For much of the world, Boys Keep Swinging was the first indication of what David Bowie’s “Heroes” follow-up was going to sound like. In the US, however, where Bowie’s critique of masculinity was deemed too outlandish for mainstream minds, the more muscular Look Back In Anger made for the lead single from his 1979 album, Lodger. With cryptic lyrics and no attempt at a musical resolution, the song was hardly a concession to the sensibilities of middle America. But Look Back In Anger would go on to find a surprise second life in one of Bowie’s most unexpected projects.
Listen to the best of David Bowie here.
The recording: “The more intense it got the better it got”
On an album whose working title was “Planned Accidents”, Look Back In Anger found Bowie, plus collaborator Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti. putting Bowie’s band through its paces during an unpredictable recording session devised by Eno. Writing a series of chords on a blackboard in Mountain Studios, in Montreux, where they had set up camp in September 1978, Eno led Bowie’s core rhythm section of guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis through an ever-changing series of chord progressions, indicating each new one with a teacher’s pointer while also shouting out the names of different styles of music for the band to cycle through.
Speaking to Melody Maker magazine shortly before Lodger’s release, Bowie allowed that the experience had been “terribly frustrating for the musicians”, even if he himself had had “a lot of fun”. “It got very intense,” he added, “and the more intense it got the better it got… Fortunately, I’m with guys who are very receptive to what I want to do.”
- ‘Lodger’: A Track-By Track Guide To Every Song On David Bowie’s Art-Pop Classic
- Best David Bowie Songs: 50 Tracks That Rewrote The Rock Rulebook
- The Real Reason Why David Bowie Had Different Coloured Eyes
Having to date helped Bowie realise an increasingly experimental run of albums, among them 1976’s Station To Station and 1977’s Low, Carlos Alomar was arguably as receptive as they came. So when Bowie asked him for a solo that alluded to the guitar break in Young Americans’ title track, Alomar was happy to oblige – albeit in his own fashion.
“There are times when I want to take a solo, but I don’t want it to be a lead-guitar solo – that’s always so played out,” he told Bowie biographer David Buckley, for the book Strange Fascination. With an eye on John Lennon’s guitar work with The Beatles, Alomar told himself, “If I am going to take a solo, I’m going to take a rhythm-guitar solo.”
Dropped in at the 1.16 mark, Alomar’s frenetic chording added to the breakneck pace of Look Back In Anger, whose backing track came together after Bowie, who would cheerfully admit to being unsure “what’s going to come out of” Eno’s roving-chords experiment, left the master tapes in Tony Visconti’s hands, along with the directive to “fool around with the jam and edit the best pieces together”. Underpinned by Dennis Davis’ feverish kit work, the track powered resolutely forward for a scant three minutes, leaving just enough space for Bowie to pen some of his most economic lyrics before laying his vocals down in typically no-fuss style while mixing Lodger at The Record Plant, in New York City, in March 1979.
