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David Bowie’s no limit cocaine albums

by | 12th, January 2013

DAVID Bowie is back with anew album. Is it as good as his best? Tony Visconti produced 12 Bowie albums. He tells Tim Teeman:

During the making of Young Americans [1975] he was taking so much cocaine it would have killed a horse. Cocaine certainly almost killed me. During the making of that album I nearly died. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I worked day and night. He’d come in to the studio at 11pm and work till 11am. One day I said, ‘I have to pack it in, the cocaine isn’t propping me up any more. I cannot stay awake. On the way home my heart felt like it was going to explode. I didn’t want to cause a scandal for him and me by going to hospital, so I took 12 sleeping pills — no suicidal intent, just to slow my heart and it did and I survived. We’d have both been dead if we’d carried on. There was a myth it wasn’t habit-forming back then. Foolishly we believed that. It was a social drug and socially acceptable. You went to any cocktail party and somebody put a line or spoon under your nose and you said ‘Oh, thank you.’ I know people who sold their homes to feed their habit. For us there was no limit.”

Lady Gaga used cocaine:

“[Using drugs] I really figured out the art I wanted to make and was inspired. Some people find inspiration in dark places. I guess I’m one of them. What always made me different is that if I was doing drugs I was also making music. I wasn’t just doing drugs.”

A doctor writes:

Cocaine’s dangers have not always been recognized. The drug was used for centuries by South American Indians and since 1884 in medicine as a local anesthetic. Sigmund Freud even used it in the belief that it would be a ”cure-all” before he recognized the threat of addiction. Since Freud, doctors have learned of more dangers, such as seizures, delirium, fever, loss of the sense of smell, and death of cells in the lining of the nose, leading to holes between the nostrils.

So much for the music. And the art?

Photo: (left to right) Lou Reed, Mick Jagger and David Bowie share a joke at a party at Cafe Royal thrown by David Bowie – Date: 03/07/1973.



Posted: 12th, January 2013 | In: Celebrities Comment | TrackBack | Permalink