>> DAVID BOWIE :: LOW

"Hello, Tony?"

"Yeah?"

"David here, David Bowie."

"How are you? I guess I missed out on the Station To Station album."

"I hardly had any time to record it. I was making that film with Nick Roeg and I went down to L.A. whenever I had an available minute to make that album. I didn't want to keep you waiting, so I made it very quickly and economically."

"It's great. I like it very much." "Thank you. Listen, I have an idea to experiment with Brian, Brian Eno -- you remember him. We were talking about making an album that might be incredible or a complete waste of time. Are you willing to sacrifice a month of your life for something that may never be released?"

"Count me in!"

"Great. What do you think you can contribute to the sessions?"

"Well, I've got this great box that I'm having loads of fun with, it's called a Harmonizer™."

"What does it do?"

"Er, it f**ks with the fabric of time!"

"Wow, bring it! Oh, I need a lead guitarist, can you recommend one?"

"Yeah, a guy called Ricky Gardiner, I'm doing some demos with him and his wife. He's insane!"

"Great! Book him."

In a few weeks I was landing at CDG airport with my Harmonizer ª in tow. We were booked for a month at the Chateau D'Hérouville, the "Honky Chateau" about 12 miles north of Paris. I had made Tanx by T.Rex there, and David recorded Pinups in the same studio. It was reputed to be haunted by the ghosts of Frederic Chopin and George Sand (they lived there as lovers). It was! But that's another story.

We proceeded to make a most revolutionary recording. Low was loved and hated. An executive at RCA said he would personally buy Bowie a house in Philadelphia so that he could write and record Young Americans II. Even Tony DeFries, who was no longer Bowie's manager, tried to have this album stopped! The criticism was "too much instrumental, not enough Bowie". Strange how "professionals" can't always seem to see something new and wonderful.

The complete story of the making of Low is too long to tell here. I will relate more of it in my book, which I am slowly chipping away at. Suffice it to say, it was both a creatively and emotionally intense month. David's friend, Iggy Pop was there for moral support. David was breaking up with Angie and his lawyer/manager Michael Lippman. But despite the outside pressures, when Bowie, Eno and I were in the studio working at our peak, it was pure magic. But we sometimes had to leave Eno on his own to layer his sound landscapes. He pleaded, "Please let me do this by myself; show me how to switch tracks on the console and leave me to it. I've cleared many a studio in my time because this is so boring to anybody not involved!" When he was finished making his "sonic bed" David and I came back to do our bits -- the overdubs and vocals. All the tracks on the ambient B-side started with a steady metronome click, me standing there counting the clicks to well over 200. There were no official "bars" of music, just phrases coming in at certain numbers, then ending, then overlapping. The effect was very spacy, since we weren't locked into the typical 2, 4 and 8 bar phrases of pop music.

One afternoon, whilst David and I were in Paris, my four-year-old son, Morgan (called "Delaney" in those days) was playing the notes a-b-c repeatedly on the piano. Eno sat next to him and finished the phrase which became the opening notes of "Warzawa". This is what Eno told me when David and I returned from Paris one day.

Due to problems with the staff at the "Honky Chateau" involving food poisoning, bad maintenance and even infiltration by the French music press in the form of a reporter posing as a staff member, we moved to Hansa (by the Wall) Studios in Berlin to mix Low.