LOW

Bowie was the Beatles of the 1970s, constantly reinventing himself, always one step ahead of the competition and fastening onto emergent trends with such alacrity he appeared to have invented them. From 1972 onwards Bowie was a major pop star but one fuelled by the marginal and esoteric strands of music and culture. He was major league pop star as cult artist, drawing arcane ideas from the periphery to the centre, and making them mainstream. The Beatles had performed a similar role in the mid to late '60s, but they never made an album as radical as Low.

Low was Bowie's first collaboration with Eno and, supposedly, the first part of the Berlin Trilogy. I say supposedly because 'Berlin Trilogy' seems to be something of a misnomer or journalistic construct. Bowie was living in Berlin during this period but only "Heroes" was completely recorded in Berlin (Lodger was recorded in Montreux and New York and most of Low was recorded at the Chateau d'Herouville in France and then completed in Berlin). And while I'm in the mood for tedious nit-picking here's a bit more: Low does not consist of a songs side and an instrumental side (despite the fact we've been told it does countless times). There are two instrumentals on side one, the album starts with one of them, and three of the four tracks on side two feature vocals.

Bowie had been fascinated by Eno's solo albums, including Another Green World, which with its mixture of punchy songs and atmospheric instrumentals, shares a good deal in common with Low. Eno arrived at the Honky Chateau with his trusty portable synthesiser in a briefcase. What else did he bring? A profound knowledge of avant-garde artistic traditions, a love of deconstructing conventional song structures, a non-musician's conceptual approach to music making, an irresistible itch to do things differently for the sheer mischief of seeing what happened. And his pack of cards, naturally: Oblique Strategies, 55 instructional cards - a sort of I Ching set up designed to aid creativity and even constructively disrupt it. Bowie and Eno played card games a great deal while making Low. He may only get one songwriting co-credit on the record (for Warszawa, an Eno tune to which Bowie added vocals), and according to Tony Visconti, who co-produced the album with Bowie, about half of the record was recorded before he even turned up, but Eno's maverick sensibility is nonetheless stamped right through Low like Blackpool through a stick of rock.

Bowie's genius lay in creating something new by fusing apparently disparate elements. Low draws on the German electronic bands of the period and New York Minimalism but is equally indebted to funk and disco (both Bowie and Eno were quick to spot the importance of disco at a time when their less open-minded, not to mention cloth-eared rock contemporaries we're dismissing it as commercial garbage). Like most genuinely original music the album was not universally welcomed on its release. The New Musical Express took the extremely unusual step of printing two reviews of it - one full of praise and the other dismissing it as the self-indulgent ramblings of a man at the end of his tether. Even its admirers tended to describe it as gloomy or depressing. They had a point, of course, Low is not exactly a party album, but listening to it all these years later what strikes the listener is something very different - the almost gleeful sense of risk-taking and adventure. The songs on side one might be about alienation, psychic withdrawal and loneliness, but they are also possessed of a febrile energy, sweeping synthetic strings, a jaw-dropping, revolutionary drum sound and sheer funkiness. Bowie's working title for the album, New Music Night and Day, better captures its innovative and exploratory spirit (mind you, the cover, a profile shot of Bowie under the word Low, should have been clear evidence that his sense of humour was still in full working order).

In The Man Who Fell to Earth, Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien played by Bowie, makes an album but we never get to hear what it sounds like, but then we don't need to - it sounds like side two of Low. These pieces, which feature some of the most startling vocal performances of his career, (but look, Ma, no words! A trick Bowie may have stolen from Meredith Monk), radiate with an otherworldly and glacial beauty. Bowie apparently intended at least some of them for the soundtrack of the film but perhaps it's no bad thing they were turned down. On Low they provide the soundtrack for an infinite number of interior movies, daydreams and nightmares.

Low was released in January 1977, just at the time the punk revolution was gathering steam. The album bypasses punk entirely and, rather astonishingly, creates the sonic template for post-punk. Bowie never went quite this far out again, not even on the excellent follow up "Heroes", but the extraordinary thing is that he had the imagination, and indeed courage, to make an album as creative, and also as challenging to the expectations of his audience, as this one at all. Very few world famous pop stars would have done - not even the Beatles.