Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Continue,’ and he started in with his electronic
noises. Suddenly everyone starts to look at each
other like ‘Hey, there’s something happening here,’
and we decided to finish an album like that. David
was painting the whole time that we were playing. He
had an easel set up in the studio. As we went on,
Bowie did all the segues that tell the story throughout
the album in real time as we jammed. All the different
voices. Baby Grace, Algeria Touchshreik, Leon
Blank, Nathan Adler …” The unusual approach to
recording was nothing new to anyone familiar with
Eno, but the more classically trained Kizilcay was
initially thrown. “He cannot even play four bars,” he
tells me. “I must say this. He’s too clever. An
interesting guy but I don’t know how he became so
famous. He cannot play two harmonies together. No
idea how to play the keyboard.”
Experiments like running Martha and the
Vandellas’ version of “Dancing in the Streets” (as
opposed to Bowie’s own duet with Jagger) through
the headphones and instructing the band to jam
along with it, then playing back the results with the
original song dropped out of the mix perplexed
Kizilcay. “He’d spent time writing us letters.
Everyone got a different letter,” he says. “I was in
Arabia and I was going to marry the sheik’s
daughter, so I was to play funky Arabic disco?”
When word got around that Eno, who’d spent
much of the eighties and early nineties working with
U2 (in addition to producing the Manchester band
James’ immortal “Laid” and creating the start-up