There’ll be others on the line filing past, who’ll whisper Low…
Much has been written about the brilliance and braveness of the music on Low, and rightly so. But, I thought I would instead just recall a couple of the things that I remember about the album’s release as a sixteen-year old in the UK.
If ever the hackneyed phrase ‘unleashed upon an unsuspecting public’ was worth trotting out, the release of Low on RCA on January 14th 1977 probably warrants it. Like many fans at the time, I was totally taken by surprise by the album…and what a wonderful surprise it was.
I think adverts for Low must have appeared ahead of its release, but the earliest one I can find in my archive now (above) wasn’t actually published until two weeks after it was released. Indeed, it seems that RCA really weren’t behind the record at all, as, apart from the trade advert above, I don’t recall any music press ads much before mid February, when the album had already proved a success by reaching #2 on the UK album chart without the help of advertising.
It’s been well recorded that Low was a record RCA didn’t want to release and this advertising strategy would bear that out, and, unusually, there wasn’t even a single released ahead of the album.
I can clearly remember buying Low on the day of release and thinking the cover seemed like it had been a little rushed.
The image on the sleeve was the first surprise as it had already been used with an identical background for the US adverts for The Man Who Fell To Earth six months earlier, (above) and the tracklisting on the reverse almost seemed like an afterthought the way it appeared on an orange sticker which had been slapped down by hand at a jaunty angle. Inside, a simple insert on white paper outlined who did what on each of the album’s eleven tracks, and initial copies included a fan club application.
Actually, the previous album, Station To Station, had received a similar treatment: A still from The Man Who Fell To Earth on the sleeve and another simple insert with the album’s personnel, and no lyrics!
In fact, there hadn’t been a full set of lyrics with a Bowie album in the UK since Aladdin Sane, and before you write in, the lyrics to Young Americans weren’t included in UK copies of the album until long after the album’s release. Lyric inners would return later in the year with the next album, “Heroes”.
I don’t think I got the visual pun of the sleeve until a long time afterwards (Low profile), and even the title seemed a last-minute change as the album had been listed in my January 1977 HMV new release schedule as New Music Night And Day. (See below)
Anyway, any misgivings about the cover (I actually think it’s a classic sleeve now) were soon swept away by the musical content, and, more than anything, I can vividly recall being absolutely blown away by how impossibly futuristic the record sounded.
Apart from the obvious slicing of the album into two distinct sides, (reflected better in the original title) it’s probably hard to imagine how absolutely unique Low sounded unless you were there listening in 1977.
Co-producer Tony Visconti (It was a Bowie/Visconti production, and not Brian Eno as widely misreported.) gifted the album that distinctive gated snare, revolutionary back then, and though Low was a record supposedly informed by the likes of Kraftwerk and other synthesiser based outfits, to my ears it sounded far more organic and not at all mechanical.
If you’ve not listened to it for a while, stick Low on now and prepare to be transported by its gloriously uplifting melancholia and musical language from another time and place.
Low sounds as fresh today as it ever did…thirty nine minutes of untouchable genius.