In Bertolt Brecht's Baal

Baal was not one of Bertolt Brecht's most appealing visions. The tale of a dissolute itinerant wretch whose natural talent for composing amoral ditties was mere accompaniment to his life of debauchery, it was the saga, according to David Bowie, of the original Super Punk — which is doubtless what attracted him to it, when he was offered the title role in a 1982 BBC TV play.

Bowie perform five songs during the course of the play, each of which coupled Brecht's original lyric (as translated by John Willett) to a contemporary Dominic Muldowney arrangement. Recording in the same Hansa studios in Berlin where Brecht's own future partner, Kurt Weill, once worked, Bowie and producer Tony Visconti also borrowed Weill's favorite recording set-up — a German theater band, one player per instrument, all arranged in a semi-circle. (Bowie would recreate this set-up for the video accompanying his next UK single, "Wild Is The Wind".") RCA originally intended releasing the Baal soundtrack as part of a new Bowie album — the star's continued reluctance to record anything more than dilettante side bars, however, left them with no option but to pare their plans down to a single EP, released in Britain on the Friday before the play's March 2, 1982, transmission. The result was an uncompromising collection, considerably truer to Brecht than many outsiders expected, with its closest relatives within Bowie's own catalog being his occasional assaults on the Jacques Brel songbook — early live favorites "Next" and "My Death," and the 1973 b-side "Amsterdam"." But even with that comparison, one is grasping; quite frankly, Baal served up a side of Bowie that he had often claimed existed, but which even his closest friends had seldom seen.