2. Nightclubbing
Despite their narcotic proclivities,
David Bowie and Iggy Pop were good for each other. Their counterintuitive logic led them to try to clean up their lifestyles by moving from LA to Berlin, the heroin capital of the world, but they showed a surprising degree of restraint while living there (for a while anyway). The 18 months they spent together would turn out to be the most productive period of both their lives. Iggy managed to release two albums in 1977, the first of which – The Idiot, named after the Dostoevsky novel – was a far cry from the Stooges. Minimalist, electronic and experimental, it was recorded at the famous Château d’Hérouville in Val d’Oise, before being finished off in Munich and Berlin. The recording techniques of the pair were said to be unorthodox and eccentric. In his Iggy biography Open Up and Bleed, Paul Trynka writes that drummer Michel Santangeli was packed off back to Brittany before he’d even realised they’d started recording, while guitarist Phil Palmer was asked to imagine and replicate the sounds one might encounter walking past the clubs of Wardour Street. Nightclubbing throbs with the sleazy ambience of an underground Kreuzberg club, though with the persistent disco thud slowed down to create the kind of disorientating effect one might experience while heavily sedated. “We recorded the song with a lousy drum machine,” Pop recalled later. “Bowie kept saying, ‘But we gotta call back the drummer, you’re not gonna have that freaky sound on the tape!’ And I replied, ‘Hey, no way, it kicks ass, it’s better than a drummer.’”
