Did David Bowie really burn his tortured Glass Spider Tour set?
The 1987 Glass Spider Tour asked a lot of David Bowie. Comprised of 86 shows spread across six months and three continents, it was a behemoth of an event. Bowie envisioned the venture as a travelling performance art circus, where Piana Bausch-inspired choreography would blend with rock ‘n’ roll excess. As well as directing and choreographing the whole show, he had to perform the damn thing night after night. It was one last explosion of Diamond Dogs-era glam indulgence before his immersion in Tin Machine, and it nearly killed him.
One of the tour’s main draws was the enormous fibreglass spider set. Designed by Mark Ravitz, it was 60 feet high and 64 feet wide. “I got up on it myself,” Ravitz writes in Bowie: A Biography. “Anything I design, if I can do it, they can do it. So one day, I got up in the head of the spider. Sixty feet in the air. There’s a three-foot square you’re standing on, steel pipe welded to it with weight lifter straps. Foot pedal to make the wings open up. You gotta shit a brick when you’re up there…”
Bowie began each concert from that exact point, descending in a chair from its mandibles. During the encore, he would sing from the small metal plate on the spider’s head, though strong winds often meant that it was too dangerous for him to scale the structure. Having decided to take on the role of the tour manager, dancer, singer and director, Bowie became exhausted very quickly. Not long into the UK/EU leg, he started praying that the winds would be too high for him to ascend the spider. The gods clearly heard those prayers because the summer of ’87 was uncommonly wet and windy across northern Europe, meaning that the spider was often left unused and only partially lit.
There were other technical difficulties too. Peter Frampton and Carlos Alomar complained that the dancers were pushing them off stage and stepping on their pedals. The headset microphones Bowie and his dancers wore didn’t cut the mustard, so their dialogue was frequently inaudible. The sound system was equally unreliable, forcing Bowie to mime pre-recorded vocals during ‘Glass Spider’. That’s to say nothing of the lighting engineer who fell to his death in Florence, the riot in Milan, and the sexual assault allegations made against Bowie in America (he was later cleared of all charges). Oh, and then there were the reviews, the terrible, terrible reviews.
Rather unsurprisingly, all of this took a toll on Bowie, who became increasingly irritable as the tour progressed. By the time he reached Australia for the final fifteen shows, he couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be done and dusted. What Bowie and the team did with the glass spider, this weight they’d been carrying for months on end, is the stuff of legend. In Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David Bowie, Bowie recalls burning the spider after the final show in Auckland. “It was great to burn the spider in New Zealand at the end of the tour,” he said. “We just put the thing in a field and set light to it. That was such a relief!”
Considering how much suffering that spider put him through, it would make sense for the Thin White Duke to want to exorcise himself in this manner. However, others have offered slightly different versions of events, with some claiming that the set was buried outside Auckland airport to satisfy customs officials. Meanwhile, New Zealand promoter, Peter Grumley, claimed that he purchased the set from friends working on the tour and put it in a warehouse. Everything he didn’t buy is said to have been destroyed or sent to the dump. Chris Davis, Peter Frampton’s guitar tech, later backed up Grumley’s claim: “To satisfy customs requirements, any equipment left behind in New Zealand was supposed to have been destroyed while being witnessed by customs agents. I’m glad to hear Peter Grumley has been able to make use of some part of the gear and can only guess enough of it was sawed up, wrecked or burnt to satisfy New Zealand officials. One thing’s for certain, we didn’t bring 360 tons of equipment, neither did it take 37 trucks to move it.”
It later transpired that the only part of the set in Grumley’s possession were two staircases, leaving the whereabouts of the actual structure unknown. The burning of the set would have satisfied custom requirements, soothed Bowie’s rage and probably saved a huge amount of money in transport costs, so it seems fairly likely that the legend is indeed true. If that’s the case, it would have been a fitting ending for one of Bowie’s most extravagant tours.
