B ★ O ★ W ★ I ★ E 

I think I have mentioned before that Bowie really only came to my attention after all the Ziggy Stardust glam rock schtick for me with his collaboration with Brian Eno and the results still fascinate me today. It did make me reconsider all his work and I enjoyed pretty much everything and his artists attitude to it until his death two years ago now. Low is a favourite album which I still play regularly.

On this day in music history: January 14, 1977 - “Low”, the eleventh studio album by David Bowie is released. Produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti, it is recorded at the Château d'Hérouville in Hérouville, France from September - October 1976. The first of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy”, it is the first of his songwriting and musical collaborations with Brian Eno, though the album is recorded in France and mixed at Hansa Studios in Berlin. In mid 1976, Bowie leaves the US, moving first to Switzerland and then to Berlin to get away from Los Angeles where his previous album “Station To Station” was recorded in a blurry haze of heavy drug use. Many of the songs are about personal issues Bowie is dealing with, including kicking his addiction to cocaine. Several of the songs featured on the album had initially been intended for the film “The Man Who Fell To Earth” that he is starring in, but Bowie ends up keeping them when director Nicolas Roeg feels that are not suitable. It spins off the single “Sound And Vision” (#3 UK, #69 US Pop), also yielding the classics “Always Crashing In The Same Car”, “Breaking Glass”, and “Be My Wife”. The album comes to be regarded as one of Bowie’s best and most influential works. Remastered and reissued numerous times since making its CD debut in 1984, it is most recently reissued as part of the box set “A New Career In A New Town - 1977 - 1982” in September of 2017. The set is issued both on CD and a 180 gram vinyl LP. “Low” peaks at number two on the UK album chart and number eleven on the Billboard Top 200.