Station To Station - Aftermath

Aftermath

With the Station to Station sessions completed in December 1975, Bowie started work on a soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth with Paul Buckmaster as his collaborator. Bowie expected to be wholly responsible for the film's music but found that "when I'd finished five or six pieces, I was then told that if I would care to submit my music along with some other people's... and I just said "Shit, you're not getting any of it". I was so furious, I'd put so much work into it." Notwithstanding, Harry Maslin argued that Bowie was "burned out" and couldn't complete the work in any case. The singer eventually collapsed, admitting later, "There were pieces of me laying all over the floor". In the event, only one instrumental composed for the soundtrack saw the light of day, evolving into "Subterraneans" on his next studio album, Low.

After abandoning the soundtrack album, Bowie went on tour in support of Station to Station, commencing 2 February 1976 and completing on 18 May 1976. Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" was employed as an overture to the shows, accompanying footage from Luis Buñuel's and Salvador Dalí's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. The staging featured Bowie, dressed in The Duke's habitual black waistcoat and trousers, a pack of Gitanes placed ostentatiously in his pocket, moving stiffly among "curtains of white light", an effect that spawned the nickname 'the White Light Tour'. In 1989 Bowie reflected, "I wanted to go back to a kind of Expressionist German-film look... and the lighting of, say, Fritz Lang or Pabst. A black-and-white movies look, but with an intensity that was sort of aggressive. I think for me, personally, theatrically, that was the most successful tour I’ve ever done." The Station to Station tour was the source of one of the artist's best-known bootlegs, culled from an FM radio broadcast of his 23 March 1976 concert at Nassau Coliseum.

Bowie drew criticism during the tour for his alleged pro-fascist views. In a 1974 interview he had declared, "Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars... quite as good as Jagger... He staged a country", but managed to avoid condemnation. On the Station to Station tour, however, a series of incidents attracted publicity, starting in April 1976 with his detention by customs in Eastern Europe for possession of Nazi memorabilia. The same month he was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader". Bowie would blame his addictions and the persona of The Thin White Duke for his lapses in judgment. The controversy culminated on 2 May 1976, shortly before the tour completed, in the so-called 'Victoria Station incident' in London, when Bowie arrived in an open-top Mercedes convertible and apparently gave a Nazi salute to the crowd that was captured on film and published in NME. Bowie claimed that the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave, a contention backed by a young Gary Numan who was among the throng that day: "Think about it. If a photographer takes a whole motor-driven film of someone doing a wave, you will get a Nazi salute at the end of each arm-sweep. All you need is some dickhead at a music paper or whatever to make an issue out it ..." The stigma remained, however, to the extent that the lines "To be insulted by these fascists/It's so degrading" from Scary Monsters' opening track "It's No Game", four years later, were interpreted as an attempt to bury the incident once and for all.