The one performance that defined David Bowie
Sometimes a gig is just a gig. In rare moments, though, it’s so much more than that. A performance becomes a historic event, not only defining an artist, but also a venue, a city, and an era. David Bowie had his fair share of these moments, but on one night, his gig wasn’t just a gig. It was a complete rethinking of what an artist could or should be.
“If I’m tired with what I’m doing, wouldn’t it be long before the audience realised,” Bowie said early on in his career, and perhaps no other statement has been more reflective of the life he had. At each turn, he reinvented himself. Most artists do that to some degree with new sounds on new albums, but he always took it further. It was more than just a new musical direction, but often a complete makeover. He’d disappear and reemerge with a new look and persona, marking different eras in his career with whole new characters.
The most well-known was always Ziggy Stardust, the character who took him from an emerging talent to a total fascination, moving him from his earlier folk-rock phases into total glam. This was the character that sparked the ‘cult of Bowie’ as he extensively toured The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and fans appeared in their masses, all dressed like him.
Out of all of his characters, Ziggy also always felt like the most thorough. It made so much sense; an alien superstar had fallen to earth, launching the narrative that would linger around Bowie as a man and a mortal for the rest of his days. With the sleazy stories on the album, too, Ziggy seemed to have a real basis and an energy that fans could grip onto. It felt like a character that Bowie could have got away with playing forever, but as he said, if he got tired, he had to outrun his crowd, who were realising it.
On July 3rd, 1973, Bowie outran the feeling of creeping boredom by committing murder at Hammersmith Odeon. Ziggy Stardust was killed off, there and then, without even his band knowing. “Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do,” the alien singer announced on stage to gasps from not just the audience, but from the stage too as his Spiders from Mars, Mick Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder, hadn’t even been informed that this was their final show.
Obviously, it wasn’t, though. Bowie would perform countless more times, and those musicians would join him. But this was the death of Ziggy and his band. They’d never again be the spiders, and he’d never again be this character. That night at Hammersmith Odeon was a thorough and electrifying funeral that defined Bowie through his dedication to the cause, killing off his most successful iteration yet in devotion to evolution.
It was also a defining night simply down to its sheer greatness. Take one look at the setlist for that show and it’ll give you goosebumps as Bowie played through the Ziggy Stardust record, scattering it with orchestral overtures, covers from his own favourite bands like The Velvet Underground, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and then capping it all off with a final, murderous rendition of ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’ where he finally sent Ziggy to death.
