You’ve got to wait to die…
Over the next five days, The Guardian newspaper in the UK will publish a five-part supplement (part one above) listing the 1,000 albums that, in The Guardian’s opinion, you should hear before you die.
Well, I reckon the majority of you reading this can slash that figure to a mere 999, as I’m pretty sure you’ve all heard the Bowie album that made the list: Low.
Here follows two of the four Guardian rules for picking the 1,000.
First, no single act can appear more than once – though where an artist has collaborated widely, they might pop up all over the place, as Brian Eno and Damon Albarn do.
Second, where there was a good alternative to the blindingly obvious album, we went for the alternative. After all, who needs to be told, yet again, to buy Revolver or Pet Sounds?
You can read the rest
Here’s the entry for Low, accompanied by the front-page blurb from the newspaper….
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David Bowie – Low (1977)
The first of Bowie’s three Berlin albums, Low is the sound of a legend at ground zero. Side one swells with sharp, metallic pop, Bowie’s glam dynamics filtered through the influences of krautrock and Kraftwerk. Side two’s extraordinary instrumental panorama, all disembodied voices and dark electronics, is a perfect requiem to the divided city in which it was made.
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Hmmm…Paris was about the nearest city to where Low was made. A divided city? Perhaps it is…but I think The Guardian is most likely concluding Low was recorded in Berlin…seeing as how it was the first of three in the ‘Berlin Trilogy’?
In the supplement, the above review for Low is accompanied by a quite irrelevant, but jolly good 1974 live shot.