The most emotional show that David Bowie played: “I was in tears”
No David Bowie fan ever had to worry about him being insincere on any of his projects.
Even if he was blatantly copying a specific style of music, ‘The Starman’ was always voyaging into new lands and would do anything that popped into his head if he thought he could bring something new to it. But even if he loved the idea of taking music in different directions whenever he entered the studio, his strong suit was always being able to deliver a hell of a show that no one had ever seen before.
And for anyone catching him back in the 1970s, they were in for a hell of a ride. There had been wild showmen that had helped push rock and roll into taboo areas, but if the more conservative crowds were pissed off at Little Richard wearing makeup during his performance, chances are they would have had a heart attack if they saw Bowie prancing around the stage in full makeup and simulating sexual situations onstage.
Even though the glam side of Bowie’s work is commonly thought of as the greatest era of his career, the Berlin trilogy has enough good songs to rival anything that he did on records like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. He was starting to look at different ways of approaching his craft, and by the time he got to work on making records like “Heroes”, he had reached the point where he could reverse his usual process of writing songs. It was about finding the magic in those raw recordings, but the title track was a piece of Bowie’s heart that somehow found its way onto the tape.
It’s far from the most inventive chord progression he ever made or anything, but hearing him sing with that signature vibrato is absolutely fantastic. It’s easy to see him holding back a lot of emotion playing this kind of tune, but whereas most people would see that as a weakness, it’s more akin to when an actor cries onscreen. If it’s easy to elicit tears out of the actor, it doesn’t feel genuine, but when you can feel them holding it back, that’s when the real pathos actually comes in.
It was hard enough for Bowie to perform the song in the studio, but getting to capture that same feeling live was bound to tear at his soul. A tune all about embracing one’s own identity was bound to feel great with millions of people singing by your side, but when he got to sing the track at the demolition of the Berlin Wall, Bowie was witnessing a piece of musical history being written in real time.
People like Roger Waters may have had their own act of celebration in Berlin when performing The Wall live, but Bowie’s performance took a lot out of him by the end of the tune, saying, “I’ll never forget that. It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears. They’d backed up the stage to the wall itself so that the wall was acting as our backdrop. We would hear [people] cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again.”
Then again, what Bowie was singing went beyond lines about him standing by the wall and the guns firing over his head. There are a lot of undercurrents from the time in there, but the greatest strength of the song is about learning to embrace one’s own individualism and be able to be happy in their own skin no matter what they’re doing.
Even if the hope of being a musical hero might have remained a dream for a lot of people in that audience in Berlin, it was always important to never give up that hope, either. After all, Bowie was the kind of person to run after his dreams, and if his performance could provide the soundtrack of freedom for many Germans, there was no limit to what any of his successors could do.
