1. Low (1977)

In truth, there are at least four David Bowie records that one could put together a completely convincing argument for being his best album. For us, however, that album is 1977’s Low, the first of Bowie’s three collaborations with Brian Eno that would come be known as the ‘Berlin trilogy’ – even though it was mainly recorded in France before he relocated to the German city with Iggy Pop to touch base with reality and break his drug habit, having lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years.

Bowie had, of course, re-invented himself before and would do so again, but never as radically as on Low. The icy teutonic rhythms had been suggested on the previous year’s Station To Station, but the real genesis of Low was in the rejected soundtrack he had recorded for Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1976, in which Bowie himself starred as an extraterrestrial who crash-lands on Earth seeking a way to transport water back to his drought-stricken planet.

Eno is often incorrectly credited with producing Low (it was actually Tony Visconti) but he did have a significant influence in its creation and sound. With side one created from avant-garde pop song fragments and the second side dedicated to lengthier ambient pieces, Low was drastically different from anything Bowie had attempted before. In 1977, the year of punk, he stood completely apart and was hugely ahead of his time, intelligent and daring enough to think forward. He therefore remained as incredibly influential as he ever had been, the bleakness of its contents anticipating the post-punk and New Romantic movements as well as any amount of future experimental artists.

The chilling ‘Warszawa’ evoked central European cityscapes in wintertime; ‘Weeping Wall’s pulsating motorik rhythm was indebted to Can and Neu!; while the stunning beauty of ‘Subterraneans’ was meant to represent the misery of those stuck in East Berlin. All of these feature few, if any, lyrics. But however experimental it got, Low wasn’t totally inaccessible to a mainstream audience. The angular, synth-washed ‘Sound And Vision’ was the closest thing to a hit, even though Bowie’s vocals don’t start until halfway through, while the instrumental ‘Speed Of Life’ featured some breathtakingly cavernous drums courtesy of Visconti’s studio toys. The solemn ambience and desperation of ‘Be My Wife’ balanced somewhere in the middle of the twin tendencies.

While contemporary reviewers were confounded and split, with record label RCA initially reluctant to even release it and first-week sales only modest, Low soon became one of the most celebrated additions to Bowie’s already exceptional catalogue. New generations of fans and musicians continue to draw inspiration from it even four decades later, and many publications have listed it as the greatest Bowie album of all. We agree. (LISTEN)

In his own words: “For many years Berlin had appealed to me as a sort of sanctuary-like situation. It was one of the few cities where I could move around in virtual anonymity. I was going broke; it was cheap to live. For some reason, Berliners just didn’t care. Well, not about an English rock singer, anyway… There’s oodles of pain in the Low album. That was my first attempt to kick cocaine, so that was an awful lot of pain.”

Highlights: ‘Speed Of Life’; ‘Breaking Glass’; ‘Sound And Vision’; ‘Be My Wife’; ‘Always Crashing In The Same Car’; ‘Warszawa’; ‘Subterraneans’