David Bowie :: Lodger CD Album

UK CD Album
Part of Iconic Berlin Trilogy

CD
1 9 7 9

All images © RCA.

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David Bowie ~ Lodger CD Album

Type: Audio CD (20 Sept. 1999)
Number of Discs: 1
Format: Enhanced, Original recording reissued
Label: EMI

Item Details

In a way, this is a sad album as it serves as a goodbye to the Berlin years and, Scary Monsters aside, nothing that came after from Bowie was ever this innovative or inspiring. It is the last of the great three albums (Low and "Heroes" - the "s are important - being the others) so the sadness is because it is so great.

It's influence is staggering. Think the New Romantics, think Cure, think Japan and David Sylvian, think Talk Talk, think of anyone who has tried to think outside the box in music since the late 1970s and somewhere, lurking, will be the son of Lodger.

Imagine what music had sounded like if Bowie had decided to live in Berlin until the day he died. What on earth would he had created. He would have witnessed first hand the fall of the berlin Wall, East meeting West, and he alone of his generation had the poetic tools to mirror it in his music so that it would become the soundtrack of a generation. Living in Berlin lasted 18 months and look what he achieved - a lifetime, or Bowie's lifetime, would have seen electronic music achieve heights it can't even possibly imagine here and now.

This 1999 UK 10-track 24-bit digitally remastered CD album comes with a picture sleeve booklet including lyrics in a hype stickered jewel case.

Track Listing:
1. Fantastic Voyage
2. African Night Flight
3. Move On
4. Yassassin (Turkish for: Long Live)
5. Red Sails
6. DJ
7. Look Back in Anger
8. Boys Keep Swinging
9. Repetition
10. Red Money

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David Bowie on Lodger:

Fantastic Voyage
"Well, that is definately pop. What's interesting about that is the logistics. We played the same chord sequence four different ways and the same thing exactly occurs elsewhere on the album. You've got to spot it. I wanted to put some sort of point of view forward that was in the narrative fashion right at the front of the album.

"It starts veering off to the obscure after this, but it's a pretty straightforward song about how I feel, in a very old fashioned romantic fashion. One feels constantly that so many things are out of our own control and it's just this infuriating thing that you don't want to have their depression ruling your life or dictating how you will wake up each morning."

African Night Flight
You will, of course, have noted the use of Swahili. Translated, that meant, 'Hello, goodbye.'

That came together because in Mombasa, in many of the bars you will find these German ex pilots who hang out wearing most of their pilot's gear. They are always saying they have been there for seventeen years and really must go back to Germany. You've got a good idea why they are there in the first place, but they live strange lives flying about in their little Cessnas over the bushland, doing all kinds of strange things. They're very mysterious characters, permanently plastered and always talking about when they are going to leave.

"The song came about because I was wondering exactly what they are and what they are doing and what their profession is and why they fly around.

"This track is very interesting. What we did was to take the basic idea of 'Suzie Q' and play it backwards. Then Brian (Eno) decided to put prepared piano on it. He put pairs of scissors and all kinds of metal things on the strings of the piano. Then we took out the main band so you just had the piano left.

"It was a case of starting out with one thing, putting another thing on top of it, and taking away the number you first thought of."

Move On
This, of couse, is blatantly romantic. The interesting thing about this one is in the middle section, I was playing through some old tapes of mine on a Revox and I accidently played one backwards and thought it was beautiful. Without listening to what it was originally, we recorded the whole thing note for note backwards, and then I added vocal harmonies with Tony Visconti. If you play it backwards you'll find that it's All The Young Dudes.

I did this in New York, which is a very enjoyable city at the moment. It's very exciting there and is probaly having its heyday as far as the arts are concerned. The whole arts thing in New York is extraordinary, much more exciting than London, which is a bit patchy.

"I'm so pleased that the conclusion of these three albums has been so up. You never know until you come out of the studio exactly what you've done, and it would have been terribly depressing if the third one had been down. At least this one has a kind of optimism."

Yassassin
"That's Simon House on violin. He was with Hawkwind. He understood the notation immediately, even though he had no experience with Turkish music before.

"This song is about the kind of characters you find in coffee bars in Turkey. An interesting thing about this track was putting two ethnic sounds together. We used the Turkish things and put it against a Jamaican back beat. They're both parallel."

Red Sails
"Here we took a German new music feel and put against it the idea of a contemporary English mercenary cum swash buckling Errol Flynn, and put him in the China Sea. We have a lovely cross reference of cultures. I honestly don't know what it's about."

DJ
"This is somewhat cynical but it's my natural response to disco. The DJ is the one who is having ulcers now, not the executives, because if you do the unthinkable thing of putting a record on in a disco not in time ... That's it. If you have thirty seconds silence, your whole career is over.

"The most absurd thing about this is that I was with John Cale in New York and I played his viola on stage at Carnegie Hall. He called me and asked me to play at a benefit for a radio station in New York. I had never played viola in my life before but I learned four notes on it and it sounded great. I may learn another four and play it on my next album."

Look Back In Anger
"I had this thought about angels and Angels of Death, which is the character that is most revered. But this one is about a tatty Angel of Death.

"We did one thing on this track which was a lot of fun but terribly frustrating for the musicians. Brian and I came up with a series of cards with chords on. We stuck them on a blackboard, and we had all the musicians sitting on chairs in front of the blackboard. Then Brian and I just pointed at the one to play next. It got very intense , and the more intense it got the better it got. We did that for thirty minutes and kept yelling out the style to play in.

"Fortunately, I'm with guys who are very receptive to what I want to do. They get angry, of course, but only if they're not fully aware of what is going on. Often I can't help them much because I'm not sure what's going to come out of it either.

Boys Keep Swinging
"What we did on this one was to have everybody play the instruments they didn't usually play. Suddenly, we had Carlos Alomar, who is the rhythm guitarist, on drums and Dennis Davis, on bass.

"What was extraordinary was the enthusiasm that came from musicians who weren't playing their usual instruments. They became kids discovering rock'n'roll for the first time again.

"Boy has exactly the same chord sequence as Fantastic Voyage."

Repetition
"This is about wife beating - something you are faced with in the American newspapers all the time.

"I think my voice sounds rather like it did five years ago. Fantastic Voyage could quite easily have turned up on Hunky Dory. This albums seems to contain things from lots of different areas of my career."

Red Monkey
"This song I think is about responsibility. Red boxes keep cropping up in my paintings and they represent responsibility there." (May 1979)

Quotes from Bowie in His Own Words Book.

Sales:

No. 4 in the UK for one week. Sales (before his death): 2.2 m.

Key track: Boys Keep Swinging.

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