“It was luxurious but a trap”: Guitarist Carlos Alomar on working with “calculated” David Bowie
Working with David Bowie was rather luxurious, albeit all-consuming – according to guitarist Carlos Alomar, that is.
Alomar worked with Bowie from the mid 1970s right through to the 2000s, having worked on records such as Young Americans and Scary Monsters. His discography also includes recordings by the likes of Duran Duran, Rush, The Pretenders, and many more.
READ MORE: Guitarist recalls how David Bowie borrowed his Les Paul for iconic Ziggy Stardust shoot – but didn’t tell him why: “He’d been bouncing around with my guitar!”
Speaking to Uncut for its new print edition, Alomar shares what it was like to work on Bowie’s 1977 record, Low. “When it came to Sound And Vision, we had to make something for the record company. David knew he had to give them something poppy because with the rest of the album he was really thrusting them into an area they weren’t into,” he says.
For the making of the record, Bowie shacked up at Château d’Hérouville in Hérouville, France. Alomar continues, “The chateau was fantastic. We had a dungeon next to the wine cellar and we were eating langoustine with the eyes on. I’m from the Bronx, this was luxury.”
He later adds, “One thing people might not realise about David Bowie is how calculated he could be. For the Station To Station tour he invited us all to Jamaica to rehearse. Dude, I’m in Jamaica, nobody can reach me and I’ve nothing to think about but David Bowie music all day and all night. This was what he did with the chateau. He isolated us so we could only think about him and his music. It was luxurious but a trap.”
Another collaborator who recently opened up on what it was like to work with the late and great Bowie is Nile Rodgers. According to the Chic guitarist, there was one particular track that the pair worked on that Bowie felt deserved more attention. He told the Recording Academy: “I go to his house in Switzerland, and he comes into my bedroom and says, ‘Now darling, I think this is a hit.’ And he starts playing a song that sounds very much like a folk song, and that wasn’t what we agreed we were going to do, but he was really into it. He said, ‘I call it Let’s Dance.’”
He continued, “When you hear the Let’s Dance demo, you can hear how much fun he’s having; you’re going to hear that he likes it. Obviously, it’s the biggest record of his career, but he thought that my arranging skills on a song called Ricochet were far superior to Let’s Dance, and he couldn’t understand why people didn’t like that more. And I thought, ‘Wow, how weird is that?’”
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