MORRISSEY: « LAUSANNE IS VERY MUCH MY FIRST HOME | «SUISSISSIMO
The Château de Signal near Lausanne, , one of Bowie's homes for many years
His first wife Angela Bowie in her book: Backstage Passes, Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie, describes how he’d have had a hefty tax problem if he’d stayed in California. The money had been spent and the tax would come due. Returning to high-tax England was ruled out, so they decided instead to move to Switzerland. Angela, who had attended the private school
St. Georges in Switzerland, flew over and with the help of a lawyer arranged Swiss residency in the
commune of Blonay. In her book she describes Blonay as “a charming village above Lake Geneva near Montreux in the French-speaking part of the country”. She then goes on to say “The place I’d found was a commodious cuckoo-clock of a house
très Swiss.”
In 1982 the Blonay house was sold and the artist and his son moved into the larger
Château du Signal situated next to the Sauvabelin forest above Lausanne. Bowie married the Somalian-American model Iman in a low key ceremony in Lausanne in 1992, and as she was no great fan of the quiet pace of life at the chateau, it was put on the market. The newly-weds then set off to the United States for a change of pace.
In an interview on the
Countdown show in Australia, Bowie said he thinks he wrote the single Let’s Dance while in Switzerland. The interview was done shortly before the album’s release in 1983.
From then on the couple lived primarily in London and New York. The chateau du Signal, originally constructed for a Russian prince around 1900, was eventually sold in 1995 for CHF 4 million.