How Berlin nearly broke Bowie

This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978.

It was a fraught, make-or-break time. Out of pocket, addicted and depressed, Bowie had grown ‘very, very worried’ for his life. It isn’t entirely clear why he chose Berlin as a place for recovery, other than that it was unstarry, cheap and a good distance from LA, where his troubles had spiralled. Unfortunately, it was also ‘the smack capital of Europe’, and Bowie was about to move in with Iggy Pop.

Listening to Bowie ruminate in later years on his desperation to turn his life around, and then the temptations of his new home, you can hardly help but place your head in your hands. Could he resist the lure of a Dutch transsexual with a fabulous wardrobe and a disco club night? Of course not. If he drank too much, he could usually rely upon the German police to peel him off the floor.

One wonders whether on some level Bowie identified with Berlin as a city which was facing an uncertain future. Many people at the time spoke of its imminent collapse.  ‘One fancies it is going very fast,’ observed Bowie of the divided epicentre of Cold War Europe. He might have applied the same words to himself.

The toll his mental state took on those around him is especially well-captured in the programme by Clare Shenstone, an artist he was seeing at the time: ‘I was a little rock that was there for him to come and climb on to get out of the water for a bit.’

A trip the pair made to Checkpoint Charlie, Bebelplatz and the Tomb of an Unknown Soldier offered some kind of turning point. Shenstone relives those scenes while speaking lyrics from ‘Heroes’. The album of the same name was one of three Bowie ended up producing while in Berlin.

The history lesson had clearly been sobering, but much is also made in the documentary of Bowie’s efforts to strip himself back to bare essentials. Gone were the Ziggy Stardust costumes, the Thin White Duke, the mask. David Jones learned to slink around, incognito, in checked shirts and jeans with a bicycle for transport.

The documentary is so engaging that it feels far shorter than an hour. It would have been good to hear some more of Bowie’s music, but a clip of ‘Where Are We Now?’ echoes hauntingly through the layers of archive material: ‘Had to get the train/ From Potsdamer Platz/ You never knew that/ That I could do that.’

Off-Peak Performance, a Radio 4 documentary on the state of Britain’s trains, struck a decidedly more bourgeois note. It is hard to imagine Bowie splitting hairs over the shortage of seats with plug sockets on the 18.53 from Euston to Manchester. Johnny l’Anson, who presented the programme, suffered no such embarrassment. 

He joined the ‘Euston Dash’ to secure a perch on the overcrowded Avanti West Coast service before apparently giving it up. He had about a dozen vox pops to conduct with frustrated fellow passengers. It would hardly have been acceptable to do so from the comfort of his own seat.

Many had paid more than £100 to gather on a crowded concourse, stare at a service board, and run to the platform only to find themselves sardined between carriages. The poor souls left lingering outside the loo soon had another task on their hands. ‘By the toilet, I met X,’ became one of l’Anson’s
defining refrains.

Naturally, you felt sorry for all on board, especially as the ‘apologies for the late running of this service’ announcements began to accumulate. But the saga was so depressingly familiar that the intended drama was rather lost. A late-running commuter train does not make for particularly scintillating radio.

Which is not to say that the programme had no value. The mixture of anger and helplessness that characterises many people’s attitudes towards the railway here found a useful outlet. Avanti, we were reminded, was awarded a new contract of up to nine years last year despite being the least punctual operator. And the CEO of FirstGroup, which owns them, is in receipt of an £800,000 bonus this year. ‘Oh, the passenger,/ He rides and he rides…’