Iggy Pop & David Bowie in Berlin: The City That Saved Them
Updated: Aug 25
By 1976, David Bowie was in trouble. Years of fame, cocaine, and a rock star lifestyle in Los Angeles had left him paranoid, barely sleeping, and creatively stuck. His solution was to leave almost everything behind and move to a rundown flat above a car repair shop in West Berlin, a city still split by a wall and a war that had ended thirty years earlier. What happened there produced two of the most influential albums of his career, though the full story is messier, and involves a lot more people, than the tidy "Berlin saved him" version usually gets credit for.
By 1976, the need to escape this destructive environment became overwhelming, and Bowie made a life-changing decision. He fled to Berlin, a city divided both physically by the Berlin Wall and emotionally by the Cold War, but one that, for Bowie, held the promise of artistic renewal and personal sobriety. His arrival there marked the start of one of the most important and productive periods of his career.
AT A GLANCE
Period: 1976 to 1978
Where he lived: Hauptstrasse 155, Schöneberg, West Berlin
Where "Heroes" was recorded: Hansa Tonstudio, roughly 500 yards from the Berlin Wall
Key collaborators: Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, Iggy Pop, Coco Schwab
Albums from the era: Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977), Lodger (1979)
Common myth: that all three albums were recorded in Berlin. Only "Heroes" actually was.
Running From Los Angeles
By the mid 1970s, Bowie's LA years had curdled into something dangerous. The wild success of Ziggy Stardust had given way to the cold, imperious Thin White Duke persona, and behind it sat a cocaine habit heavy enough to leave him paranoid and barely eating. Friends and collaborators later described him as running on almost nothing but drugs, cigarettes, and milk for weeks at a stretch. He needed somewhere unfamiliar, somewhere nobody expected anything of him. Berlin, divided by a wall and still carrying the scars of the Cold War, wasn't an obvious choice for recovery. That was rather the point.
The Expressionist Obsession
Bowie's pull toward Berlin actually went back much further than 1976. As a teenager at Bromley Technical High School, he'd been introduced to German expressionist art and Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, and he later described developing "an obsession for the angst ridden, emotional work of expressionists, both artists and filmmakers, and their spiritual home: Berlin." That fascination followed him into his work with Lindsay Kemp's mime company in the late 1960s, long before he had any plan to actually live there.
By the mid 1970s, he'd also become fixated on the electronic music coming out of Germany, particularly Tangerine Dream and its founder Edgar Froese. Froese's 1975 solo album Ypsilon in Malaysian Pale shaped Bowie's own Station to Station, and it was partly in Froese's footsteps that Bowie finally made the move.
Iggy Pop's Own Rock Bottom
By the time Bowie extended the Berlin invitation, Iggy Pop had already hit his own low point. In 1975, after the Stooges fell apart, he'd voluntarily checked himself into a psychiatric facility at UCLA rather than face the legal trouble his drug use had brought him. Bowie visited him there, though not exactly in a state to help: by his own admission he showed up with actor Dennis Hopper, both of them "out of our minds," and brought drugs along because they figured Iggy "probably hadn't had any for days." It's a messy, contradictory moment, the same man who'd soon help Iggy get clean first turning up as part of the problem. Iggy later credited Bowie with helping him survive that period regardless, and within months the two of them were sharing a flat in Berlin instead.
A Flat Above a Car Repair Shop
Bowie's assistant Coco Schwab found him an apartment on the first floor of an old Berlin building at Hauptstrasse 155 in Schöneberg, after an initial stay at the grander Schlosshotel im Grunewald hadn't worked out. The flat itself was almost deliberately unglamorous: high ceilings, plain furniture, a small balcony facing the street. Bowie later arranged separate lodging for Iggy Pop just across the road, though the two shared the Hauptstrasse flat at first.
Living there largely unrecognised was the point. Bowie read German newspapers in public, picked up basic German, and rode the U-Bahn like anyone else, an anonymity he couldn't get in London or LA. It gave him something closer to an ordinary routine for the first time in years, even while he was making some of the strangest music of his career.
Romy Haag and the Cabaret Scene
Part of what pulled Bowie into Berlin's nightlife was Romy Haag, a Dutch performer who ran the cabaret club Chez Romy Haag in Schöneberg. The two met not long after Bowie arrived, and he became so drawn to her and the club's world that he was once reportedly over four hours late to a performance because he didn't want to leave. Haag's theatrical, gender bending style left a visible mark on Bowie's own aesthetic during this period, and she later recognised her own club's staging in the video for his 1979 single "Boys Keep Swinging."
Coco Schwab, the One Who Told Him the Truth
If Berlin gets most of the credit for Bowie's recovery, Coco Schwab arguably deserves more of it. She'd met him in 1973 while working at his management company, and by the time he moved to Berlin she'd become the one person willing to tell him when he was being difficult. "Coco was the only one to tell me what a jerk I was and helped me out," Bowie said of her. Tony Visconti later put it more bluntly, saying she kept "the irritating people out of his life." Bowie's recovery in Berlin wasn't instant or clean. His depression and drinking didn't disappear the moment he crossed into West Germany, and by most accounts it was Schwab's steady presence, not the city alone, that kept him from sliding back into the chaos he'd left LA to escape. In 1987, Bowie wrote "Never Let Me Down" for her, thanking her for the "soothing hand that turned me round."
Hansa, By the Wall
Musically, the turning point came when Bowie brought in Brian Eno, whose avant garde instincts matched what he was chasing. Together with producer Tony Visconti, they recorded at Hansa Tonstudio, a former Nazi era ballroom about 500 yards from the Berlin Wall. Eno made deliberate use of the building's acoustics, setting up microphones in a Grand Hall built for 150 musicians to record a session with just six. For Bowie's vocal on the title track, Visconti solved a shortage of spare tape tracks by setting up three microphones at different distances, close, mid room, and right across the hall, each one gated to only pick up his voice once he sang past a certain volume. The effect built the song's cavernous echo into the performance itself rather than adding it afterward, and gave the vocal its rising, increasingly desperate quality as it builds. Visconti recalled the view from the control room during the sessions: "We recorded the album in the shadow of the wall. Directly in front of us was a guard tower with East German guards, you could actually see the red stars on their fuzzy hats." The title track itself was partly inspired by Visconti's own fleeting kiss with a backing singer near that same wall, and it became one of Bowie's most enduring songs.
The album's cover carried the same theme even further. Bowie had grown fascinated with German expressionist painter Erich Heckel, and modelled his own pose for the "Heroes" sleeve on Heckel's 1917 painting Roquairol, a portrait of a fellow artist caught in visible emotional distress. Photographer Masayoshi Sukita recreated the contorted stance for the shoot, giving Bowie's most Berlin record a cover that reached all the way back to the art that had drawn him to the city in the first place.
A Trilogy That Wasn't Quite Berlin
Here's the part most retellings skip: only one of the three albums people call the "Berlin Trilogy" was actually recorded in Berlin. Low was largely recorded at Château d'Hérouville in France and only finished at Hansa afterward. "Heroes" was the one genuinely made there from start to finish. Lodger, released in 1979, was recorded at Mountain Studios in Switzerland and never went near Berlin at all. Bowie himself later admitted the trilogy label was mostly a convenience, calling it "a handy handle for journalists" rather than a strict account of where the music was made. Berlin shaped the mood and the collaborators far more than it shaped the actual tape reels.
What Came Out of It
It's worth remembering that none of this was welcomed at first. When Bowie delivered Low, his label's head of press reportedly responded with little more than "What are we going to do with this?" His own manager at the time, Tony DeFries, was blunter still, dismissing it as "a piece of crap" and refusing to count it toward Bowie's contractual obligations at all.
"A piece of crap." That was Bowie's own manager, on the album now considered one of his masterpieces.
Bowie didn't wait around for anyone to come round to it. By the time Low reached shops in January 1977, he was already planning the next record.
When "Heroes" followed later that year, some listeners found its dark, experimental instrumentals hard to warm to, but it's since been recognised as one of Bowie's finest records. Its influence reached well past his own catalogue. U2, Depeche Mode, and Nick Cave all later recorded at Hansa themselves, drawn partly by the same studio that had shaped Bowie's sound. Musically, Bowie described his approach during this period as treating "the album as an instrument" itself, keeping mistakes if they sounded interesting rather than smoothing them over.
Berlin, Revisited
Bowie didn't just leave Berlin behind when he moved on. In 2013, decades after "Heroes," he released "Where Are We Now?", a quiet, reflective single that name checked specific places from his old life there: Potsdamer Platz, once a crossing point on the Death Strip between East and West, and the Dschungel nightclub on Nürnberger Strasse, a venue he'd frequented that locals compared to New York's Studio 54. It wasn't nostalgia for its own sake. Berlin in the 1970s had briefly recaptured something of what Bowie called "the Weimar days of the 1920s," the same reckless, hedonistic era that performers like Anita Berber had defined half a century earlier, and it seems to be that spirit, as much as the music, that he was still thinking about decades on.
"Berlin was the first time in years that I had felt a joy of life, and a great feeling of release and healing."
Berlin didn't hand David Bowie a clean recovery or a finished trilogy, whatever the tidier version of the story suggests. What it gave him was an unglamorous flat, a handful of people who actually looked out for him, and a studio built in the shadow of a wall that happened to produce some of the strangest, most enduring music of his career. Bowie put it more simply years later, saying he'd finally "felt like I was coming back to who I should have been." That's a messier story than "the city that saved him," but it's the one that actually holds up.
Quick Questions About Bowie's Berlin Years
Did David Bowie record all three Berlin Trilogy albums in Berlin?
No. Only "Heroes" was recorded entirely in Berlin. Low was mostly recorded in France and finished at Hansa, and Lodger was recorded in Switzerland.
Where did David Bowie live in Berlin?
He lived at Hauptstrasse 155 in the Schöneberg district, in a modest flat he initially shared with Iggy Pop.
Was Iggy Pop actually with Bowie in Berlin?
Yes. Bowie invited him to Berlin in 1976, and the two lived close to each other while Bowie produced Iggy's albums The Idiot and Lust for Life.
What was Hansa Studios?
Hansa Tonstudio was a recording studio near the Berlin Wall, housed in a former Nazi era ballroom, where "Heroes" was recorded in 1977.
