Future legend: David Bowie's Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976)

As I would hope is well recognised, few bend at the knee more to the greatness of David Bowie than I. But there are some limits: the eye-watering Eur 266.99 being asked at my local record emporium for Where Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), the admittedly sumptuous second box set released today and covering The Dame's pre-Berlin, mid-Seventies career, which produced the studio albums Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Station To Station.

To be fair, that Eur 266 does buy you 13 180g audiophile-quality vinyl discs, including these three albums plus The Gouster - the previously unreleased album that became Young Americans, TWO versions of the double album David Live (the 2005 reissue runs to three-discs) and the double Live Nassau Coliseum '76, plus another collection of rarities, Re:Call 2. For the digitally-minded (and those with smaller budgets) the collection is also available as a 12-CD package at a more modest Eur 129.99. Still, an expensive fortnight, following the release last week of Led Zeppelin's Complete BBC Sessions.

Of course, we're appealing to the über consumer here. Most self-respecting Bowie fans - and even those with only a casual interest - will have the three studio albums already. But, inevitably, interest in The Dame has piqued with his death, and if that brings new appreciation for his canon via these luxury re-releases, so much the better.

What makes this particular box set interesting is where Bowie was in this period. It began with his move, first to New York and then Los Angeles, to make America his base of operations. This, as Paul Tryka detailed in his excellent Starman biography, saw Bowie consumed by compulsive behaviour, including wild spending, Olympic cocaine consumption and numerous obsessions with people (Mick Jagger) and themes (post-apocalyptic dystopia). Diamond Dogs was the first manifestation of the latter: his eighth album, it was built on a fascination with George Orwell's 1984 and the bleak vision of the (then) future it depicted. 

Diamond Dogs also appeared after Bowie had theatrically 'retired' the Ziggy Stardust character, but in doing so he merely moved on to a new guise, the whey-faced Thin White Duke, eschewing the glam rock that Bowie had pursued in the previous two years. Though recorded at London's Olympic Studios (as well as some work at Ludolph Studios in Nederhorst den Berg, a tiny village in the rural Amsterdam hinterland...and just down the road from where I used to live), Diamond Dogs had a noticeably looser sound, pointing towards the 'Americanization' that would evolve further with Young Americans and its notable shift towards soul and funk.

For some of Bowie's earlier cheerleaders, the Diamond Dogs era marked a less welcome change. John Peel, who'd been one of the strongest champions at the outset of Bowie's career, remarked that Bowie's cover of the Eddie Floyd soul classic Knock On Wood, and released as a single off David Live, was "lazy, arrogant and impertinent". But it was on the tour that produced David Live that Bowie appeared in one of the most fascinating - and disturbing - documentaries ever made about a rock musician: Alan Yentob's Cracked Actor. 

Made for the BBC's Omnibus arts magazine, Yentob captured an emaciated Bowie, deep in the grip of cocaine addition, on tour in California, with semi-lucid interviews in the back of limousines interspersed with footage of Bowie performing the Diamond Dogs title track along with earlier entries from the canon like Space Oddity, Aladdin Sane and John, I'm Only Dancing (Again). Sadly, Cracked Actor has never been released on home media, although some dodgy bootlegs - recorded off the last BBC screening - lurk online. See it if you can, but be prepared to see a Bowie in a very different space to the jovial, blokey star of chat shows in the late 1990s.

Who Can I Be Now? could very easily have been called something like 'The American Years'. His desire to explore contemporary American music stretches back to the demise of Ziggy Stardust, when the singer was already looking for a new vehicle. Who Can I Be Now? is one of the tracks on The Gouster, the album that Bowie worked on immediately after the Dogs tour, and is a title reflecting his need to reinvent himself. The album took him to Philadelphia's Sigma Sound studio to immerse in the local music culture with producer Tony Visconti, with whom he had reunited to work with on the David Live release. Though The Gouster was never released, it contained early versions of Right, Can You Hear Me and Somebody Up There Likes Me, along with a reworking of John, I'm Only Dancing (Again) and an early version of Young Americans.

It would be a stretch to say that The Gouster alone warrants buying the Who Can I Be Now? package, but for Bowie completists it marks a curious bridging point between Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. It was, according to Visconti, an attempt at soul - "plastic soul", as Bowie would later waspishly brand it - and even its title (a reference to African-American fashion in the 1960s) was meant to represent a statement of attitude. 

It's eventual release is more, though, than a work in progress, but the reason why it didn't appear in its originally recorded form was partly down to Bowie recording too many longer songs to fit a single album, and also to the capricious state Bowie was in at the time. Some of the songs recorded for The Gouster were taken into a New York studio with John Lennon, who gave the prototypes outright Philly soul sound (which included guitar work from Carlos Alomar and then-unknown singer Luther Vandross) more of a pop feel. But given how much we still don't know about Bowie, even the presence of a few previously unreleased tracks interpolates gaps in the fan's understanding of the musical - and physical - state Bowie was in between 1974 and 1976.

The cocaine that Bowie was hoovering up at this point in his life may have affected his increasingly paranoid personality, but not necessarily his creativity. After Young Americans came Station To Station. Lasting only six tracks and running for just under 38 minutes, it is both a demonstration of  Bowie's impatience to release new material, but also the inventiveness with which he was still streets ahead of any of his peers at the time. Golden Years still sounds, 40 years later, box-fresh, while TVC 15 stands out for its funk and pace, and remains one of my favourite Bowie songs of all time. And his cover of Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind became so distinct it's now hard to think of how Simone recorded it to begin with (a live version on the Bowie At The Beeb limited edition three-CD set in 2000 saw Bowie - accompanied by his brilliant band of the time - teetering between torch song and rock epic).

Thematically, Station To Station found Bowie toying obsessively with yet new literary inspiration, namely the works of Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche, and reflects a state of mind in some degree of turmoil. It's hard not to wonder how much of that was the result of the cocaine. But the album - which precedes the Berlin trilogy and its starker sound and vision (sorry...) - also evolves the funk that had been the hallmark of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. Ever the magpie, Bowie had become interested in German industrial rock and the synths and rhythms of Kraftwerk, the influence of which can be heard in spirit on Station To Station. However, even Bowie admitted that the album was also a statement of detachment. 

Towards the end of the album's tour (from which the Live Nassau Coliseum 76 release was culled), Bowie arrived at London's Victoria Station in an open-topped Mercedes and was photographed giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Having previously been questioned by police for possession of Nazi memorabilia as well as being quoted saying that the UK "...could benefit from a Fascist leader", many felt that, along with his somewhat stark, black and white stage aesthetic, Bowie was indeed leaning to the extreme right. Not long after, a drunk Eric Clapton gave his support to Enoch Powell's notorious comments on immigration, leading to the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement. The popular perception became that Britain's rock elite were not as cool as their fans had expected them to be.

Bowie would later dismiss the Victoria Station episode as a case of a photographer catching him at an unfortunate angle. Others would simply put it all down to a rock star's descent into cocaine-induced mania (and portrayed, inadvertently, by Bob Geldof's 'Pink' in Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall). No wonder, then, that Bowie's next move would be to decamp with Iggy Pop to Berlin - then Europe's drug gateway - though to sober up, both chemically but also creatively.

It's hard, then, not to view the music contained on the numerous discs of Who Can I Be Now? as the result of a rock star in stereotypical drug-addled exploration. But whereas the mountains of coke being taken by the rock music community in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s led to some of music's blandest output, the reason why Bowie continues to be deservedly exalted is loud and clear in this collection. Whatever his state, whatever his application of outside influences, he was, between '74 and '76, still the most unique performer in rock and roll, then or since.

Calling all stations - David Bowie's Station To Station turns 40

© John Robert Rowlands.

It's started already. There are already grumblings on the interweb of Bowie Fatigue. Good God, the man has barely been gone 12 days and already social media's billious underbelly is carping.

Me, personally, I've done what any self-respecting music fan would do and have taken to what I call "positive wallowing" - scouring YouTube for Bowie interviews and TV appearances from, it would seem, largely around the time of his 'third age'. This was post-Let's Dance and post-Tin Machine, perhaps post-midlife crisis, too, but a period in which the albums Hours, Outside and Reality seemed to reflect a contented Bowie lacking any obvious desire to create yet another personality to project his songwriting through.

Looking at appearances on Jonathan Ross and Conan O'Brien's chat shows, even an interview on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, for heaven's sake, you see a Bowie you'd want to hang out with. Funny, relaxed, self-aware but not self-possessed. Unlike some of the great and the good who unloaded their own grief at the man's passing. "He had such a profound effect on my life, I don't know where to start," said Damon Albarn.

Tempting as it is to mock, he had a point. Where do you start? "Who else has left a mark like this?" asked Kate Bush, herself no slouch in the convention-busting department. "No one" was her rheotorical answer.

Elsewhere I've covered the enormity, the breadth and the depth of Bowie's canon, so I won't repeat myself. But this day, January 23, does possess considerable significance in Bowieology.

For it was this day in 1976 that Bowie released Station To Station, and album which - as it's title might suggest - represented yet another transition.

By the age of 29 he'd already produced nine studio albums and had been and gone through the musical theatre of his debut, invented space rock, midwifed glam rock, produced his own My Way and given it all up to try a hand at blue-eyed (or wonky blue-eyed) Philadelphia soul, quite well, as it happened.

With pop unsure whether to follow the disco boom (which, thanks Google, I've also discovered to be a questionable nightclub still going in Greece) or the chambray-shirted West Coast soft-rock movement, David Bowie entered LA's Cherokee Studios in September 1975 to work on an album that marked first steps towards a more industrial sound.

Bowie had always been an artistic kleptomaniac, acquiring influences and styles from wherever he went. Right up until Blackstar he was still hoovering up loose trinkets from across the cultural spectrum, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly amongst them. But in the mid-1970s, Bowie's reception of cultural influences was also being impacted by his enthusiastic consumption of drugs, especially Los Angeles' confection of choice, cocaine.

Having spent the summer of 1975 making Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth, an acclaimed but still baffling pyscho-sci-fi drama that seemed to have been about The Dame himself, Bowie's entry to Cherokee Studios was to follow-up the "plastic soul" as he later branded Young Americans.

The conventional wisdom is that Station To Station marked a musical shift towards the Europe that the Berlin trilogy, which followed, clearly embraced. But the truth is that Station To Station was still a highly soulful album - Golden Years and TVC15 especially, even if the acquired trinket since Young Americans was the synthesised industry of Kraftwerk, who'd released Autobahn in 1974.

The real European shift, however, was in Bowie's thinking: opening Station To Station, its title song announces the "The return of the thin white duke", at a stroke profering another persona, but one clearly ready to depart California: "Flashing no colour tall in this room overlooking the ocean" and, tellingly, later: "It's not the side effects of the cocaine, it's too late to be grateful, it's too late to be late again, it's too late to be hateful. The European canon is here."

Paul Tryka, who's biography Starman is without the definitive Bowie study, describes Station To Station as a "love letter to Europe" and a "remarkably coherent statement from a man whose grip on reality was intermittent", although in Cameron Crowe's seminal Rolling Stone feature on Bowie in February 1976, those around him claimed that Bowie was now drug-free. However, he was, so he told Crowe, "very, very bored".

Whether Bowie was clean or still using when he began recording Station To Station it was clear he was restlessness. Los Angeles will do that, whether you've succumbed to its temptations or not. Around this time, too, there were rumours of an interest in occultist Aleister Crowley. After Station To Station had come out, Bowie became embroiled in a series of incidents in which he appeared to flirt with facism - being quoted in Sweden that "Britain could benefit from a fascist leader", being caught in possesion of Nazi paraphernalia and then, in May 1976 being photographed at London's Victoria Station giving what many believed to have been a Nazi salute.

However abstaining, Bowie's previously Olympic taste for drugs had left him 'erratic', to put things mildly. Moving to Berlin to clean up with Iggy Pop was, he would later joke, a strange choice given that Berlin was, in 1977, Europe's drug gateway.

Perhaps, then, influenced by addiction's manias, or even by the experience of spending several weeks as Roeg's alien, Bowie's approach to Station To Station drew out themes of emotional attachment, madness, disillusionment or, simply, the doldrums he spoke of to Crowe. Golden Years, mind you, is both mysically and lyrically quite 'up', and in fact, the whole album delivers a warmth at odds with some of its lyrical themes, perhaps a consequence of the musicians who added colour to the record - stalwarts like Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick, and pianist Roy Bittan, now a fixture of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band.

There is, though, a simmering disquiet to Station To Station, manic flashes glinting through the apparent stability of the album's "funk on the edge" as Charles Shaar Murray described it in Melody Maker. And with Bowie edging towards Europe, both geographically and in the apparent nature of his suggested political interests, there are clues laid here and there as to his future (a trail of breadcrumbs similar, I supposed, to that laid on Blackstar), with Stay creating a sense of longing for something or someone long lost, and a cover of the Johnny Mathis theme tune to the 1957 film Wild Is The Wind asking "Let me fly away with you".

Despite official claims to the contrary, the David Bowie who commenced recording Station To Station in Septmber 1975 wasn't any more lucid than the Bowie who released it on January 23, 1976. "I was in a serious decline, emotionally and socially," he admitted 20 years later, recognising that he was living on a cliff edge then. "I was lucky enough to know somewhere within me that I really was killing myself, and I had to do something drastic to pull myself out of that." And so, after touring the album, he and Iggy took off for Europe, producing a year later Low and its grey, spartan contrast to the sunshine of Southern California, the cold turkey experience of "Pale blinds drawn all day, nothing to do, nothing to say" as Sound And Vision would describe.

Station To Station may have been the precursor to change, the album that Bowie needed to record to shed the fraudelence of LA and its painted-on sunshine, and get ready for something new, but it is far from being a gloomy album. Even if it is clear that Bowie was looking to get out of La-La Land and, in particular loose the chains of addictions, the line that defines the record in its entirety is right there in Golden Years: "Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere - angel! Come get up my baby."