Songfacts®:

• This song was Bowie's initial response at retreating from America in an attempt to get away from his drug addiction. Bowie said this song was about "wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows."
• Backing vocals came from Brian Eno and Mary Hopkin, the folk-pop singer and then-wife of producer Tony Visconti. Hopkin had been staying at the Château d'Hérouville during the Low sessions with their two children. Engineer Laurent Thibault recalled to Uncut magazine: "Mary was pushing the baby round in a pushchair. Tony said, 'Oh, Mary must sing on Sound and Vision.' At first she didn't want to do it."
  
  Visconti and Hopkin's daughter Jessica Lee Morgan continued: "She was in the lounge and the phone rang. Brian asked her to come up and sing a backing vocal for 'Sound and Vision.' He had written what Mum describes as a twee little riff, and they sang together into the same mic. Brian was obviously doing a very Hopkin impression as you can't hear him."
  
  When they did a playback, Hopkin thought it would be low in a mix, but Bowie decided to whack the faders right up so her vocals were really blasting out. "She's still quite embarrassed about that," said Morgan.
• An unusual song to be released as a single, it was recorded at first as an instrumental with Mary Hopkin's backing vocals before Bowie recorded his own vocals. He then trimmed some of them, leaving the opening instrumental section as longer than the main vocal part.
• This was a hit in the UK despite Bowie doing nothing to promote the song himself. It reached the top end of the charts mainly as a result of the BBC using it as background music to its program announcements at the time.
• RCA, David Bowie's then record label, had little faith in Low, but it has been subsequently recognized as one of the most innovative, influential albums of the 1970s. The website Pitchfork voted it the best album of the '70s. Bowie described the album as "A new way of looking at life." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Edward Pearce - Ashford, Kent, England, for all above
• Whilst Bowie's backing band worked at the instrumentation, the "Thin White Duke" sat in the control room listening. Guitarist Ricky Gardener recalled to Mojo magazine January 2012, then, "he just went into the studio and sang it straight off, words and all. He listened to the playback once, adjusted something in his head and did it again. And that was that."
• "Sound and Vision" is a pop song that emerged from the experimental landscape of David Bowie's Low album yet stands apart as its most accessible track. Built around a minimalist groove - Dennis Davis' drums, Carlos Alomar's rhythmic guitar and George Murray's taut bassline - it was released as a single a month after the album and soared to #3 on the UK chart, Bowie's biggest hit since 1973's "Sorrow."
• According to Alomar, the song was Bowie's concession to the record label. "When it came to 'Sound and Vision,' we had to make something for the record company," he told Uncut. "David knew he had to give them something poppy because the rest of the album was really thrusting them into an area they weren't into."