Let’s dance? David Bowie’s diverse history with electronic music
Earlier this week UK dance magazine Mixmag put together a list of the nine greatest remixes of David Bowie’s work to mark the great man’s passing. It was a strange numerical move — compiling nine tracks, rather than the usual top ten, five or 20 — that seemed oddly appropriate for an artist whose influence on dance and electronic music was both huge and strangely hard to grasp.
To unpack that: Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of albums in the 1970s was wildly important for the development of electronic music, helping to popularise the new synthesiser sound being forged by artists such as Kraftwerk and Neu. Tracks like Warszawa, a Brian Eno co-write on the second side of Low, were masterpieces of electronic atmospherics, introducing a new audience to the wild possibilities and ethereal elegance of electronic music, while V2 Schneider (on Heroes) is an overt tribute to Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider.
Bowie’s influence on clubland was massive too, with the New Romantics / Blitz kids of early 80s England inspired by Bowie’s androgynous looks and other-worldly music. And yet if you’re a contemporary dance music DJ looking to play tribute to Bowie this weekend, you may well struggle for an appropriate track. And if you’re a dance magazine looking for his ten best remixes, well, you might end up with just nine.
Bowie’s adventures in electronic music didn’t end with 1979’s Lodger, the last of the Berlin trilogy. Eno may have been absent for 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) but guitarist Chuck Hammer added guitar synth throughout the album, notably on classic single Ashes to Ashes. A year later, Bowie recorded the gothic-y Cat People (Putting Out Fire) with electronic music pioneer, Giorgio Moroder.
The next decade would, however, see little electronic experimentation in Bowie’s work, as he first amped up his commercial leanings (on Let’s Dance, Tonight and Never Let Me Down), then embraced back-to-basics hard rock with Tin Machine. It’s not that electronics were entirely absent from Bowie’s commercial phase, of course — Bowie himself contributes synth on Never Let Me Down — but they were used more as a matter of course, in the same way any 80’s heritage rocker might. We were a world away from Low’s crystalline synth experimentation, in other words.
Black Tie White Noise, Bowie’s eighteenth studio album, would see the spectre of electronic music return to Bowie’s work after the meat and potatoes rock of Tin Machine, the 1993 album nodding to — and at one point wholeheartedly embracing — the dance culture then prevalent in the singer’s native England.
Bowie told The Boston Globe in 1993 that he and producer Nile Rodgers were heavily influenced by house music while making the album. “We both basically missed the same element, with what was happening with the new R&B, which is now hip-hop and house, and what we were missing was the strong melodic content that was apparent in the ‘60s,” he said. “I wanted to see if we could establish a new kind of melodic form of house.”
Jump they Say, the album’s lead single and a UK top ten hit, was based around Rodger’s shuffling drum loop, for example, while Leftfield’s progressive house remix of the same track was a big club hit in Europe.
The album’s real electronic highlight, though, was Pallas Athena, five minutes of moody tech-ish house, complete with haunting strings and Bowie’s distorted saxophone. Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers would remix the track, with this mixes apparently being issued anonymously to US club DJs.
Pallas Athena would also play a role in what was Bowie’s most widely-recognised embrace of experimental electronic music since the 70s: his drum and bass phase of the late 90s. This period is typified by the 1997 album Earthling, knocked off in two and a half weeks by Bowie and guitarist Reeves Gabrels under the influence of The Prodigy, Underworld, US industrial music and drum and bass. It was a brave move for an artist now well into his fourth decade of recording but not an entirely successful one. Bowie assimilated drum and bass ideas into his unique pop sound on Earthling, much as he had done with Eno’s synths 20 years before — using, for example, the distinctive Amen break on Little Wonder — but it was an ill-fitting mix that is stretched uncomfortably between two camps, too pop for the junglists, too odd for the pop fans.
And yet there was no denying Bowie’s devotion to the sound. At the Phoenix Festival in 1997 Bowie and band played a drum and bass-influenced set in the Radio 1 Dance tent as Tao Jones Index and some of the remixes from the Earthling period are brilliant, notably A Guy Called Gerald and Adam F’s takes on Telling Lies. Pallas Athena also got the drum and bass treatment during the Earthling tour, with a live take of the song released on limited 12” vinyl under the Tao Jones Index name.
Subsequent albums saw Bowie tone down the drum and bass influence but he remained open to the possibilities of electronic music through Hours, Heathen (whose bonus disc came complete with remixes from Air and Moby) and Reality.
And then… there was nothing. Bowie went on a hiatus that many assumed was permanent, only to return when we least expected it, with the surprise release of Where Are We Now in January 2013, followed two months later by The Next Day, his twenty-fourth studio album. Both single and album may have played the nostalgia card with a (very satisfying) classic rock sound but Bowie would enlist James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem) to remix Love Is Lost, which was released as the fifth single from the album.
Murphy would return to the Bowie fold on Blackstar, an album said to be influenced by shadowy electronic duo Boards of Canada, contributing percussion to Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) and Girl Loves Me. That album, released days before Bowie’s death, would see the singer introduce jazz to his musical palette to wild acclaim. And yet its very last track, I Can’t Give Everything Away, is possibly Bowie’s most successful excursion into electronic music since the 1990s, unusual drum machine patterns and airy synth stabs perfectly framing a heart-breaking vocal.
Bowie wasn’t an electronic music artist, of course. One of his greatest attributes, in fact, was how he seemed to defy any kind of simplistic label you might want to pin on him. But Bowie doubtlessly contributed a great deal to the history of electronic music, from its popular roots in the 70s, to the commercial boom in the early 90s, to the genre fragmentation of the mid to late 90s. Should you want one, I Can’t Give Everything Away, the last song on Bowie’s last album, could be the perfect tribute to electronic Bowie. But I would like to propose another track for that particular crown, a song I’ve found myself listing to incessantly since his death this week: Aphex Twin’s 1997 remix of “Heroes”.
The song, technically, isn’t even a Bowie original: Aphex remixed Philip Glass’ orchestral version of “Heroes”, for a CD to accompany the Japanese issue of the composers “Heroes” Symphony (it was later reissued on Aphex Twin’s 26 Mixes for Cash). In doing so he mixed in fragments of Bowie’s original vocal, creating a hugely moving, if oddly unsettling, take on one of Bowie’s most-loved tracks, inadvertently creating the perfect tribute to one of popular music’s most brilliantly unlikely, ceaselessly innovative artists.
