The one tour that David Bowie called a “waste of time”
No artist has to love every single part of their day-to-day life as a performer. Many aspects go into a musician’s life that aren’t for the faint of heart, and when looking at the regiment that everyone has between albums, touring, interviews, and everything in between, it’s hard to find a second to breathe, let alone find time to work with your friends and family. However, even for someone as enigmatic as David Bowie, he lived and breathed every aspect of his music until the end of his life.
Bowie was never looking to be the kind of intimate rock star that everyone knew the details of, and looking at his discography, he always kept people guessing. No one expected him to take strange detours into genres like Philadelphia soul or drum and bass music in the 1990s, but every step of the way, he was always doing what he wanted to do instead of writing songs that a committee put together.
He knew as well as anyone else that playing the same music over again would get boring, and even in his prime, it’s astonishing to see him stay in glam-rock for that long. Hunky Dory all the way to Diamond Dogs would have been enough to sustain anyone else’s career, but Bowie saw them as blips on the radar in between all the other strange moments that he could throw into his artistic oeuvre.
But there came a point where he felt that the idea of touring had become too much for him to take. The goal may have still been to give the audience a good time whenever they paid for a ticket, but whenever someone becomes a robot onstage, putting together every one of their shows, that’s normally when all of the passion drops out.
‘The Starman’ was all about passion, though, so the idea of him having to go out on a tour was never going to sit well with him as the years went by, saying in 2002, “If I could get away with not having to perform, I’d be very happy. It’s not my favourite thing to do. As I said, I don’t mind trying it out and making sure something seems to work well, but I really do rather want to move on because I think it’s rather a waste of time, endlessly singing the same songs every night for a year, and it’s just not what I want to do.”
At that stage in Bowie’s life, it’s also understandable that he would want to take a break from that side of his career. Anyone can spend time doing the touring circuit in their 20s, but since Bowie was officially sidelined after having a heart attack onstage, he knew he was better off making the music that he wanted to make from the comfort of a studio rather than having to worry about staying upright every night.
It’s also a little disheartening knowing what Bowie could do on the live stage. Every piece of the Serious Moonlight was among the finest shows he ever played, and the theatrical moments of the Ziggy Stardust were spectacular for the time, but the main reason why Bowie stepped off might have been because of not wanting to disappoint people, either. He knew nothing was worse than a nostalgic rockstar, and having to make a bastardised version of his music was the last thing on his mind.
Some of his music might be co-opted by his former backing bandmates, but hearing their renditions doesn’t feel all that different from what Bowie intended. All music was flexible in his mind, so it made sense that after he was gone, people had other means of sharing the beauty he created with the world.
