The Tours of David Bowie

Table of contents 1970’s .............. 2-9 1980’s .............. 10-13 1990’s .............. 14-21 2000’s .............. 22-23 1

ZIGGY STARDUST TOUR [1972-1973] 2

The Ziggy Stardust Tour, including 182 shows in the United Kingdom, North America, and Japan in 1972–73, promoted the studio albums The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Aladdin Sane.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars tells the story of Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust, a rock star who acts as a messenger for extraterrestrial beings. Bowie created Ziggy Stardust while in New York City promoting Hunky Dory and performed as him throughout this whole tour. The character of Ziggy Stardust was known for its glam rock influences and themes of sexual exploration and social commentary. This character not only helped to define his place in rock history, but also helped give out of this world performances across the globe.

Ziggy played guitar for the final time on July 3, 1973. That was the day David Bowie retired his most famous, and career-defining, alter ego after a triumphant sold-out concert at London’s Hammersmith Odeon Theatre.

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diamond dogs TOUR [1974]

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The Diamond Dogs Tour featured 73 shows in North America in 1974 to promote the studio album Diamond Dogs. The end of the tour was also called The Soul Tour, which included some songs from the forthcoming album Young Americans.

Although Bowie had toured already, this tour would be different for him and his audience. Ziggy Stardust was no more and Bowie settled for a more contemporary look; however, the show, set, props, and music were still unique and Bowie’s starmanship would shine.

Two months of rehearsals were required to get the tour ready, mainly due to the elaborate set and props. The set was built to resemble a city, called “Hunger City”, and included over 20,000 moving props including streetlamps, chairs, and catwalks.

It weighed six tons and was reported to cost $275,000 per show.

In 1990, Bowie recalled the difficulties faced by the show saying it “was good fun and dangerous, with the equipment breaking down and the bridges falling apart on stage. I kept getting stuck out over the audience’s heads, on the hydraulic cherry picker, after the finish of ‘Space Oddity.’”

I’ll keep a friend serene Oh baby, come unto me Well, she’s come, been and gone.

Come out of the garden, baby You’ll catch your death in the fog Young girl, they call them the Diamond Dogs Young girl, they call them the Diamond Dogs Keep cool - Diamond Dogs rule, OK Beware of the Diamond Dogs

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Rebel Rebel, you’ve torn your dress

You’ve torn your dress, your face is a mess

Rebel Rebel, your face is a mess

You can’t get enough, but enough ain’t the test

Rebel Rebel, how could they know?

You’ve got your transmission and your live wire

Hot tramp, I love you so!

Don’t ya?

You got your cue line and a handful of ludes You wanna be there when they count up the dudes

isolar TOUR [1976] 6

The Isolar Tour suppported the album Station To Station.

It consisted of 64 shows and opened in February of 1976 at the Pacific Coliseum, Vancouver, British Columbia. It continued through North America and Europe and concluded at the Pavillon de Paris in Paris, France, in May of 1976.

This tour was put together in a much different way than the two previous tours. Performances began with a projected sequence of surrealist, and kind of graphic, images from the 1928 film Un Chien Andalou, by Luis BuĂąuel and Salvador DalĂ­. Visual elements in his performances incorporated fluorescent white lights set against black backdrops creating a stark spectacle on a stage largely devoid of props or other visual distractions.

He stayed away from his more coloful outfits and kept the black and white consistency with a black vest, black pants, and white longsleeve shirt.

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isolar II TOUR [1978] 8

This 77 show tour opened in March of 1978 at the San Diego Sports Arena continuing through North America, Europe and Australia before reaching a conclusion at the Nippon Budokan in Japan in December of 1978. The set list for the performances consisted of material from the previous years’ albums, Low and Heroes, with the second half of each performance opening with a five-song sequence from the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album.

The stark fluorescent tube lighting approach of the previous 1976 tour, was further developed and expanded to create a large cage of tube lighting, which enclosed the stage with the ability to pulsate moodily during the slower instrumental pieces and flash frantically during the faster songs.

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Let’s Dance, Put on your red shoes and dance the blues Let’s Dance, To the song they’re playing on the radio Let’s Sway, While colour lights up your face Let’s Sway, Sway through the crowd to an empty space If you say run, I’ll run with you If you say hide, we’ll hide Because my love for you Would break my heart in two If you should fall, into my arms And tremble like a flower

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serious moonlight TOUR [1983] This tour was Bowie’s longest, largest and most successful concert tour so far. It opened at the Vorst Forest Nationaal in Brussels on May 18, 1983 and ended in the Hong Kong Coliseum on December 8, 1983. In total, this tour visited 15 countries, had 96 performances, and sold over 2.6M tickets.

The tour, designed to support Bowie’s latest album Let’s Dance, was initially designed to be a smaller tour, playing to the likes of smaller indoor venues, similar to previous Bowie tours. However, the success of Let’s Dance caused unexpectedly high demand for tickets. For example, there were 250,000 requests for 44,000 tickets at one show and as a result the

tour was changed to instead play in a variety of larger outdoor and festival-style venues. The largest crowd for a single show during the tour was 80,000 people in Auckland, New Zealand. The tour sold out at every venue it played.

Bowie himself had a hand in the set design for the tour, which included giant columns, affectionately referred to as “condoms”, large moon, and a giant hand.

The stage was deliberately given a vertical feeling, especially due to the columns, and an overall design that Bowie called a combination of classicism and modernism. The weight of one set, of which there were two, was 32 tons.

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glass spider tour [1987] The Glass Spider Tour was a 1987 worldwide concert tour launched in support of the album Never Let Me Down. It began in May 1987 and was preceded by a 2-week press tour that saw Bowie visit 9 countries throughout Europe and North America to drum up public interest in the tour. The Glass Spider Tour was the first Bowie tour to visit Austria, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Wales. Through a sponsorship from Pepsi, the tour was intended to visit Russia and South America as well, but these plans were later cancelled. The tour was, at that point, the longest and most expensive tour Bowie had embarked upon in his career. At the time, the tour’s elaborate set was called “the largest touring set ever”.

“It looks like the kind of show I really want to go and

see myself. It’s fast, colorful, vulgar, loud, subtle, quiet, dreamlike. I mean, it has so many different qualities to it,” the singer, then 40, said before the first show.

Bowie conceived the tour as a theatrical show, and included spoken-word introductions to some songs, vignettes, and employed visuals including, projected videos, theatrical lighting, and stage props. On stage, Bowie was joined by guitarist Peter Frampton and a troupe of five dancers who were choreographed by long-time Bowie collaborator Toni Basil. With the theme “Rock stars vs Reality,” the show was divided into two acts and an encore. The set list was modified over the course of the tour as Bowie dropped some of his newer material in favour of older songs from his repertoire.

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sound + vision Tour [1990]

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This tour was billed as a greatest hits tour in which Bowie would retire his back catalogue of hit songs from live performance. The tour opened at the Colisée de Québec in Quebec, Canada on March 4, 1990 before reaching its conclusion at the River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina on September 29, 1990, spanning five continents in seven months.

The concert tour surpassed Bowie’s previous Serious Moonlight (1983) and Glass Spider (1987) tours’ statistics by visiting 27 countries with 108 performances. Bowie said that this tour was “nowhere near as ambitious as Glass Spider in size, but qualitatively, in essence, I think it’s as theatrical.”

Bowie’s previous Glass Spider Tour and two most recent albums, Tonight and Never Let Me Down, had all been critically dismissed, and Bowie was looking for a way to rejuvenate himself artistically. To this end, Bowie wanted to avoid having to play his old hits live forever, and used the release of the Sound + Vision box set as the impetus for a tour, despite having no new material recorded.

It was announced that the set-list for any given performance of the tour would be partially determined by the most popular titles logged in a telephone poll by calling the number 1-900-2BOWIE-90. Mail-in ballots were made available to vote by in territories where telephone technology was not available.

Bowie did in fact build the tour’s setlist from calls to the phone number from all over the world, saying “What I ended up doing was taking about seven or eight from England, another seven or eight from the rest of Europe and the rest I made up from America so it’s a good sampling of what everybody wanted in all the continents.”

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outside tour [1995-96]

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(Hallo) Spaceboy, you’re sleepy now Your silhouette is so stationary You’re released but your custody calls

The Outside Tour, with Nine Inch Nails co-headlining, opened on September 14, 1995 at Meadows Music Theatre - Hartford, CT. The opening of the concert tour preceded the release of the 1. Outside album which was released on September 25, 1995. Bowie had 68 shows during this tour, visited 17 countries, and concluded the tour on February 20, 1996 at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris.

For the tour, Bowie went with a modest stage design (“some banners, some mannequins”) and avoided the theatrical presentation like his previous Glass Spider Tour in 1987 and Sound+Vision Tour in 1990. The stage “resembled a building site, with paint splashed crumpled sheets draped about”, and included an old fashioned table and chair in one corner, onto which Bowie would occasionally climb during shows. Bowie had a few outfits for the tour (which varied between the European and US shows), but included 3 jackets designed by

And I want to be free Don’t you want to be free Do you like girls or boys It’s confusing these days But Moondust will cover you Cover you This chaos is killing me So bye bye love Yeah bye bye love Bye bye love Yeah bye bye love This chaos is killing me And the chaos is calling me Yeah bye bye love This chaos is killing me Yeah bye bye love Bye bye love Good time love Be sweet sweet dove Bye bye spaceboy Bye bye love Moondust will cover you

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Nowhere, Shampoo TV, Come back Boy’s own, Slim tie Showdown, Can’t stop Satellite, Satellite, Satellite, Satellite Looking for satellites Looking for satellites Where do we go to now?

There’s nothing in our eyes As lonely as a moon Misty and far away Satellite, Satellite, Satellite, Satellite Looking for satellites Looking for satellites Where do we go from here?

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Earthling tour [1997] The Earthling Tour, promoting the album Earthling, opened on June 7, 1997 at Flughafen Blankensee in LĂźbeck, Germany and continued through Europe and North America before reaching a conclusion in Buenos Aires, Argentina on November 7, 1997.

On Earthling, Bowie lets the songs tell the story.

Gone are the spoken interludes and overblown avant-garde flourishes that marred Outside; instead, the tracks on Earthling are linked only by the power of the turbocharged guitars, the energy and intensity

of the skittering drum-and-bass rhythms, the spiritualtechnological tug of war in the lyrics and Bowie’s signature baritone croon.

The original concept of the tour was to perform two separate set lists, one regular, and one dance-oriented set incorporating drum and bass. The two set-list concept was abandoned, due to media critics and audience apathy, after the Muziekcentrum Vredenburg – Utrecht performance on June 11, 1997 with elements of each incorporated into the one set.

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The hours... tour [1999] 20

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The ‘Hours...’ Tour was a small-scale promotional concert tour comprised of eight live performances and numerous television appearances in support of the album ‘Hours...’. A new guitarist, Page Hamilton, ex-Helmet founder member, was drafted to replace Reeves Gabrels whose final performance and association with Bowie ended at the VH1 Storytellers performance on August 23, 1999. Rumours of a split were denied by both parties, until a few months later the story changed as the guitarist admitted that he and Bowie had drifted apart.

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A reality tour [2003-04] A Reality Tour was a worldwide concert tour by David Bowie in support of the Reality album. The tour started on October 7, 2003 at the Forum, Copenhagen, Denmark and continued through Europe, North America, and Asia. This included a return to New Zealand and Australia for the first time since the 1987 Glass Spider Tour. The tour grossed US $46 million, making it the ninth-highest grossing tour of 2004. This also proved to be his final tour before his death on January 10, 2016.

Bowie sought to perform in the format of a stadium concert with less focus on elaborate staging and more focus on the musicians in his band. The stage featured a number of platforms, some extending into the audience, as well as multiple video-screens projecting artistic images and live footage of the concert along with many colored lights for effects.

The musicians were dressed in casual but colorful outfits; nearly each musician had a set of outfits in different colors, such as Bowie’s cut-off shirt and neckerchief or Gail Ann Dorsey’s dress. Musicians

were free to move about the stage as their instruments permitted with wireless amplification, though Bowie and Dorsey interacted most often as part of the acts.

Each concert began with an introduction on the main video-screen, during which the band would enter the stage and prepare the opening number.

After the opener, Bowie would greet the audience with the flexible line, “Hello, [city name], you crazy bunch of motherfuckers” as a sign of welcoming. The performances, between the somewhat staged pieces, were informal often with a dialog between Bowie and his audience, jokes, band introductions, and the occasional “Happy Birthday To You”.

The set list included tracks spanning Bowie’s 30 plus years in the music business, from The Man Who Sold the World (1970) all the way to Reality (2003), along with collaborations such as “Sister Midnight” (originally from The Idiot (1977) by Iggy Pop) and “Under Pressure” (released as a single (1981) by Bowie and Queen), and snippets and teasers of Bowie classics such as “Space Oddity” and “Golden Years”.

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