True to Station To Station’s cocaine indulgence aesthetic, this long-time-coming reissue pushes the boundaries of believability for buffed-up over-doing, with a deluxe edition boasting six mixes of the same record… Hell, seven if you include the disc of EP edits.
You’d have to be a tranced-out obsessive with a correlating amount of gak to sit and take in the minutiae of each – the original analogue mix, 1985 CD remaster and, on DVD, four more mixes in 5.1/stereo/analogue/as-heard-from-theinstep- of-Bowie’s-left-shoe. And while some may argue that’s the only way to absorb Station To Station’s brilliance, most of us have wives and kids to go home to.
Stripped to the necessities on a more manageable 3-CD punt, we find the album and Thin White Duke’s appearance at Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, NY on 23 March 1976. Given the amount of nose candy Bowie was reportedly vacuuming at the time, the gig sounds remarkably controlled. That’s not to say that Station To Station doesn’t open the show with a resounding This Is Who I Am Now: the synths are colder, the guitar lines more sinewy, and the bass roves like a motherfucker right off the map. It storms and juggernauts while Bowie sounds at his most emotionally fragile urging his confessions: “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine/I’m thinking that it must be love… I can’t pass the day without her.”
The new wave funk Station material continues in much the same vein, with Stay destroying the bone structures of all but those at the very rear of the hall. Returns to Changes, Life On Mars? and other pre-blizzard high points are positively Vegas in comparison, with only a 1,000mph Panic In Detroit coming close to immediacy of the rest. The closing Diamond Dogs-Rebel Rebel-Jean Genie triumvirate slides into wet jam band territory, jolting you out of any hazes and ending the night on an incongruously Broadway note.
So – was Bowie more aware than he’s ever given credit for at these times? Only he can tell, though EMI’s back room team certainly have all their marbles, knowing how to package a product for maximum cash splash from the devoted. Rather than working on multiple DVD audio mixes, someone should really be hard at work licensing the unreleased music Bowie recorded for The Man Who Fell To Earth – a true Holy Grail caught up in legalities and increasingly looking like it will never see the light of day.
For Bowie’s part, it’s still claimed that he remembers nothing of S2S’s recording sessions; it certainly takes a particular kind of mind to open your new album with a 10-minute title track in which you enter “throwing darts in lovers eyes” and leave bursting at the seams to be loved. But Station remains a masterpiece, Bowie having fully harnessed his soul leanings on the previous year’s Young Americans, while edging towards the new wave/avant-garde-isms of Low. Though not as allencompassingly influential as the latter, S2S remains remarkable for its synthesis and as a snapshot into Bowie’s increasingly troubled mind. We see the man who would soon record Always Crashing In The Same Car try to get to grips with his increasing sense of isolation, occultist obsessions, religious dilemmas and a need to feel safe and warm in someone’s arms. For that, it’s even more soulful than Young Americans; stripped of the twinkly sheen and Luther Vandross backing, it’s Bowie’s soul laid bare.
