The Berlin period — 1976 to 1979 — is the chapter of David Bowie’s life that his most serious admirers return to with the most consistent reverence, and it is the chapter that almost did not happen because the person who needed to escape Los Angeles most urgently was not Bowie but Iggy Pop, and the decision to go to Berlin was made by two people in the specific crisis of needing to be somewhere that was not where they were.
Iggy Pop — James Newell Osterberg, from Ann Arbor, Michigan — had spent the first half of the 1970s as the most physically reckless performer in rock music and the least commercially successful important artist of his generation. The Stooges had made albums that were received, at the time, with critical indifference and commercial failure and that were subsequently recognized as foundational documents of punk and alternative rock. Iggy himself had developed a performance practice involving self-mutilation, stage diving before the term existed, and a relationship with his audience that dispensed with the professional distance that most performers maintained as a minimum condition of survival. He had also developed a heroin addiction that was consuming him with a thoroughness that the music could not offset.
Bowie had been a friend, an admirer, and eventually a professional collaborator — he had produced Raw Power for the Stooges in 1973, one of the great rock albums of the era and one whose commercial failure at the time was followed by decades of influence that make the failure seem, in retrospect, like a misunderstanding on the part of the market. He understood Iggy’s talent with the specific clarity of someone who recognized greatness operating in circumstances that prevented it from being fully received.
The move to Berlin was, on the surface, practical — both men needed to be somewhere without the specific infrastructure of their Los Angeles lives, without the dealers and the enablers and the circumstances that made the substances too easy and the music too difficult. Berlin in 1977 was a divided city in the specific geopolitical sense, with the Wall visible from the windows of Hansa Studios where they would record, and it was a city with its own music scene — the Krautrock tradition, the electronic experiments of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream — that was entirely different from anything either of them had previously encountered.
Bowie wrote Lust for Life for Iggy Pop during the Berlin period. He has said the writing of it was one of the fastest creative acts of his career — the drumbeat came from an Armed Forces Radio broadcast of the Morse code identification signal, the riff assembled around it in a session of such productive momentum that the song was essentially complete the day it was started. He has said he wrote it for Iggy but also for himself — that the specific energy of the song, its forward momentum and its celebration of surviving and continuing, was something both of them needed at that precise moment.
Iggy has said Lust for Life was the first song he recorded in the Berlin period that felt like himself — that the preceding months of attempting to get clean and attempting to find a new musical direction had produced uncertainty about who he was as an artist, and that singing Lust for Life in the studio clarified something. That the person who had made those Stooges albums was still present and was now in a room that allowed him to be that person without the costs that had previously accompanied it.
Bowie has said the Berlin years saved his life. He has said Lust for Life was the song that made him believe they were going to be all right — that whatever had needed to happen by leaving Los Angeles was happening, and that the music they were making was evidence of it.