Let’s dance? David Bowie’s diverse history with electronic music

Plus Darkside, Ethel Cain and more

The cover of a record I found in a charity shop but didn’t buy, featuring dancing from a region in Spain.

January 2025 marks the ninth anniversary of the Line Noise podcast and also the ninth anniversary of David Bowie’s death, two things which always come together in my mind. In fact, you can hear Philip Sherburne and I discussing Bowie’s influence on electronic music on episode one of Line Noise.

To mark the occasion, I thought I would go back and revisit a piece I wrote about David Bowie’s history with dance music, which is, as you will see, both vast and a little odd, at times.

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In January 2016 UK dance magazine Mixmag put together a list of the nine greatest remixes of David Bowie’s work to mark the great man’s passing. It was a strange numerical move - compiling nine tracks, rather than the usual top ten, five or 20 - that seemed oddly appropriate for an artist whose influence on dance and electronic music was both huge and strangely hard to pin down.

To unpack that: Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of albums in the 1970s was wildly important for the development of electronic music, helping to popularise the new synthesiser sound being forged by artists such as Kraftwerk and Neu. Tracks like Warszawa, a Brian Eno co-write on the second side of Low, were masterpieces of electronic atmospherics, introducing a new audience to the wild possibilities and ethereal elegance of electronic music, while V2 Schneider (on Heroes) is an overt tribute to Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider.

Bowie’s influence on clubland was massive too, with the New Romantics / Blitz kids of early 80s England inspired by Bowie’s androgynous looks and other-worldly music. And yet if you’re a dance music DJ looking to play tribute to Bowie on the anniversary of his death, you may well struggle for an appropriate track. And if you’re a dance magazine looking for his ten best remixes, well, you might end up with just nine.

Bowie’s adventures in electronic music didn’t end with 1979’s Lodger, the last of the Berlin trilogy. Eno may have been absent for 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) but guitarist Chuck Hammer added guitar synth throughout the album, notably on classic single Ashes to Ashes. A year later, Bowie recorded the gothic-y Cat People (Putting Out Fire) with electronic music pioneer, Giorgio Moroder.

The next decade would, however, see little electronic experimentation in Bowie’s work, as he first amped up his commercial leanings (on Let’s Dance, Tonight and Never Let Me Down), then embraced back-to-basics hard rock with Tin Machine. It’s not that electronics were entirely absent from Bowie’s commercial phase, of course - Bowie himself contributes synth on Never Let Me Down - but they were used more as a matter of course, in the same way any 80’s heritage rocker might. We were a world away from Low’s crystalline synth experimentation.

Black Tie White Noise, Bowie’s eighteenth studio album, would see the dancing spectre of dance music return to Bowie’s work after the meat and potatoes rock of Tin Machine, the 1993 album nodding to - and at one point wholeheartedly embracing - the dance culture then prevalent in the singer’s native England.

Bowie told The Boston Globe in 1993 that he and producer Nile Rodgers were heavily influenced by house music while making the album. “We both basically missed the same element, with what was happening with the new R&B, which is now hip-hop and house, and what we were missing was the strong melodic content that was apparent in the ‘60s,” he said. “I wanted to see if we could establish a new kind of melodic form of house.”

Jump they Say, the album’s lead single and a UK top ten hit, was based around Rodger’s shuffling breakbeat, for example, while Leftfield’s progressive house remix of the same track was a big club hit in Europe. The album’s real electronic highlight, though, was Pallas Athena, five minutes of moody tech-ish house, complete with haunting strings and Bowie’s distorted saxophone. Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers would remix the track, with his mixes apparently being issued anonymously to US club DJs.

Pallas Athena would also play a role in what was Bowie’s most widely-recognised embrace of experimental electronic music since the 70s: his drum & bass phase of the late 90s. This period is typified by the 1997 album Earthling, knocked off in two and a half weeks by Bowie and guitarist Reeves Gabrels under the influence of The Prodigy, Underworld, US industrial music and drum & bass. It was a brave move for an artist now well into his fourth decade of recording but not an entirely successful one.

Bowie assimilated drum & bass ideas into his unique pop sound on Earthling, much as he had done with Eno’s synths 20 years before - using, for example, the distinctive Amen break on Little Wonder - but it was an ill-fitting mix that is stretched uncomfortably between two camps, too pop for the junglists, too odd for the pop fans.

And yet there was no denying Bowie’s devotion to the sound. At the Phoenix Festival in 1997 Bowie and band played a drum & bass-influenced set in the Radio 1 Dance tent as Tao Jones Index and some of the remixes from the Earthling period are brilliant, notably A Guy Called Gerald and Adam F’s takes on Telling Lies. Photek’s V5 mix of I'm Afraid of Americans, meanwhile, is so utterly perfect that I can only wish that Bowie had worked with drum & bass producers directly on Earthling, rather than trying to fashion the sound himself. Pallas Athena also got the drum & bass treatment during the Earthling tour, with a live take of the song released on limited 12” vinyl under the Tao Jones Index name.

Subsequent albums saw Bowie tone down the drum & bass influence but he remained open to the possibilities of electronic music through Hours, Heathen (whose bonus disc came complete with remixes from Air and Moby) and Reality.

And then… there was nothing. Bowie went on a hiatus that many assumed was permanent, only to return when we least expected it, with the surprise release of Where Are We Now in January 2013, followed two months later by The Next Day, his twenty-fourth studio album. Both single and album may have played the nostalgia card with a classic rock sound but Bowie would enlist James Murphy to remix Love Is Lost, which was released as the fifth single from the album.

Murphy would return to the Bowie fold on Blackstar, an album said to be influenced by shadowy electronic duo Boards of Canada, contributing percussion to Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) and Girl Loves Me. That album, released days before Bowie’s death, would see the singer introduce jazz to his musical palette to wild acclaim. And yet its very last track, I Can’t Give Everything Away, is possibly Bowie’s most successful excursion into electronic music since the 1990s, unusual drum machine patterns and airy synth stabs perfectly framing a heart-breaking vocal.

Bowie’s influence on all music was vast and he was undoubtedly an pioneer of electronic music. But he was such an idiosyncratic artist that it is sometimes hard to see exactly where the crossover lay. Black Tie White Noise wasn’t really a house music album; and Earthling was exactly drum & bass. James Murphy didn’t do his typical LCD Soundsystem thing on Blackstar and the influence of Boards of Canada on Bowie’s final album was more likely thematic than textural.

Bowie wasn’t an electronic music artist, per se. But then he wasn’t really tied to any genre. One of Bowie’s greatest attributes was how he seemed to defy any kind of simplistic label you might want to pin on him. That said, Bowie doubtlessly contributed a great deal to the history of electronic music, from its popular roots in the 70s, to the commercial boom in the early 90s, to the genre fragmentation of the mid to late 90s.

Should you want one, I Can’t Give Everything Away, the last song on Bowie’s last album, could be the perfect tribute to electronic Bowie. But I would like to propose another track for that particular crown: Aphex Twin’s 1997 remix of “Heroes”.

The song, technically, isn’t even a Bowie original: Aphex remixed Philip Glass’ orchestral version of “Heroes”, for a CD to accompany the Japanese issue of the composers “Heroes” Symphony (it was later reissued on Aphex Twin’s 26 Mixes for Cash). In doing so he mixed in fragments of Bowie’s original vocal, creating a hugely moving, if oddly unsettling, take on one of Bowie’s most-loved tracks, inadvertently creating the perfect tribute to one of popular music’s most brilliantly unlikely, ceaselessly innovative artists.

Some Listening

Darkside - S.N.C

Darkside unite three things in music that I don’t particularly like: Americana, jamming and the Grateful Dead. And yet, damn it, I love them. S.N.C., from their new album Nothing, seems to exemplify their blend of Kosmiche Americana, its guitarische drift being interrupted about a minute in by the filthiest clavinet boogie, which floats about a bit, like Stevie Wonder in space, then retreats. About a minute after that, the band introduce a fantastic country soul vocal hook, the clavinet returns to bear it aloft and a four four kick drum takes the listener home. It’s a genuinely bizarre mix but utterly irresistible. Although please don’t turn into Phish, Darkside. That I really couldn’t handle.

The Sindecut & Ijeoma - Keeping Me Up

And talking of bizarre blends, the new record from UK hip hop pioneer The Sindecut and singer Ijeoma seems to have no regard for where it should sit in our consciousness, mixing a reggae feel with four four house beat, hip hop production cuts and a widdling guitar solo, which sees out the near nine-minute original mix. The vocal is delicious, the production razor sharp and the guitar solo, erm, long. This is fantastic work from The Sindecut, some 25 years after the release of their debut album.

Ethel Cain - Amber Waves

A confession: I paid almost no attention to Ethel Cain’s debut album Preacher's Daughter, with the US artist only really entering my consciousness when I realised that people were very excited indeed to see her at Primavera 2024. From what I understand, though, her new album Perverts is a massive left-turn, taking the Southern Gothic indie rock of her debut and plunging it into freezing industrial ambience. People are already talking about album of the year for Perverts and, while I wouldn’t go that far, it’s great to see an artist really stretch themselves. Amber Waves is a tremendous example of the album’s chilling power, the song stretched out over eleven and a half minutes like a skeleton at repose. It sounds to me like mortuary soul and these cold January days are all the more beautiful for it.

Things I’ve done

Ringo Starr - Look Up

Anyone who knows me, knows I love Ringo Starr above many and most things. So I was very happy indeed to review his new album for Pitchfork. Honestly - no but honestly - it’s pretty great. “The former Beatle has the doleful vocal charm to sound at home in country music, the shrewdness to pick the right collaborators, and the sense to - well - act naturally among them. Craggy, wounded, and oddly philosophical, Look Up makes a timely case for Starr as one of the UK’s most convincing country singers, his gritty Liverpool blues stretching right back across the Atlantic.”

The playlists

I’ve had the flu and the year started slowly. But even so, I have added precisely ten (at time of writing) songs to my best of 2025 playlist. If that’s not enough, well you have the 1,943 songs on the mother playlists, the newest and the bestest.