2. David BowieStation To Station
I was sort of torn with this choice, in that it was Ziggy Stardust that that first opened the door for me; smacked in the head with, “It was cold and it rained, and I felt like an actor”, and the sounds of ‘Five Years’ and the end of the world. It was “Nobody in the world understands me except David.” That type of teenage thing. I adore Low, I adore Diamond Dogs and the 70s stuff, but I’ve picked Station To Station simply because it’s the first time I saw him. I was about to turn 16, and I was in the fan club. I saw the tour being advertised in the NME and I wrote away for the tickets. I got them, but I didn’t tell my mum or dad, because I wouldn’t have been allowed to go away. But I went over to London on my own, via boat and train. I slept in Victoria station when you could still do that.
Itt was quite revelatory because, not only was it the first time I’d seen him, but I was seeing him in this stark guise as The Thin White Duke. It was also the first time I heard Kraftwerk; he opened the show with Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and ‘Radioactivity’. It’s also the first time I saw punks, which really fucked me up. I felt like a fucking idiot, because the English knew how to dress, but I remember looking across the road at a pub and a gang of kids. I thought, “What the fuck is that?” They looked like some version of a post-apocalyptic Ziggy Stardust! You know, I’d come over from Dublin with my platforms, my long, curly hair, thinking I was some sort of cool dude, and I’m standing there with all the Bowie clones.
Station To Station is such a complex album in that he sort of disappeared, as in he went to America and suddenly, he’s famous with soul hits, ‘Fame’ and ‘Young Americans’, but then came this almost minimalist album. I remember the graphics on the cover, the bold red, the typography, no space, no information, no lyric sheets; just really modern. And then the opening title track, where the first few minutes are the sound of feedback and trains, and then this almost gothic sort of stance about the return of the Thin White Duke that morphs into this Philly-soul-cum-rock & roll jam that was like, “Wow! The master returns!” It had this imperial, godlike thing.
One of my favorite tracks on the album is ‘Stay’ and it’s just savage! It’s a funk ballad, but where it goes musically and rhythmically is amazing. It’s violent and visceral, but also it’s funk. It’s rhythmic, and the album jumps so many times – you listen to ‘Word On A Wing’, and it’s a Bowie you’d never heard of before then. You hear him again in Blackstar, like a man that’s vulnerable, looking for some meaning in life or God. And the musicianship is just stupendous. As a kid, you’d go, “Station To Station only has six tracks!” but it was the first time that you were really listening to something that was profoundly different.
