“Poor Iggy became a guinea pig for what I wanted to do with sound”: in 1977, David Bowie moved to Berlin to kick drugs. He emerged with five albums that changed music forever

David Bowie on the cover of the Heroes album.

Life in Los Angeles was killing David Bowie. He’d moved to the city to begin work on Nicolas Roeg’s science fiction drama movie The Man Who Fell To Earth in July 1975, but a cocaine addiction he’d developed the previous summer had caused him to develop a series of damaging obsessions, not least with the occult.

Not sleeping for days, paranoid and delusional, he’d avidly read texts on religion, magic, the Third Reich, Nietzsche, Crowley and then habitually coke-babble half-considered concepts to a grateful press. He was teetering on the brink of losing everything.