LODGER @ 45

Why I had this but not the previous two Bowie albums on vinyl is illustrative of how I used to think as a record buyer when I was a teenager. I cared less for the first than the second side of Low and I didn't want to buy a record only play half of it. Heroes kind of made sense all the way through but for any album to call itself after its most accessible track and have the rest sounding like finished failed experiments was not one I'd want on anything but cassette. But it wasn't just the music. I loved the covers of both of those albums. Low looked mysterious and sci-fi. Heroes looked at strong as its title. But I missed the joke in the first (low profile, for those who can't picture it) and didn't get the point of the second. So, I was fine with home-taped cassettes. But Lodger had a weird cover and I liked all the songs I heard off it beforehand. It was only vaguely known as the Berlin Trilogy at the time so there was no sense of urgency in collecting all three.

The myth that MTV likes to sell is that the music video was invented for it. Countdown had been playing them for over half a decade before. Bowie did something different with Lodger in that he made a few clips for songs, whether they were singles or not, and let them loose on to the world's tv. DJ, Boys Keep Swinging and Look Back in Anger all had scripted short films to accompany them that featured Bowie and others miming the lyrics, pretending to play or just being in scenes. It was like seeing different trailers for the same movie. So, why this album rather than the others? It suckered me better than the others.

Fantastic Voyage begins with a few bongo beats that, if they'd been on a record only one year later, would have been a drum machine. The song is a mix of the Bowie Ballad (Word on a Wing, Sweet Thing) and a few distinct rhythm styles from languid, breezy exotica to a kind of soft '50s rock (like TVC15). As the coconut fronds sway by the beach we're treated to a lyric, in Bowie's romantic croon, that's all ineluctable downer, depression, prolonged youth, cold war missiles, and the need to get it all down. The oddly laidback melancholy is a fitting opener by an artist who always aced the first track of his albums. 

Bowie had recently shaken his fear of flying and had spent a lot of the two years between the last albums and this one, jet setting to any corner he could find that he'd heard of but never been to. And this is a record (in two senses) of his discovery of the world on the map, not just the one made of gigs, hustles, media and tours. He became a tourist and wanted the world to know about it. But this isn't just traveller's tales over port and dessert, it's Bowie's.

And as the pianos and bongos of the ballad fade into silence, we're ready for another. Then, we get punched in the head with a weird percussive figure on drums and the lowest piano keys. It's in 4/4 but feels more like something that a drummer would come up with to show off. Bowie's double tracked vocal tears in without a breath at more words per second than you can understand on the first few listens (the LP came with printed lyrics) and it's all panic and paranoia against a slow moving background where no one cares if you are stranded or not, which heightens the anxiety. The narrator plans or hallucinates becoming part of the mythology of the bushland before a gear change introduces a chorus of hellos and goodbyes in the local dialect. These become a chant that takes over the middle and end of the song and might be either the fleeting nature of travel or getting stuck in local daily life forever. If we were lulled by the ballad, we're now wide awake.

Move On starts in a gallop of drums and chorused guitars as Bowie sings quite plainly about his itchy feet. A looser, more romantic section is backed with gorgeous wordless vocals that sound as exotic as the trimmings of the previous two songs. Bowie in contemporary interview revealed that this feature came about after he mistakenly threaded All the Young Dudes back to front and was struck by the yearning sound of the chorus running backwards. I only recently heard this proven and it's extraordinary. A stirring anthem of running westward with the sun.

Yassassin (Long Live) is reggae through Turkish pop music. The title provides its own translation in the brackets. The song with call and response choruses and a halting verse and bridge speaks of migration, perhaps from Turkiye to German cities as Geistarbeiten but it could equally be just from country to city. The shift is disruptive and there is a need for reference points as a heavily middle-eastern violin part snakes through the rhythm. This song always worked best for me in the North Queensland heat where I really got to know the feel of it.

Side one ends with jaunty anthem to jaunting, Red Sails. A truncation of the old standard Red Sails in the Sunset, this is Son of Move On as the even more pumping band keep Bowie aloft as he tries out different ways of doing the refrain between the pentatonic verse melody. Adrian Belew drops in for a note scattering solo (and then the Fripp-like feedback at the end: never worked out if this was an ebow or not, they were around at the time). So, whether the thunder ocean or Island are yelled out or smoothed to a lulling harmony, the octave leaps of the guitars and bass and Bowie's crowd rousing cries lead us on beyond the horizon with a flourish of sheer joy.

DJ opens side two with a a strident bass and piano being smeared in processed guitar and electric violin. When Bowie's vocal comes in - "I'm home. Lost my job. And incurably ill" - the person that immediately springs to mind is David Byrne whose high strung staccato style had been intriguing anyone listening under the radar at the time. Eno had just produced Fear of Music for Talking Heads (the opening track of which had an Afro Funk feel that Eno would have brought with him here as one of Bowie's chief participants).  The DJ, here, is a club spinner rather than a radio host. Bowie heard of such a one getting fired for allowing a few seconds of silence between records which sounded weird and dystopic. The video for the track is a mix of Bowie strolling the streets of Manhattan and in a studio destroying turntables and audio equipment. Adrian Belew's solo was the result of him being played the song without vocals. It is a thrilling mash of wails, tritone sirens and some creamy melodics. Belew recorded six takes all of which were kept and switched between as though switching channels and hearing different solos on the same song. The bridge is a slow and tense meditation on the perception of time when in crisis and ends with an anguished plea for recognition. He is what he plays.

Look Back in Anger is another gallop with rich instrumentation and Bowie harmonising with himself is his operatic voice. The chorus comes in with a Beatlesque backing vocal ("waiting so long") which he interrupts with an impassioned singing of the title. The video shows him in a stylised bohemian artist loft at one of his own paintings. The more he looks at it and tinkers with the brush the more smudged and daubed with paint his face becomes. The overall feel has a kind of action sequence urgency with a chunky funky guitar solo and some French horn colouring. Another moment of eclecticism in this wandering set, and a very tasty morsel it is.

Boys Keep Swinging is a joke that's still funny. With a Heroes like backing (players switching from their normal instruments) Bowie again takes on his Euro opera boom to bellow out the advantages of being a lad. It has a kind of Cabaret swagger and a similar call and response chorus but one very different in tone from the previous track. It works through the sheer boastfulness, no one could think like this (until you meet one). The video is a forward step and only makes the song funnier. Bowie starts out alone on a small stage, making Jagger moves at the mic. Then it cuts for the choruses to a trio of female backing vocalists (including one that looks like an ancient bluestocking) who are all Bowie in very convincing drag. This is presented straight, as a meta joke. MTV be buggered, Bowie had music video down in the late '60s.

And then there's this. Repetition is the strangest song in any of Bowie's '70s tracklists. Think about that as you read it. Bowie had just given the world two of his most experimental works ever, and all of his albums from the 1970s had had darker, weirder corners, but this one wins. Remember, I'm not saying it's an oddball song (it is) but its place, even in an album this restlessly eclectic, is so ill-fitting. But that's why it works.

First, the subject matter had never been addressed by Bowie and wasn't a favourite topic in rock music: domestic violence. Johnny, working class and feeling trammelled by life, comes home from work, probably tanked, and verbally and then physically assaults his wife. The arrangement is a sparse rock band with a loping bass and siren like figures played on a slide guitar which destabilise the situation, keeping it constantly tense. 

Aside from a few lines sung as Johnny, Bowie keeps his vocal low and quiet, observational as he moves through one of his most genuinely poetic lyrics: "he'll get home around seven, cause the Chevy's real old. And he could have had a Cadillac if the school had taught him right." The lines seem to scoop up the daily antipathy right up to the only line with a vocal harmony, and it's almost murmured and in a low register: "But the space in her eyes shows through."  And then the camera slowly cranes away from the scene as we first hear Johnny's thought, "and he could've married Anne with the blue silk blouse," and then the observer's quiet insistence, "shows through..." That it comes close to breaking out but never does tightens the skin around it, keeping its horror protected. This song has actually been covered a few times, most poignantly by the post punk band The Au Pairs who didn't copy the arrangement but kept the quiet, matter of fact approach to the vocals and the effect is the same, a troubling mix of sadness and spookiness.

Red Money closes the album. It's a repurposing of the track Bowie worked on with Iggy Pop for The Idiot. There's some added instrumentation and effects but it's the self same track with different lyrics and vocal melody. There's more of a funk edge to this go around, carrying on the tradition of earlier funk landscapes like Fame, The Secret Life of Arabia. It's also something of a presage for his '80s career with its funk and pop sensibilities. It begins with a glittery chord progression that calls Fame to mind and then settles in for a funk workout that also looks forward to the album that ushered Talking Heads into their '80s and wider appeal, Remain in Light. Bowie ends by moving forward and standing still all at once.

This is the last Bowie album I love whole. It's one of the few I bought when it was released (though I had cassettes of a few) and this is the one that felt like mine rather than to a previous generation. I think you're meant to put the cut off at the next one, Scary Monsters, blithely ignoring the rest. I tend to think that, as mighty as the best of that one are, they just don't add up the way this one does. I played this next to Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, and all the '60s stuff I was increasingly getting into and it fitted perfectly. So did Low and Station to Station. I remember studying for my Grade 12 exams with it (and coffee and a few select brands of cigarette), turning it up or down according to my attention span and need for void-filling when the energy fell below zero. 

And then I moved down to Brisbane to polish my crappy results up to University level and took a few cassettes but no records (the new place didn't have a system) and listened to the radio and watched Sounds, Nightmoves and Countdown. Then, at the end of the year, I returned to Townsville for the Xmas holidays and caught up with people by getting them around. I put this LP on with every visit and got even more out of it by virtue of hearing beneath the conversation (eventually, I would test albums by hearing them while doing housework; they can really get through that way). It has come to mean that time, the second tier listening sessions under voices, and the continual discoveries of the holidays for me. And it's still a good occasional listen, and all the way through every time.