David Bowie - Low

The first of the famous Berlin trilogy (followed by Heroes and Lodger), Low sails across an icy sea of electronics and experimentalism, simultaneously setting the post punk agenda and redefining Bowie’s artistic persona.

Bowie had already started moving in a new direction on his previous album, Station to Station. Burned out, paranoid and wracked by the delusions which would culminate in his infamous Nazi salute at Victoria station, Bowie left the narcotic netherworld of LA and relocated to Berlin. He gave up the coke, sobered up and re-energised his muse, with a little help from Brian Eno and his oblique strategies.

Eno provided much of the impetus for Low’s sparse, glacial synthesiser textures, but his experimental working methods were an equal inspiration to Bowie, who would eventually be credited as playing 12 different instruments in addition to his vocals.

The opening tracks mine a vein of dense, robotic funk. The sprightly Sound and Vision contrasts its shimmering keyboard cascades and danceable beat with Bowie’s deadpan vocals, and its extended intro confounds DJs to this day. Always Crashing in the Same Car welds heavily treated guitars and whooshing synthesisers to a gloomy chord sequence and an anguished vocal about a life going nowhere.

The second half of the album displays Eno’s influence to its fullest, foregoing songs altogether for dark swathes of instrumental ambient unease. Warzawa perfectly captures the bleak Eastern Bloc feeling of that ill fated city, which Bowie had visited in 1976. Art Decade is less intense, but no less interesting, and clearly shows the influence of Kraftwerk. Low would later be recast by composer Philip Glass into an orchestral work, and there certainly is something of a glacial grandeur about the closing instrumentals.

Low was a brave move away from the mainstream, showing Bowie had lost none of his facility to anticipate trends. Its marriage of cold synthesisers, doom laden vocals and stark, angular electronic noise would prove enormously influential on the post punk movement, not least Joy Division, whose first incarnation, Warsaw, took its name from the Low track. Bowie is currently undergoing one of his occasional critical renaissances, but his Berlin trilogy remains, for many, his last period of truly satisfying work.

Fear and Loathing in Wimbledon - Lou Reed's "Transformer"

When Lou Reed left the Velvet Underground in 1970, it seemed rock and roll's loss was accountancy's gain - he found employment with his dad's accountancy firm. What's more the minute sales of his debut solo album were hardly likely to trouble balance sheets at his record company.

It no doubt came as a relief to Lou when David Bowie, then at the peak of his Ziggy success, offered to produce a new album. Transformer was aptly named - it would change Lou Reed from shadowy cult figure to (albeit unusual) pop star, and also become possibly the best album ever inspired by New York, even though it wasn't recorded there.

In July 1972, Reed moved to London and rented a house in Wimbledon, an area not renowned for its abundance of low life cross dressers and drug users. Recording commenced at Trident Studios, overseen by Bowie and his trusty guitar sidekick Mick Ronson, who also lent his trademark crunch to several of the tracks. Also involved where Beatles associate Klaus Voorman and ace session man Herbie Flowers, whose double tracked bass line on Walk on the Wild Side practically made the song, even if credit was never fully given for his contribution beyond the standard session fee.

Lyrically, Reed's obsession with the seedier side of New York street life can be placed in a tradition exemplified by novels such as Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn. Reed saw his work as a celebration of the dispossessed, saying "I always thought it would be kinda fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn't met before, or wanted to meet." By comparison, Bowie's flirtation with gay subculture smacked of affectation when placed against Reed's harshly realistic portrayals.

Transformer eventually hit number 13 in the UK charts, helped considerably by the success of …Wild Side, a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic after its release as a single. It brought Reed the wider audience that had been denied the Velvets, and also contained many of his most enduring songs, such as Perfect Day and Satellite of Love. The former took on new life in the 90s in a BBC ad campaign, hardly suiting its genesis as a thinly veiled ode to heroin which had informed its appearance in the Trainspotting soundtrack.

Reed would return to the Big Apple for inspiration again and again - most notably on 1989's New York, which saw him using the ills of the city to mount a withering attack on contemporary American society - but Transformer remains his most popular album. Informed by the mainstream sensibilities of Bowie and Ronson, it hit the top 30 on both sides of the Atlantic and is the Lou Reed album every home should have.