1976 to 1980

Bowie's interest in the growing German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to (West-)Berlin to dry out and rejuvenate his career. Sharing an apartment in Sch?neberg with his friend Iggy Pop, he co-produced three more of his own classic albums with Tony Visconti, as well as aiding Pop in his career. With Bowie as a co-writer and musician, Pop completed his first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life.

More unusually, Bowie joined Pop's touring band in the spring, simply playing keyboard and singing backing vocals. The group performed in the UK, Europe, and the US from March to April.

The brittle sound of Station to Station proved a precursor to that found on Low, the first of three recorded where Brian Eno was integral to the making of the albums, but despite wide-spread belief, he was not the producer. Journalists who do not read the album covers often credit Eno with production of the trilogy but in fact Bowie and Tony Visconti co-produced, with Eno co-writing some of the music, playing keyboards and developing strategies. Bowie stressed in 2000: Over the years not enough credit has gone to Tony Visconti on those particular albums. The actual sound and texture, the feel of everything from the drums to the way that my voice is recorded is Tony Visconti.

Visconti said at the time that Bowie wanted to make an album of music that was uncompromising and reflected the way he felt. He said he did not care whether or not he had another hit record, and that the recording would be so out of the ordinary that it might never get released.

Partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu! and the minimalist work of Steve Reich, Bowie journeyed to Neunkirchen near Cologne to meet the famed German producer Conny Plank. Conrad Plank was considered the revolutionary producer of that era for German rock, but had no interest in working with Bowie, refusing him entry into the studio. Bowie and his team persevered, however, and recorded on their own new songs that were relatively simple, repetitive and stripped, a clear and perverse reaction to punk rock, with the second side almost wholly instrumental. (By way of tribute, proto-punk Nick Lowe recorded an EP entitled Bowi.) The album provided him with a surprise #3 hit in the UK when the BBC picked up the first single, Sound and Vision, as its 'coming attractions' theme music. Low was renowned for having been far ahead of its time. Bowie himself has said cut me and I bleed Low. It was produced in 1976 and released in early 1977.

The Low sessions also formalised Bowie's three phase approach to making albums that he still favours today. Much of the band were present for the first five days only, after which Eno, Alomar and Gardiner remained to play overdubs. By the time Bowie wrote and recorded the lyrics everybody but Visconti and studio engineers had departed.

The next record, Heroes, was similar in sound to Low, though slightly more accessible. The mood of these records fit the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city that provided its inspiration. The title track remains one of Bowie's best known[citation needed], a classic story about two lovers who met at the Berlin Wall.

Also in 1977, Bowie appeared on the Granada music show Marc, hosted by his friend and fellow glam pioneer Marc Bolan of T. Rex, with whom he had regularly socialised and jammed since before either became famous. He turned out to be the show's final guest, as Bolan was killed in a car crash shortly afterwards. Bowie was one of many superstars who attended the funeral.

For Christmas 1977, Bowie joined Bing Crosby, of whom he was an ardent admirer, in a recording studio to do a version of Little Drummer Boy, with a new lyric . The two singers had originally met on Crosby's Christmas television special two years earlier (on the recommendation of his children — Crosby had not heard of Bowie) and performed the song. One month after the record was completed, Crosby died. Five years later, the song would prove a worldwide festive hit, charting in the UK at #3 on Christmas Day 1982. Bowie later remarked jokingly that he was afraid of being a guest artist, because everyone I met dropped dead a month later, referring to Bolan and Crosby.

There was an extensive world tour in 1978 (including his first concerts in Australia and New Zealand) which featured the music of both Low and Heroes. A live album of this tour was released, known as Stage. Songs from both Low and Heroes were later converted to symphonies by minimalist composer Phillip Glass. 1978 was also the year that featured Bowie narrating Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, which to this day is regarded as one of the best recordings of the work.

Lodger (1979) was the final album in Bowie's so-called Berlin Trilogy or 'triptych' as Tony Visconti says Bowie called it. It featured the singles Boys Keep Swinging, DJ and Look Back in Anger and, unlike the two previous long-players, did not contain any instrumentals. However, the album is renowned for being quite a contorted mix of New Wave and world music, and pieces such as African Night Flight and Yassassin were surprising detours even by Bowie's standards. However, it contained tracks that were composed using the non-traditional Bowie/Eno composition techniques. Boys Keep Swinging was developed with the band members swapping their instruments with each other and Move On contains the chords for an early Bowie composition All The Young Dudes, however they are played backwards. This was Bowie's last album with Eno until Outside (1995).

In 1980, Bowie did an about-face, integrating the lessons learnt on Low, Heroes, and Lodger while expanding upon them with chart success. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) included the #1 hit Ashes to Ashes, featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer, and revisiting the character of Major Tom from Space Oddity. The imagery Bowie used in the song's music video gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement and, with many of the followers of this phase being devotees, Bowie visited the London club Blitz — the main New Romantic hangout — to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the video, renowned as being one of the most innovative of all time.

While Scary Monsters utilised principles that Bowie had learned in the Berlin era, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically, possibly reflecting the brutal transformation Bowie had gone through during the experience. Bowie had divorced his wife Angie, undergone withdrawal from the drugs of the Thin White Duke era, and his conception of how music should be written had totally changed. The album had a hard rock edge with many innovations, including conspicuous guitar contributions from King Crimson's Robert Fripp and The Who's Pete Townshend. Perhaps in an appropriate creative high point, as Ashes to Ashes hit #1 on the UK charts, Bowie opened a 3-month run on Broadway starring as The Elephant Man on 1980 September 23.