Mike Garson takes the blame for David Bowie’s decision to stop touring
Former David Bowie collaborator Mike Garson has admitted to feeling responsible for the touring retirement of ‘The Starman’ in 2004.
Due to health problems, Bowie stopped playing live in 2004. However, according to Garson, Bowie wanted to get back on the road two years later but he was talked out of the idea by his longtime pianist. Garson was Bowie’s longest-standing band member, having begun playing with him in the early 1970s until he stopped touring decades later.
Garson recalled in a new interview, “So he called me in 2006 and he said, ‘Well, Mike, do you think we should go out again?’ Now, I think the band and my wife want to kill me because I said something absurd, but actually deep and correct and honest. I said, ‘David, only if you’re feeling it’, because he wasn’t feeling it. I knew it but he wanted to give work to the band – our tour was cut short in 2004, so he was feeling guilty.”
“Of course, my first thought was, ‘Yeah, let’s go’. But my second thought was, ‘I don’t want to be on the road with someone who is miserable and doesn’t want to be there,” he told Music Week.
Garson and Bowie remained in close contact until the late singer’s death in 2016. On another occasion, they discussed the idea of getting back out on the road but Bowie’s health prevented them from making the dream become a reality.
He added: “He wrote to be saying he was hoping to maybe do another version of ‘Outside’ with Brian Eno and tour that. I had some hopes, but it was cut short unfortunately.”
In the same interview, Garson also recalled the final conversation he had with Bowie which took place through email. “Right before he died, I was working on my biography and was asked to listen 60 songs we’d recorded together. I was overwhelmed, because I never usually listened to our old songs – like David, I’ll be on to the next thing.
Garson continued: I emailed him, saying I was in shock at how good we’d been. Within minutes, David wrote back saying, ‘Mike, we did a great body of work together.’ I suddenly felt tears, knowing something was wrong. I said to my wife Susan, ‘That’s the last time I’m going to speak to David.’ I couldn’t explain why, but I was right.”
In 2021, Garson helped organise a tribute show to Bowie which was live-streamed and featured guests such as Simon Le Bon and Ricky Gervais.
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