Iggy Pop (28 page)

However intimidating, the hold-up was brief, and any impressions of the KGB’s omniscience evaporated when the group arrived in Moscow and found the agent’s promise that ‘we’ll have someone meet you’ was an empty one. Finding themselves unmonitored and free to explore the city, they dropped off their luggage at the Metropole hotel, then set off for Red Square, where they posed as troops marched by, soaking in the atmosphere, Jim and David laughing like happy schoolboys. From there followed a trip to the GUM department store, and a leisurely dinner back at the Metropole - a beautiful Art Nouveau building decorated by Mikhail Vrubel, the site of several crucial Workers’ Congress meetings addressed by Lenin, and also a central location in Mikhail Bulgakov’s sinister
The Master and Margarita
. Then, seven hours after they’d arrived in the city, the party boarded their train to Helsinki, where they would be greeted with ‘Bowie Lost In Russia’ headlines.

Bowie’s tour resumed in Helsinki, followed by five Scandinavian gigs, travelling thereafter to London - where it’s possible that David and Jim did some preparatory recording on ‘Sister Midnight’ - to face a huge media onslaught concerning Bowie’s supposed fascist sympathies, prompted by his remark to a Stockholm reporter that Britain ‘could benefit from a fascist leader’. Perhaps it was fortunate no one in the British press had seen photos of Bowie’s travelling companion being brutalised by a musician wearing an Afrika Korps uniform and swastika armband. Finally, the tour ended in Paris on 15 May. At the party to celebrate its conclusion, Bowie spent much of the evening canoodling with Romy Haag, the striking, transgendered diva who seemingly embodied all of Berlin’s glamour and decadence. Romy reportedly asked David to come up and see her in Berlin.

David and Jim stayed in Paris for a couple of days after the tour, and around 18 May, Laurent Thibault received an anxious phonecall from Coco Schwab, telling him that David needed a refuge from the fans swarming around Paris. Thibault, who’d made his name as bassist with French prog band Magma, had recently taken over management of the Chateau d’Herouville, a luxurious, state-of-the-art residential studio based in a chateau twenty-five miles outside of Paris. It was a huge, rambling, romantic building, famously haunted by the ghosts of its celebrated former residents Frédéric Chopin, and his lover George Sand. That evening David came up with Jim, Coco, his son Zowie and Zowie’s two nannies, and they stayed a couple of days. David had brought several flightcases of records and other equipment, and asked for his hi-fi to be set up in a huge room with a wood-beamed ceiling. The first day, David and Jim inspected the studio, which David had used to record
Pin-Ups
in 1973. The second night, he played Thibault records from his flightcases late into the night, including Magma’s debut album, which he critiqued, and at around three in the morning he announced he intended to record ‘Jimmy’s album’ at the chateau, and that Thibault would also be playing bass. (There was a secondary benefit to working at the residential chateau, for it meant that RCA would be picking up the living expenses of Bowie and entourage, easing a chronic cash-flow problem that afflicted Bowie after his split with MainMan.)

Around the end of May, Bowie, Jim and Coco arrived as promised, bringing along David’s Baldwin electric piano, Dan Armstrong perspex guitar, Arp Axe synthesiser and Marshall amplifier, and they set to work. David had many of the songs recorded on cassette, and recorded some of his piano parts before asking Thibault if he knew a drummer. ‘He wanted a very solid, very rough one,’ says Thibault, ‘and I said, yes, I know exactly the guy.’

Thibault phoned up Michel Santageli, who’d played with many French artists, including Alan Stivell and Jacques Higelin; Michel arrived a couple of days later and was initially transfixed with fear, as he’d thought Laurent was joking when he’d mentioned playing with David Bowie. The next day they started working on the backing tracks, with Bowie sitting at the piano and signalling over the sound-screens to Santageli, who learned the parts as they went along. Meanwhile, Jim sat in the control room, furiously scribbling on piles of paper, crafting impressionistic lyrics that frequently fused his and David’s world views; over and over the songs use the first person plural - ‘hey baby, we like your lips’ - in a kind of collective consciousness.

As they listened back to the first takes, Michel nervously told Thibault, ‘OK, I understand what we want now, let’s do the proper version.’ There was no answer from David, who was listening in rapt attention, kneeling on the control-room chair. Then David announced, ‘Next! Suivons!’ and it was on with the next song, despite Santageli’s objections that he hadn’t even learned the song or tuned his drums. Over that day and the next they recorded the drums and piano on seven songs or so, after which Santageli was sent back to Brittany, mortified that he hadn’t recorded the drums properly or had a chance to chat with Bowie. After a few more days, during which Bowie added electric guitar to the skeletal compositions, he disappeared for a rest and asked Thibault to add some bass guitar. Thibault’s instructions were as minimal as were Santageli’s, but he overdubbed around five songs using his Rickenbacker; the results were deemed acceptable, bar one song, called ‘Borderline’, for which David hummed a new bassline that Thibault duly replicated. And so the recording continued, in an impressionistic, often seemingly random manner, with sounds left rough and accidents incorporated into the final results. Towards the end of the session David called in
Station To Station
bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis to overdub rhythm tracks on some of the songs, including ‘Sister Midnight’ and ‘Mass Production’.

Between takes, David or Jim occasionally wandered around the grounds alone, or explored the huge, rambling building while the other was working. Occasionally one of them would travel into Paris, where Jim went to see his old flame Nico. The chateau often became a sanctuary for friends of the owner, Michel Magne, and that summer the celebrated French left-wing actor and singer Jacques Higelin was staying in Magne’s wing. The luxurious apartment was a blissful refuge for Higelin, his girlfriend Kuelan Nguyen and their six-year-old son, Tom, and at the end of August Higelin would record
Alertez Les Bébés
, his commercial breakthrough album, at the chateau.

One afternoon Kuelan was surprised to find an American musician playing piano in the rear living room of the chateau. She was instantly taken with him - he had blond hair, and looked like a Viking - found out via sign language, for he spoke no French and she no English, that his name was Jimmy, and invited him, in gestures, to a birthday party she’d organised for Tom’s nanny. That night, Jimmy danced into the room, leaping over chairs and tables, then walked over to Kuelan and simply laid his head on her shoulder. Soon they were sharing a surreal, mystically profound conversation pieced together via gestures, expressions and random words. The evening would be the start of a relationship which, played out against the romantic setting of the chateau, echoed the courtly, doomed love affairs of the eighteenth century. ‘It was a complete, real love affair,’ says Kuelan, ‘but it was not possible.’

Higelin was an advocate of sexual freedom, but found himself becoming increasingly jealous of the
beau
,
blond
interloper. Kuelan hadn’t known at first Jimmy was a musician; then one night she heard him shouting ‘Iggy Pop, Iggy Pop’ out of a window, like a tribal war cry. Meanwhile, Jacques implored her to stay and listen to a song he had written for her. By the time Kuelan managed to see Jimmy he’d become so nervous he was drunk, like a lovelorn schoolboy, blurting out that
he
had written a song for her, before voicing his frustration in pidgin French, ‘Je fais abattoir de la terre entière if you leave me.’ Kuelan looked into his eyes, put her finger to her lips and told him to ‘shhhhh’, as if comforting a child. ‘I say shush, to calm him. I was half laughing, half afraid he would go to some extreme and hurt himself.’ That night she heard a song called ‘Borderline’ that Jimmy and his friend David had written, while David played with the ambiguity of the situation, as if he were besotted with her, too. By the time Jim recorded the vocals on the song, which was retitled ‘China Girl’, it incorporated Kuelan’s ‘Shhh, shut your mouth’ response. Its romantic, lovelorn simplicity - ‘I’m just a mess without my China Girl’ - was engagingly subverted by Jim’s acceptance of his own unsuitability, and warning of his own megalomania: ‘I’ll give you men who want to rule the world.’ The song’s undercurrent of thwarted love was true to life, for Kuelan ultimately decided she had to stay with her son and family. She would marry Higelin two years later.

After recording for most of July, David, Jimmy, Coco and Laurent had to leave the chateau to make way for a Bad Company session and decamped to Munich to record the vocals and mix the album. Musicland was a panelled basement studio that felt like a bunker; the city itself, the birthplace of the Nazi party, seemed to have a dark resonance too. One evening a couple of studio guests greeted Bowie with a Nazi salute; he ignored them, but muttered an obscenity to Thibault once they were safely past. The quartet stayed on the twenty-first floor of the Sheraton, mostly sleeping during the day; at one point there was a huge summer thunderstorm and they could look down at the lightning below them as their windows shook with each massive peal of thunder.

As the sessions continued, a young British guitarist named Phil Palmer gained an intimate insight into Bowie’s working methods. The phone rang at 2am one morning and Phil’s mother knocked on his bedroom door to tell him, ‘There’s a Mr Bowie on the phone for you!’ Mr Bowie assured Phil that he was not an impostor, said that Phil had been recommended to him by the producer Tony Visconti, and told him to throw some clothes in a bag and catch a plane to Munich, where he and Iggy Pop were recording.

Palmer turned up for the midnight session and walked into the studio, set in a deserted shopping mall. It felt like the
Mary Celeste
, full of abandoned guitars and drum kits belonging to Thin Lizzy, who were working the day shift. Meanwhile David Bowie and Iggy Pop sat in the control room, chatting affably enough, but the whole atmosphere was spooky and the guitarist was slightly overawed as Bowie rolled the tapes. For five days he experimented with guitar sounds, plugging his Telecaster into a variety of gear, some of it borrowed from Thin Lizzy, and he experienced at first hand Bowie’s genius for unlocking musicians’ creativity. Iggy and David’s manner was ‘gentle. But odd.’ Sometimes the instructions were cryptic. As Palmer prepared to overdub guitar on ‘Nightclubbing’, Bowie or Iggy told him: ‘You’re walking down Wardour Street. Now play the music you hear coming out of the door of each club.’ Elsewhere they were more specific. As Palmer replayed Bowie’s doomy guitar arpeggios on ‘Dum Dum Days’, Bowie had him re-record the opening over and over, instructing him: ‘Bend that note more.’ The order seemed appropriate for the whole session, which felt pretty skewed all round. After a while, Palmer found himself on a thrilling creative roll, but the whole episode was intensely disorientating, whether it was David telling him he was ordering in some sheep brains and would Phil like any, or excitedly flipping through an Erich Heckel monograph and asking Phil’s opinion of the paintings. One night he arrived early to witness a member of Thin Lizzy’s crew getting a beating for allowing the supply of cocaine to dry up. Bowie and Iggy were obviously slightly ‘whacky’, although there was no open drug use, and both were intensely focused on the task in hand. The most striking impression came from the fact he never saw Iggy or David outside the hours of darkness. ‘Vampiric would be the perfect word.’

Thibault too found the surroundings disorientating. For one song, ‘Mass Production’, David was frustrated he couldn’t get the sound he wanted, and the ex-Magma bassist intervened, making up a huge tape loop of overloaded industrial noises that ran round the entire studio; he remembers Bowie sitting there silently for what seemed like an endless period of time, watching the white editing strip on the tape going round and round the room, like a child transfixed by a train set.

Around the beginning of August Thibault returned to Paris to record with Jacques Higelin, while David and Jim travelled to Berlin, to finish the mixing at Hansa studios on Kurfürstendamm. The studio was located on the fourth floor of an office block and had been recommended to David by Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream. Bowie called in his old friend Tony Visconti - with whom he’d last worked on
Young Americans
- to mix the bulk of the album and oversee a couple of final overdubs. By now, Bowie and Iggy had moved into an apartment Coco Schwab had found at 155 Hauptstrasse, in Berlin’s Schöneberg district, and when Visconti arrived he was struck by Bowie’s obvious physical and psychological improvement - he looked radically different from the emaciated creature with whom Visconti had recorded
Young Americans
- and while Visconti had been told that David was working with the animalistic American Iggy Pop, he was surprised to meet the polite, cheery and rather civilised Jim Osterberg.

The work was difficult - Visconti got the impression all the material had been slammed furiously onto tape in a creative rush - but over a couple of weeks the three of them carved out ‘a great, new sonic landscape,’ says Visconti, ‘full of angst and torture.’ (It’s likely that Thibault’s original mixes survived on ‘Sister Midnight’ and ‘Mass Production’.) The work, which they’d later title
The Idiot
- derived from Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, the wise but mentally ill subject of a book that each of them had frequently namechecked to their friends - was a radical departure for both of its main architects, and it must be pointed out that much of Bowie’s genius lay, as so often, in choosing the perfect collaborator. It could be guaranteed that the world would be shocked to hear a diehard rocker, known for cutting himself with broken glass or smearing himself with peanut butter, front an intense, minimal, electronic and formidably European opus. But Jim intuitively understood and in fact relished this experimentation, for his own appreciation of avant-garde music was as profound as David’s. Even though much of his most recent cultural experience consisted of sleeping rough in a garage shared with a male hustler, it was Jim who had emerged from a sophisticated college campus, had performed with a close associate of Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley, had seen Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable on its second outing, back in March 1966, and even a decade earlier had been cognisant of concerts ‘given by a nude woman playing a cello while someone else beat the strings of a piano with hammers’ - experiences which made Bowie’s CV look positively parochial.