The old song David Bowie was almost pranked into playing live
For a moment, imagine your favourite musician is on tour, and you can pick the set list. But, there’s a caveat: if your song isn’t chosen, you might never hear it again. This is a clearing out of the closet, a last hurrah for the hits. That was David Bowie’s 1990 Sound and Vision tour.
In 1990, when Bowie was about to embark on this new run of live dates, he was looking for something new to do. His last few tours hadn’t been a flop by any measure, but they also hadn’t been critically acclaimed. They were, simply, good. This time round, he wanted to make it great again.
But by this point, he wasn’t relying so much on characters or personas. His shows weren’t as theatrical as they were before, so there was less showmanship he could fall back on. When trying to think about a new foundation to build upon, he realised he had one thing that couldn’t fail him. As the biggest win of a long career, he realised how reliable his fans are.
So, he brought them into the process. 1-900-2-BOWIE-90. That was the number to call. Fans could ring up and request their favourite songs, with the money from their call going directly to charity. The response was overwhelming.
There was a caveat, though. While Bowie began relying on his fans, he wanted to stop depending on his old hits. He was tired of them and started to fear that maybe they were holding him back, keeping him too tethered to the past when he wanted and needed to look forward. So, he said that after this tour, that would be it for the greatest hits. “Knowing I won’t ever have those songs to rely on again spurs me to keep doing new things, which is good for an artist,” he said. “I have no intentions of parroting my own songs, which is what it ends up being after you’ve been doing it for 20 years. You can’t do it with any more enthusiasm. I don’t care who you are, you get to the point where you don’t like singing the song anymore.”
That meant the stakes were high, pushing even more fans to call in, desperately trying to ensure they got to hear their favourite song one last time. From those requests, Bowie was meticulous in translating the masses’ dreams into his show. He explained the process, “What I ended up doing was taking about seven or eight [songs] from [the calls in] England, another seven or eight from the rest of Europe and the rest I made up from America so it’s a good sampling of what everybody wanted in all the continents.”
However, it wasn’t quite as fair and honest as Bowie was making it out. When the scheme was launched, NME decided to be pranksters. They launched their own campaign called Just Say Gnome, getting fans to call in and obsessively request ‘The Laughing Gnome’, an early track from 1967. It worked so well that the track became the most requested song on the phone line, and for a while, Bowie thought he’d need to oblige.
Apparently, fans were about to get a ‘The Laughing Gnome’ rendition but in the style of The Velvet Underground, but before it ever hit the stage, he found out it was all a prank and pulled the plug, meaning that the ‘60s track never got its jokey goodbye.
