The Bowie years. Vol.2 From soul boy to berliner

On 11 August 1974, Bowie and his new band spent a week at Sigma writing and recording his next album. While his regular bandmates were beginning to grow accustomed to Bowie’s prolific workrate and unconventional methods, the new additions to the group were transfixed by the ‘cut up’ technique he deployed for his lyrics. This consisted of taking a passage of text, cutting it up and piecing it together in a random sequence to stimulate new ideas (a method he had learned from William Burroughs), across lengthy, coke-fuelled recording sessions sometimes lasting up to 72 hours.

“Back in the day, if you were recording, there were two microphones on everything: one would go to the venue’s sound, and one would go to the mobile recording truck,” Earl Slick later told NPR. “At soundcheck, I didn’t think anything of it, but Herbie [Flowers] picked up on it right away. Tony Defries was one of the biggest shysters on the planet, and earlier that day, I had gotten a letter pushed under my hotel door offering me $300 basically to give my rights over. Not long after that, Herbie is on the phone with everybody, saying: ‘This is bullshit, we’re not gonna do this’. Basically, with Herbie being the spokesperson, we said, ‘we ain’t going onstage until we get an agreement for X amount of money, period’. They agreed to it, we signed it – and we didn’t get paid, so we sued David. We won, but it took a long, long time to get the money.”

“I was getting all the problems,” Bowie later said in Melody Maker. “I had an amazing amount of people on the road with me. Every night, I’d have maybe 10 or 15 coming to see me and laying their problems on me, because the management system had no idea what it was doing and was totally self-interested and pompous and couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with it, so I was getting all these problems. They were little problems, but to each individual they were big, and I just couldn’t cope with them. The tour was a horrendous experience.”