David Bowie’s favourite live recording
The live performances of David Bowie were truly something to behold. Fittingly, for a songwriter who spent a handful of years playing the role of a rock and roll alien, Bowie’s gigs were something otherworldly, as anybody lucky enough to see him in the flesh can testify to. For the man himself, there was one live recording that stood out among all the rest.
The Ziggy Stardust tour cemented David Bowie as a true cultural icon. Appearing on stage in his signature glam rock alien outfits, backed by the Spiders from Mars, the songwriter shocked and fascinated audiences across the UK, USA and Japan. The Ziggy era catapulted Bowie from the ‘Space Oddity’ one-hit wonder to one of the biggest and most respected artists in the world.
Promoting a trio of groundbreaking albums in Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and Aladdin Sane, the Ziggy tour lasted 19 months and took Bowie around the world. One concert, in October 1972, saw Brixton’s favourite son play at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in California.
In 2008, Bowie compiled a CD of his favourite Bowie tracks to be given away free with the Mail on Sunday. Among the tracklisting was a recording from that 1972 show in Santa Monica, making it the singer’s favourite live recording of himself. The track itself, ‘Hang on to Yourself’, is a fan favourite from the Ziggy era and provided the opening track for his appearance in California.
Interestingly, the live recording from Santa Monica began life as a bootleg, recorded from KMET FM’s radio broadcast of the concert. Once the enemy of recording artists, bootleg live recordings act as important accounts of a performer’s concert history and sound. Given an official release in 2008 as Live Santa Monica ‘72, the album shows Ziggy Stardust at his greatest, as he puts on a truly phenomenal show.
As opposed to other recordings from the tour, many of which centre around the UK dates in which Bowie is hailed as a superstar, the Santa Monica show presents Bowie as a relative unknown in America, pushing to make it in these strange new lands.
Given that a wealth of new live recordings of Bowie have surfaced to be reissued in the years following his tragic death in 2016, it is not known for sure that ‘Hang on to Yourself’ Live in Santa Monica is the definitive live recording of the songwriter. However, as of 2008, it was certainly his most preferred.
