Somewhere someone's calling me

Bowie travels the world and sings about it. But rather than finding answers, he finds questions

David Bowie at Capital Radio, London, in 1979

“[On Buddhism] I've never sorted that out. At the time I very earnest about it, being 19-ish. One does get a little overly earnest, I think, at 19. Not that it’s a bad thing - I think it’s very instructive to put yourself through those kinds of things. But when push came to shove I realised there must be something in the West that I could adhere to, rather than something in the East — surely we must have some kind of spiritual backbone in the West. And I guess everything since has been some kind of search for it.”

David Bowie, Capital Radio, 1979

It is tempting to see David Bowie as an icon of rootlessness. He changed how he looked, how he sang, how he wrote, how he spoke, with a rapidity that was almost desperate; he seemed untethered from any particular location or tradition or even time.

Tempting, yes, but wrong. Bowie was always a man of his time and place; it was just that those times and places changed. Acutely sensitive to his environment, he would frequently find profound inspiration from the atmospheres and people and landscapes he encountered on his travels. However fleetingly, there would indeed be a laying down of roots, through which would be drawn creative nourishment.

The link between physical exploration and spiritual exploration has been a constant for millennia. Journeys and pilgrimages are the very stuff of the practice and mythology of religion. It follows that a man in search of spiritual truth might travel the world to find it.

Bowie’s job gave him ample opportunity in this regard. His 1978 would be dominated by his most extensive tour yet, beginning in San Diego in March and ending in Tokyo in December, with a four-month break two-thirds through. For the first time, he would perform in Australia and New Zealand. These travels would be reflected in his next album; in this spirit of itinerancy, it would be called Lodger.

Most of Lodger was recorded in Switzerland but it is commonly bracketed with Low and “Heroes” as the final part of the ‘Berlin trilogy’. In truth, it sits a tad uneasily with its two supposed siblings. It is made by the same producer, Tony Visconti, and with the same collaborator, Brian Eno, and with most of the same musicians. But it is less immediately striking to the ear, often sounding murky and cluttered (a fault long acknowledged by Visconti, who eventually remixed the album). It is also, in some respects, less adventurous: there is nothing like Warszawa or Neuköln here. The songwriting is hardly formulaic but is nevertheless more conventional, and few of its tracks have entered the consciousness of the public or been especially influential. The result is a record that feels for the most part like a collection of B-sides. This is not necessarily a criticism, but makes for a markedly different listen.

Lodger, like Low and “Heroes”, is an album of two halves. Its second half is the home of the album’s three singles: Boys Keep Swinging, DJ and Look Back in Anger. Its first half is Bowie’s attempt at a travelogue of sorts.

We need not dwell long here, for these songs are not deep spiritual ruminations. After Fantastic Voyage, whose apparent gentleness belies its anguish about the possibility of nuclear armageddon, comes African Night Flight, inspired by the recollections of a pilot Bowie encountered in Kenya. It includes the lines “Seemed like another day I could fly / into the eye of God on high” but it would be a stretch to call it deep.

Then we have Move On, an unambiguous expression of wanderlust (opening lines: “Sometimes I feel / The need to move on / So I pack a bag and move on”; the title of this article comes from this song). Its middle section goes:

Africa is sleepy people
Russia has its horsemen
Spent some nights in old Kyoto
Sleeping on the matted ground

Cyprus is my island
When the going's rough
I would love to find you
Somewhere in a place like that

Enjoyably gauche as it is, revelatory anthropology it isn’t.

Next is Yassassin (Turkish for: Long Live), a blend of Caribbean rhythms and Levantine scales, before Red Sails ends the first side of the album by placing a driving German-inspired motorik beat in an Oriental setting; the lyrics of neither song seem relevant to our purposes.

So that is Lodger, which fittingly is perhaps more of a staging post than a destination in its own right. But there are things going on here below the surface that merit close attention, subtle currents that Bowie would ride to new and unusual places.

Two seem especially significant. The first is a stirring of interest in day-to-day, material, socio-political concerns, expressed in explicit and concrete terms. That is to say: he had opinions about how humans lived and began to express them clearly. This was not entirely new for Bowie, the lyrics on whose second album are often direct and quotidian. But after a decade of obliqueness, abstraction, ambiguity and collage, the difference hits like an axe; there is evidence of a sensibility more in keeping with Ken Loach than Nic Roeg, say.

A couple of songs here are actually, unequivocably, about things. The album begins:

In the event that this fantastic voyage
Should turn to erosion
And we never get old

Remember it's true
Dignity is valuable
But our lives are valuable too

The song continues:

It's a moving world,
but that's no reason
To shoot some of those missiles
Think of us as fatherless scum
It won't be forgotten
'Cause we'll never say anything nice again, will we?

And the wrong words make you listen
In this criminal world

There remains a veneer of poetry, a light mist of imagery to this, but by the time we reach the line “they wipe out an entire race” we know what he is talking about.

Another song on Lodger is unlike any he had previously written. It is called Repetition and is about domestic violence. It is brutal and unsparing:

And the food is on the table
But the food is cold
(Don't hit her)

"Can't you even cook?
What's the good of me working when you can't damn cook?"

Well Johnny is a man
And he's bigger than her
I guess the bruises won't show
If she wears long sleeves

The words are recited bleakly, blankly; the accompaniment pummels relentlessly.

The other dimension worth exploring relates to Bowie’s increasingly extensive travels. Aside from being evidence of his curiosity, they would give him a greater appreciation of global politics; he would understand how the violence visited in the home would find a corollary in the affairs of nations. He had shown a feeling for this as a teenager, when he took up the cause of Tibet in its oppression by China. But this would now broaden and deepen, and become more explicit in his work.

It may not be immediately clear what any of this has to do with what we might call Bowie’s spiritual journey. But this period can be seen as the start of another move in him, from matters of God and eternity being primarily preoccupations of the soul to something embodied, to blood and bone, to material fact.

“I’m starting to get a general picture of what we possibly could be doing to look after ourselves, but I’m not entirely sure,” is how Bowie put it in that Capital Radio interview. “Still half in dreams, half in reality.”

As we will see, his attempts to reconcile the two would lead to to a point of crisis, and power a creative rebirth.

---

If you enjoyed reading this, I would be grateful if you would please share it by clicking below. Thank you.

---

Next on Bowie/God:

David Bowie creates the future by returning to the past