The 1970s shows David Bowie always regretted: “Infuriating”
David Bowie didn’t seem to be the kind of person who walked around with too many regrets.
He was opening people’s eyes to what rock and roll could be outside of the conventional norms, and even if he wasn’t always making the best music that he possibly could, he was the one who could dust himself off and keep moving throughout every single obstacle that came his way. But he did have those few performances where he felt like things were far too perfect, and others that had the slightest problems whenever he left the stage.
But ‘The Starman’ didn’t like to dwell on the past all that often, either. Before anyone could even fathom what he was doing half the time, he was well on his way to the next phase of his career, and a lot of the best moments were seeing everyone try to catch up with him. He was ahead of the curve in so many ways when he first started dismantling the concept of a rock and roll frontman, but he did know that his era as a rock and roll heavyweight needed to come to an end sooner or later.
And that ended up coming far too early for some fans when they saw Ziggy Stardust’s final show. Seeing him at the peak of his powers at the Hammersmith Odeon would have been one of the greatest shows that anyone could have witnessed at the time, but even if he kept on making glam rock, watching the rock and roll alien that fell to Earth suddenly sacrifice himself to the music during his final performance was enough to break any fan’s hearts.
Then again, Bowie wasn’t ready to leave his characters behind. He had a wealth of great material to draw from, and when he wasn’t giving his personas names like ‘The Thin White Duke’ and ‘Halloween Jack’, he was switching up his styles even more drastically, like when he tried his hand at making Philly soul throughout the entire recording of Young Americans. This kind of run is usually only reserved for the true legends, but Bowie felt that he dropped the ball by not bringing certain people along.
Namely: the cameraman. The entire process of making new music may have been about the visuals to a certain degree, but the artwork wasn’t doing justice to what his shows were like. Sure, Bowie managed to get the camera crew down for the final shows of Ziggy’s lifespan, but when looking back on that era of his career, he felt that he should have documented everything that he was doing just like his other famous friends.
Because without the visuals, Bowie felt that the shows didn’t hit people the way they should have, saying, “I’ve always regretted not having filmed things like the Diamond Dogs show. We never filmed the Station to Station show, or the ‘soul’ show with Dave Sanborn and those guys. I have absolutely no footage of those things.”
“It’s terrible. Rod Stewart has footage from 1908, well, from quite a long way back. I’ve got the Ziggy Stardust thing, and that’s about it. That’s all I’ve got. It’s infuriating.”
David Bowie
And it’s not like Bowie had to wait around for the rest of the world to get the picture. The advent of MTV was already beginning in the US, and with Bowie being one of the most natural actors in the rock and roll world, it was easy for him to slowly start to adapt to what music video culture had to offer, especially when making short art films like what turned up in the video for ‘Ashes to Ashes’.
So for the second half of the 1970s, Bowie’s shows have had a bit of a question mark next to some of them, to a certain degree. Everyone who was there knows that they got the experience of a lifetime, but Bowie didn’t want his theatricality to stop at his albums. His records were almost a teaser for his live shows, and when he eventually went the way of making art pieces, no one could replace how he looked whenever he performed.
