 1968, hippies etc.