Customer Reviews

Bowie In Berlin A New Career In A New Town

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

David Bowie's albums Low, "Heroes," and Lodger are some of the most seminal pieces of popular music released in the 1970s. Two albums in the same ranks are Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life, both of which Bowie had a large hand in creating. The years the two spent together in Berlin, each recovering from substance abuse and general mental deterioration, were a fascinating time that will interest any fan of either; and this book does an excellent job of detailing those heady days. Bowie is seen here as a fragile genius (if an opportunistic one) rather than the chameleon-like fashion plate he can be accused of being. My only quibbles are that the author sometimes gets lost in off-topic tangents that become boring history lessons - Christopher Isherwood may have played a role in Bowie's Berlin years, but we didn't need a multi-paragraph rundown on Isherwood and W.H. Auden's story (already told so many damn times!). Likewise, while the film The Man Who Fell To Earth (Bowie played the lead role) certainly had much to do with what became of Bowie in the years after its making, we didn't need a play-by-play, multi-page synopsis of the film. But once you get past those moments of excess, everything else in the book is well done, thoughtful, engaging . . . If you are interested in David Bowie in general, and particularly if you are a fan of his experimental late 70s work, or if you care to read about the friendship and working relationship between Bowie and Iggy (also Bowie and Eno, as well as Bowie and Tony Visconti), you will enjoy this book.

Bowie in Berlin adds absolutely no new insights or new factual information.

The factual information seems to be lifted right off The Complete David Bowie and while the author offers his opinion on certain songs, he doesn't back up his claims by argument,so why should we care?

For instance he says of 'TVC15' that 'it's not the greatest thing Bowie ever recorded, but not as bad as some might suggest either', which is a typical pointless and trivial statement that could have been uttered by anyone with no particular knowledge of Bowie or music as such over a pint.

The author lacks a vocabulary for discussing music, so he is best off sticking to facts. Unfortunately the facts he delivers are well-known and well-documented.

Why bother writing a book that adds nothing new to the story and offers no interesting points of view? Why bother reading it?

Well, you may bother if you are new to Bowie's work in which case this unoriginal book does make for a fluent read faithfully recounting some well-loved anecdotes of this periode of Bowie's career.

I was motivated to write a review for this when I saw an other customer complain that the book is "written by a fan for other fans". Well, obviously! If you're writer that's motivated enough by non-fiction, you want to share all of your knowledge to others. That's exactly what the writer does.

Very quick and simple read about the happenings of Bowie, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, and the underrated Tony Visconti during the Berlin Triad. If goes into very nice detail about Bowie's cocaine psychosis in Los Angeles to the creation of the Iggy Pop albums. He gives lots of credit to Tony Visconti on making the Berlin albums as amazing as they are and giving them that signature sound.

My only complaint, as mentioned in an other review, is that he goes into too much detail about "The Man Who Fell to Earth". I've seen the movie several times and read the book. I know already how it goes. Besides that, it's an excellent book on an important moment in popular music that avoids because a piece of fanboy dribble.

David Bowie's lifestyle in mid-70s Los Angeles was killing him, physically and psychologically. Negative media attention, drug addiction, paranoia and a body weight of around 80 pounds were reason enough for a change. Bowie grabbed his pal, Iggy Pop - also suffering from a bad drug habit - and headed to Europe to find a sanctuary to recover and create new music far from the watchful eye of the press.

Thomas Jerome Seabrook's Bowie In Berlin: A New Career In A New Town gives an in-depth account of Bowie's musical rebirth centered around his time in Berlin, France and Switzerland from 1976-1979. This time period was Bowie's most prolific. Not only did he release Low, "Heroes" and Lodger, toured twice (once as a sideman for Iggy), co-wrote and produced two albums for Iggy Pop - The Idiot and Lust For Life - but also managed to star in a film, "Just A Gigolo."

Seabrook meticulously guides us through each of the Bowie and Iggy albums, song by song. This book is a rare gem for the diehard Bowie fan, because it focuses on just a 3-year period of his 40+ year career. The pages are filled with an abundance of trivia, including the birth of the 'Lust For Life' riff, which Bowie wrote on a ukulele after hearing a Morse code broadcast on the U.S. Armed Forces News Bulletin. It's also revealed that Iggy Pop was once considered as a replacement for Jim Morrison in The Doors.

While there may be a few moments of questionable details - describing the 4 chord progression that makes up Iggy's 'The Passenger' as a 2 chord riff - overall, Seabrook's accounts are thoroughly researched. Jawbone Press does a fantastic job on the layout, beginning with a collection of rare photos, including my favorite - a pic of Bowie and Iggy waiting to catch a train in Copenhagen.

I definitely had a hard time putting this one down. Much praise goes to Seabrook for his thorough look into Bowie's late 70s creative renaissance.

I just finished this book a few minutes ago. I started it yesterday afternoon. That should give you an idea of how well the book kept my interest. I would consider myself a Bowie fan, but there's no doubt the Berlin trilogy set of albums are my favorite full Bowie LPs. I think anyone who is a fan of these three albums will greatly appreciate the wealth of data housed within this book.

That being said, you can tell from the get-go that the author himself is quite an avid Bowie found. I felt that, at a few points in the book, he had a probably separating objective facts from his opinion as a Bowie found. Take, for example, the extensive track-by-track breakdowns for each album (and Iggy Pop's albums Bowie produced during this time!) - the descriptions of each track contain facts on the writing/recording, but the author also feels that he must share his take on the "value" of the song.

Overall, this book is a great read and a valuable source of information for any Bowie fans wanting to learn more about this period of the musician's life. As another reviewer mentioned, much of this information is available elsewhere, but it's nice to see this often underrated era of Bowie's music getting some much-deserved attention.

As a final comment, I enjoyed the author's comments at the end of the book about contemporary artists influenced not only by Bowie's music during this period, but his attitude towards his label and promotion.

At the time of publication of Bowie's Berlin production, I was involved with music myself and can attest on the significance/impact/impulse generated by the 3 and a half masterpieces of the epoch (Lust For Life being half a chef d'oeuvre, Lodger none at all).
The reading of this book however is my first investment into getting to know the story behind the Berlin adventure. Compared to most literature on music, this book is extremely well written and a pleasure to read. Unlike my fellow reviewer, I also enjoyed the detours into side-stories and parallel personalities. The only character that finds it hard to come off the page is Iggy. But then the book is not about him...
Thoroughly enjoyable!

P.D.: Warsaw is not the Czech capital, it is Poland's.

I really enjoyed reading this book and I feel that others here have represented the content and quality of the work well. I would, however, like to comment on the formating of the Kindle edition: although the layout was acceptable on the page, whatever OCR/scanning was used left huge washes of barely-readable text and it appears that the book was only spot-edited at best.

I had actually chosen the same exact passage as another reviewer to illustrate the errors, but I would like to emphasize: Bcrvvie and 13<rwie?!

This is just one example among many throughout the book and I cannot recommend the Kindle edition in its current state.

This book contains lots of detailed information assembled from pre-existing sources, which demonstrates that the author did his research. For longtime Bowie fans, this means that much of the content will be quite familiar to you. The same also applies for those ,(young and old), who read the excellent "UnCut" interviews from several years back, which Seabrook references in this book. Now. This isn't to say that its a bad book. On the contrary - it does a good job of organizing the information in an enjoyable format and serves as a good reference for those seeking an introduction to this period of Bowie's career. Additionally we get some expanded insight into Bowie's involvements with Iggy Pop. I also liked the track-by-track breakdown for the album releases. I would definitely recommend this book as a good primer for Bowie newcomers. For those who have been following his career since the 70s it is still a good read though you probably won't learn much that is new.

Lastly, the author makes what I consider to be an error when he suggests that Tony Visconti wasn't invited to produce Station to Station perhaps because Bowie was trying to distance himself from those who might remind him of his days with former manager Tony DeFries. This is most odd given that a primary reason for Visconti not working with Bowie for several albums was because of Visconti's dislike of DeFries ! In any case this book is still a good read.

Great book for all Bowie fans specialy of the berlin era.
The making of Low, Heroes, Lodger + The idiot and lust for life of Iggy pop is very detailing, the writer knew about his subject is not the case of all the books about Bowie. This book is very instuctive and easy reading

Overall, I enjoyed this book. While the author may not himself gathered much new material dealing with Bowie's "Berlin" Trilogy, he did amass a great deal of information from other sources and it was interesting to read about Bowie's artistic and personal development during this time in his career.

I would easily have given the book four stars, but I feel I have to dock it one because the formatting of the Kindle edition is just terrible. There are major typos on nearly every screen, some of them so bizarre one has to wonder what was originally meant. One such typo was a word somewhat like "cmcical" in regard to Iggy Pop. Was that supposed to be "crucial" or "comical"?

And take this section, talking about Iggy Pop's "TV Eye" which was meant to be a contract-breaker for RCA, "the label that Bcrvvie had urged tcr sign Iggy, but which had never really understood him c>r his music. While it is of some interest as a document cfr Iggy's return to the stage, and of 13<rwie's brief role as as his keyboardist..." All of that is exactly how it appears in the book, though admittedly that's a particularly ripe plumb.

In short, I enjoyed the book; it's engagingly written and gathers a lot of information, the author is quite insightful, and it's a fun and compelling read. But I urge someone connected with it to take another pass at editing the Kindle edition. The number of typos exceeds even what an Oblique Strategy would recommend.