David Bowie – Station to Station Review 

Six songs and an utter masterpiece come together for David Bowie. Just a few years on from Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars came a whole new image for Bowie. He had donned the Ziggy image for too long, had grown tired of it and retired the persona live on stage in the mid-1970s. Just a year later, and The Thin White Duke was rolled out on Young Americans. Bowie would deepen the meaning of that personality switch-up on Station to Station, a masterstroke of an album influenced by his time in Berlin, Germany. Heading back into Station to Station after so many years away from it, hearing that heightened sense of drama, that eerie industrial tease and whining instrumentals, is brilliant. You never forget your first experience with it, and you’ll have a hard time not relishing a return to one of Bowie’s greatest achievements. Just the title track alone is worth it, a monumental experience which hears Bowie wonder if it’s far too late to appreciate and criticise his body of work and his personal life.  

Station to Station is made a touch different as Bowie, sweating through a few addictions and the Los Angeles heat, starts to pull at a few ideas that he perhaps wouldn’t have explored otherwise. The title track is a phenomenal layering of everything from occultism, the Stations of the Cross, and those experiments with substances that guide much of the album. Following it up with lead single Golden Years, a groovy instrumental with the same vocally intense and discomforting sound as the title track, is a masterstroke. Funk and disco influences with a narrator whose unreliable nature and untrustworthiness as a character, as well as Bowie remembering hardly anything from the sessions, blends paranoia with the tone of the times. It’s a transition into what Bowie would piece together on his staggering Berlin Trilogy. It’s still amazing to hear Bowie dig deep into the music that was influencing him at the time, the sounds which weren’t quite infiltrating the US and UK charts. He pulls at them and puts them to the pop sword very well with Golden Years.  

Bowie tugs at the nerves of fame with Word on a Wing, an underrated gem of Station to Station. His fear and obsession with the spotlight are a clear conflict but he tackles it well and hopes to seek some salvation, be it in the studio or on stage, to overcome this terror of being a cultural presence. Young Americans offered Bowie the structure to make an out-there, dark and dense piece of work. Stay has all the longing of your usual romantics but the tone of a terrified heart hoping to cling to what he knows and where he can get it from. Bowie is at his best during these moments, where the instrumental team he assembled backs his wilder notions to the hilt. A few subtle but certain electric guitar solos bring the project together brilliantly. What Bowie articulates here is a feverish fear of nothing specific, and thus the everything pressure makes the walls close in no matter what action he takes.  

It’s an astonishing listen. Hearing Bowie spiral into this thought process or that instrumental break is among his very best work. What it informed after this and the context of Station to Station as a follow-up to his most successful period and one of his best-selling albums, it’s a license to get weird with it. The fact it worked, and remains one of his greatest achievements, is just a happenstance but satisfying occurrence. That crushing, longing notion heard on album closer Wild is the Wind is nothing short of beautiful. Gone are the protective layers of the Thin White Duke, the occult allegories and that notion of being carefree. Bowie cared, deeply, at this time in his career. He may not remember the experience but his hunger for a place in the world after a popularity peak is what comes to the forefront here. Station to Station is a masterstroke from an artist who had more than a few expansive projects come together in the years before and after this release.