Lust for Life

After the tour for The Idiot, Pop and Bowie went back to Berlin to write, and Pop moved into his own apartment in the same building. Ricky Gardiner joined them in May 1977, and the trio worked out songs including The Passenger and Lust for Life. At the end of May they moved into Hansa Studio by the Wall. The Sales brothers returned from the tour on bass and drums, and Carlos Alomar came in as musical director. Bowie, Pop and the engineer Colin Thurston produced it under the name Bewlay Bros., borrowed from the last track on Bowie's Hunky Dory. Bowie cut his role back to keyboards. Pop prepared only fragments of lyrics and improvised at the microphone, which gave Bowie the idea for his own words on "Heroes". Sixteen is the only piece written entirely by Pop, and for Fall in Love with Me the band swapped instruments, with Hunt Sales on bass, Tony Fox Sales on guitar and Gardiner on drums. Pop said the whole record was written, recorded and mixed in eight days.

RCA promoted it little, partly because Elvis Presley had died two weeks earlier and the label was busy with his catalogue. It still reached number 28 in Britain, which stayed Pop's highest British chart position until Post Pop Depression, number 120 in the United States and number 8 in the Netherlands. Success, backed with The Passenger, was issued as a single on September 30, 1977 and did not chart. The cover photograph is by Andy Kent. For the tour, Stacy Heydon took Gardiner's place and Scott Thurston replaced Bowie on keyboards, and the band played 40 gigs in almost nine weeks.

Reception

Robert Christgau of The Village Voice later said that of the two Bowie-era albums he preferred Lust for Life, because it was faster and more assertive. NME ranked it eighth among the albums of 1977 in its year-end list. Pitchfork's Stacey Anderson called it a mission statement for the ages and placed it at number 64 on the site's list of the best albums of the 1970s. In 2020 Sasha Geffen wrote that Pop sounds alert and embodied here. The record is in the 2018 edition of the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.