Breaking Glass

Low, 1977

i n a superb and concise, disturbing but danceable 112 seconds, Bowie casually captures madness. The lyric is little more than a snapshot of the disintegration of lovers: ‘Don’t look at the carpet, I drew something awful on it,’ and then, schizophrenically insistent, ‘See!’ So what’s drawn on the carpet? “Kabbalistic drawings of the Tree Of Life,” Bowie claimed later.

He had indeed drawn the Tree Of Life on his floor while chemically snow-blind and darkly obsessed with conjuring spirits, prior to reinventing rock in Berlin. So was this short, sharp, synth-slashed descent into insanity and paranoia autobiographical? The clue’s in Low’s title.