A Bit Roughed Up

David Bowie : Red Sails

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“Brian (Eno) and I did play a number of ‘art pranks’ on the band. They really didn’t go down too well though".
-David Bowie

On May 18, 1979 David Bowie released Lodger. It is often considered the last of the fabled Berlin Trilogy recorded with Brian Eno even though the album was recorded in New York and Montreux where Bowie had homes. Still, Eno's impact on the album can be heard to an even greater degree than on Low and Heroes, especially in the way his Oblique Strategies cards encouraged accidents in the studio. Not all of the musicians enjoyed the experiments. Carlos Alomar called some of Eno's ideas "bullshit...I totally, totally resisted it"

Adrian Belew played guitar on most of the tracks:

“When I arrived they had about twenty tracks already done: bass, drums, rhythm guitar, but no vocals. They said, ‘Adrian, we’re not going to let you hear these songs. We want you to go into the studio and play accidentally – whatever occurs to you’ ... I would just suddenly hear ‘One, two, three, four’ in the headphones and a track would start ... I didn’t even know what keys the songs were in or anything. The one particular song where I remember I lucked out on was ‘Red Sails’, ‘cos I started the guitar feeding back and it was right in key. Anyway, they would let me do this maybe two or three times and by then I might know something about the song, so it was over.”

Some of the songs on Side One reflect Bowie's travels. "African Night Flight" is about a group of German fighter pilots Bowie met in Kenya. "Yassassin" combines Turkish melodies with a reggae beat. "Red Sails"  sounds like Neu recording a song set in the South China Seas. Side Two contains the hits ( "Boys Keep Swinging" and "D.J." as well as the final single from Lodger, "Look Back In Anger") . David Mallet returns to direct the music video.

RCA exec Mel Ilberman came out with the early spin on Lodger:

“It would be fair to call it Bowie’s Sergeant Pepper, a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life’s pressures and technology.”

But, of course, record execs don't write the reviews. Writing for Rolling Stone Greil Marcus hoped for something bigger on the even of the 80's:

Lodger might have been an event, if only as a record we would someday look back on as work that mapped the territory between past and future. Instead, it’s just another LP, and one of his weakest at that: scattered, a footnote to “Heroes“, an act of marking time.

Robert Christgau was more taken with the album, giving Lodger a grade of A-:

I used to think Bowie was middlebrow, but now I'd prefer to call him post-middlebrow--a habitue of prematurely abandoned modernist space. Musically, these fragments of anomie don't seem felt, and lyrically they don't seem thought through. But that's part of their charm--the way they confound categories of sensibility and sophistication is so frustrating it's satisfying, at least if you have your doubts about the categories. Less satisfying, actually, than the impact of the record as a whole. 

Life Is A Pop O' The Cherry

David Bowie : Boys Keep Swinging

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On April 27, 1979 David Bowie released the single "Boys Keep Swinging" b/w "Fantastic Voyage" in the U.K. (though not in the United States). Both are tracks from his forthcoming album Lodger and both feature the same chord progression. The major difference is the band, following a suggestion from Brian Eno's deck of Oblique Strategies cards, swapped instruments. Guitarist Carlos Alomar plays drums and drummer Dennis Davis plays bass. Both are solid musicians, but the best musical moment is the guitar solo by Bowie's touring guitarist Adrian Belew., who may have inspired the song with his endless enthusiasm.  He told Uncut Magazine 

"In New York, David was doing vocals for 'Boys Keep Swinging.' He played me it and said: 'This is written after you, in the spirit of you.' I think he saw me as a naïve person who just enjoyed life. I was thrilled with that."

The single peaked at U.K.#7, thanks in part to the video featuring Bowie in drag.

About the song Bowie told Busted Magazine in 2000: 

"The glory in that song is ironic. I do not feel that there is anything remotely glorious about being either male or female. I was merely playing on the idea of the colonization of gender."

Is it better to be one or the other? 

" That is, in my opinion, an absurd question."

The Small Red Box

David Bowie : Red Money

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On January 13, 1979 Melody Maker published an interview with David Bowie in which he told journalist Michael Watts he was finishing up an album ( the last of the Berlin trilogy) to be called either Despite Straight Lines or Planned Accidents. ( It would actually be called Lodger, released in May of 1979.).

Bowie thinks it contains some of his most intimate lyrics ever and says that although he still uses cut-up techniques, he's also going back to narrative. "But in a more emotionally driven way rather than from an objective point of view."

Bowie also says he plans to focus on his painting over the next couple of years, but he is scared of exhibiting his art publicly.

In February, Bowie would be in London to promote the UK release of Just a Gigolo, a film he made with director David Hemmings and featuring a 78-year old Marlene Dietrich in her final role. Of the critically derided film, Bowie said:

Everybody who was involved in that film – when they meet each other now, they look away [covers face with hands, laughs]... Listen, you were disappointed, and you weren't even in it. Imagine how we felt... It was my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled into one.