Flashes of inspiration were recorded there, alongside images borrowed from books, TV advertisements, even the labels stuck on the Olympic Studios mixing consoles. Bowie had already discovered the value of introducing chance into his creative process, but on this album, and again in 1977 on much of “Heroes,” he elected to rely explicitly upon an accidental collision of images rather than orthodox narrative techniques. He was encouraged in this direction by his November 1973 meeting with the author William S. Burroughs (motto: “mix your own linguistic virus”), an encounter engineered by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine. To prepare for the interview, Bowie immersed himself in Burroughs’s novel Nova Express, the third of his books (after The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded) to depend on the cut-up technique pioneered by his friend Brion Gysin. He in turn acknowledged the influence of Dada and surrealist writers such as Tristan Tzara, who had assembled poetry by cutting random words out of newspapers.
What do You think about The Man Who Sold The World?
