The tour David Bowie refused to play for years: “It’s corny”
David Bowie wasn’t someone who needed to be talked into doing something mainstream. ‘The Starman’ always had a vision for what he wanted his music to be, and that usually didn’t involve some random arsehole in a suit taking him aside and explaining to him what the people really wanted to see out of him. And when it came time to give his music to the people, he was never going to go onstage unless it was something that he was completely satisfied with before people even showed up.
Then again, that makes sense coming from someone who invented characters onstage. The whole point behind inventing people like ‘Aladdin Sane’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust’ was because no one had seen what that would look like, and when people started getting too comfortable or thought that they had him trapped in one musical box, it didn’t take Bowie long to move into some strange direction.
If you look at his entire career, the whole reason why he never got bored was his willingness to experiment. From embracing soul on Young Americans to the beginnings of krautrock during his Berlin period to eventually working with Nine Inch Nails to create the most abrasive sounds of his later years, he felt that he was never complete unless he had something that sounded newer than anything he had worked on.
But sometimes, being “new” means becoming the biggest name in the world by accident. By the 1980s, Bowie had felt content trying to reinvent himself however he could, but the era of MTV was the one moment when the music world caught up to him. He hadn’t changed anything about the way he approached songs, but listening to Let’s Dance felt like the one time when the masses could embrace Bowie along with his core audience. No casual listener was jamming out to all ten minutes of ‘Station to Station’, but there wasn’t anyone left off the dance floor when ‘Modern Love’ came on.
At the same time, there were a lot of people close to Bowie who were seeing dollar signs when he started playing massive hits onstage. This was bound to be his opportunity to do his version of a greatest hits tour and play everything that the public, but where would be the fun in seeing ‘The Thin White Duke’ put on a suit and act like he was yet another dinosaur of rock?
As much as Bowie could appreciate his history, he remembered only wanting to play his hits if it meant getting to retire them, saying, “It’s been thrown at me for some years, ‘Why don’t you just go all the way and do all the songs that they know? You’ve never done it, and it’d be great.’ I’d go, Oh, I don’t want to; it’s corny, no. I went away and thought, What about if I do these songs for the last time – just do them on this tour and never do them again? That would give me motivation for the entire tour, knowing each night that I do them, I get that much closer to never singing ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’ again.”
Bowie eventually retired tracks like ‘Young Americans’ after going on tours in the early 1990s, which opened up the playing field for what he could do later. Even if not every Bowie fan was blasting Nine Inch Nails, seeing him inhabit industrial music and perform a version of ‘Hurt’ with Trent Reznor was still one of the most inspiring moments of his career. Bowie might have been ready to hang up his glam-rock boots in some respects, but that meant that every show felt special when he did decide to bring out a song like ‘Changes’.
