BASS-IC INSTINCT

Plucked from obscurity in 1975 to be in David Bowie's band, then unceremoniously out of the picture five years later, bassist George Murray looks back on his time with the Thin White Duke.

-  lan Fortnam

George Murray, one of the most enigmatic figures in a David Bowie story that’s been told and retold countless times, was plucked from relative obscurity in September ’75 to apply his singular bass-playing skills to Golden Years. Providing a pivotal sonic bridge between the slick Philadelphia soul of Young Americans and the harsher rock-literate funk of Station To Station, Golden Years gave Bowie his twelfth UK Top 20 hit single and, over the next four years, Murray was a central cog in Bowie’s rhythm section (the so-called D.A.M. Trio with drummer Dennis Davis and guitarist Carlos Alomar) underpinning Station To Station, its subsequent Low/‘Heroes’/Lodger Berlin Trilogy, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), ’76 and 1978’s Isolar and Isolar II world tours, and Iggy Pop’s transformative, Bowie-produced ’77 post-Stooges ‘comeback’ album The Idiot.

At this point, Bowie was arguably at his peak, embracing myriad new sounds and new styles, consuming and reconstituting hitherto alien musical genres into visionary, punk-adjacent, future-proof pop. Inveigling - alongside Brian Eno - ambient electronic music into the heart of the mainstream, and making the role of Thomas Jerome Newton his own in Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell To Earth. Nothing appeared to be beyond late-70s Bowie. But, as George Murray found to his ultimate cost, Bowie harboured one crucial character flaw: he was more than a little deficient in the field of human resource management. Specifically, the hiring and firing of staff.

“What drew me to the bass was the magnetic nature of early rock’n’roll,” Murray begins. “I started developing a fascination with music when I was a young teenager. I was infatuated with it. But when I first started out I wanted to be a drummer.”