LODGER

Adrian Belew tells anecdotes about this album - how over the course of making it, it became increasingly clear that Bowie and Eno had lost interest in the idea of working with each other on another album but never actually had a personal falling-out. I can believe that; Lodger sounds like an album which was completed solely out of politeness on the part of the creative partners concerned rather than out of any real passion for the material. The best song, Look Back In Anger, is a pale imitation of the warped soul on Station to Station, and even then it doesn't measure up to the best material on that album, let alone the glories of Heroes or Low.

Bowie is so low on ideas that he ends up recycling a backing track from Iggy Pop's The Idiot for the final number. Eno is barely a presence, his usual flair for inspired engineering and production not in evidence in the slightest. Cluttered down with ugly, half-baked filler songs about Africa and domestic violence, the album is a mess: not in an endearingly shabby mess, but a pile of clutter and malformed ideas. Bowie's worst album since Young Americans, and at least on Young Americans he was making an effort.

The 2017 mix by Tony Visconti on the A New Career In a New Town boxed set does tease out more of the album's charms, mind you - and that may be one of the best reasons to obtain that particular boxed set - but even then it's likely to be the runt of the litter as far as the Berlin albums go.