Gig 064 David Bowie

David Bowie
London Earls Court
1 July 1978

 

Blimey, Tuesday was The Clash, Friday was David Bowie, I was on a roll here. I’d last seen Bowie almost exactly five years earlier, since which time he’d released six albums, at least three of which were mind-blowingly innovative, and collaborated on the two albums which launched and defined Iggy Pop’s solo career. Fey and otherworldly as he may have been, he knew how to put in a shift. If anything the punk revolution enhanced his standing, even if the Gumby tendency probably considered him a bit of a poof. He moved in different air, did his own thing and the rest of us could only gawp; notwithstanding the likes of Ultravox, Magazine or Siouxsie and the Banshees, his influence would remain largely unacknowledged for another couple of years, after which those excitable new romantics just couldn’t contain themselves any longer.

 

Talking of whom, I imagine most if not all of those who were to become the Blitz kids attended Bowie’s London shows that summer. As with my first Bowie gig in 1973 and Roxy Music in 1975 much of the audience looked extraordinary, there to see and be seen, despite the unsympathetically vast and characterless barn that was the Earls Court Exhibition Centre. Bowie and Roxy allowed youth of modest means to transcend mundanity, and there was some serious transcendence going on here, not merely in the vestiary department. It’s always been part of what makes a memorable gig as far as I’m concerned, not that I made a special effort in this respect, having worked all morning at the printworks and taken the train from Didcot.

 

No one will tell you this, but it’s all about trousers. The lights go down, the 8-piece group take the stage, we’re squinting to see the Dame, and there he is behind a keyboard, almost motionless vocalising the melody to Warsawa, a lengthy, wordless contemplation on cold-war Eastern Europe. There’s nothing like starting with a crowd-pleaser, and this was nothing like starting with a crowd-pleaser. (Though since hearing Adam Buxton’s take on Warsawa I’ve found it impossible to hear without giggling, still never mind.) The tension builds over seven minutes, then finally breaks as the group launch into Heroes, our man strides to stagefront, and the crowd goes berserk. Those trousers! Ludicrously capacious multi-gathered puce bags, cuffed at the ankle and seemingly made of rubber. Since there is no one else in the world who could look cool in trews apparently custom-made for a Soviet-era Latvian sewage plant operative, I wonder if this was an impish stunt on Bowie’s part, knowing that he was a style icon whose every sartorial move was clocked and aped. The lesson, all too frequently ignored, is that just because David looks jaw-droppingly ace in this get-up doesn’t mean you would. I for example would have resembled, well, a Soviet-era Latvian sewage plant operative. It helps of course that David is singing Heroes, one of the most significant songs and greatest performances ever, a thrilling, timeless work of shattering genius. Other opinions are available but they’re wrong.

 

The rest of the first set is comprised mainly of the chilly tunes from Low and Heroes, which are essentially studio creations and don’t work quite so well in a live context, plus a rather stiff take on The Jean Genie. This becomes more of a problem at the beginning of the second set which features a selection of tunes from Ziggy Stardust. No question, this group – notably the core of Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davis, George Murray – are technically streets ahead of the Spiders from Hull and could play these songs in their sleep, but they just don’t have that louche swagger that made the Spiders so great. Not that most of the audience are too bothered, struck as they are by David’s update on the white US Navy uniform as seen in South Pacific, featuring trousers even more voluminous than those from the first set. Before the numerous pleats were applied the waist must have measured about 8ft, the whole ensemble topped off with a jaunty sailor hat. Again, don’t try this at home, he’s David Bowie and you’re not. His voice is sounding particularly great tonight, as if daring any larky Londoner to mock the preposterous keks. All the same the set seems to be drifting until the group begin the long intro to Station to Station, and everything falls into place. This is a tune that the Spiders would certainly have struggled with, a sluggish industrial funk groove shifting into semi-operatic euro-disco bombast. ‘It’s not the side effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love.’ Not that I knew anything about either, but blimey. A couple more tunes from the same extraordinary album and we’re done, my pal Toby and I piling down the front for the finale. 

 

As we drifted out of the charmless warehouse the sense of euphoria was palpable if a little incongruous, people of indeterminate gender having fits of the vapours all over the place, tough-looking forklift drivers on the verge of tears, shrieking and swooning, the cast from an amdram production of Cabaret having an out-of-body experience. The fat skinny people, the tall short people, the nobody people, the somebody people. Toby seems to remember the whole carriage singing Ziggy Stardust on the tube back to Paddington, I think I must still have been a little dazed at the time. David Bowie was still out there on his own, no one could touch him. Truly, there was nothing like the Dame.