david bowie tour 1984

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David Bowie: Serious Moonlight

David Bowie performs his 'Serious Moonlight Tour' in Vancouver, 12th August 1983. David Bowie performs his 'Serious Moonlight Tour' in Vancouver, 12th August 1983. David Bowie performs his 'Serious Moonlight Tour' in Vancouver, 12th August 1983.

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• Trivia In the end credits Tour Lighting is attributed to Ozzy Osbourne.
• Connections Featured in Rolling Stone Presents Twenty Years of Rock & Roll (1987)
• Soundtracks Look Back In Anger Written by David Bowie and Brian Eno Performed by David Bowie

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• Jun 12, 1999
• February 12, 1984 (United States)
• Pacific Coliseum, Pacific National Exhibition Grounds, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
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• Runtime 1 hour 27 minutes

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Serious Moonlight [1984]

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• July 3, 1983 Setlist

David Bowie Setlist at Milton Keynes National Bowl, Milton Keynes, England

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• Look Back in Anger Play Video
• Breaking Glass Play Video
• Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) Play Video
• Rebel Rebel Play Video
• "Heroes" Play Video
• What in the World Play Video
• Life on Mars? Play Video
• Golden Years Play Video
• Fashion Play Video
• Let's Dance Play Video
• Red Sails Play Video
• China Girl ( Iggy Pop  cover) Play Video
• White Light/White Heat ( The Velvet Underground  cover) Play Video
• Guitar Solo Play Video
• Station to Station Play Video
• Cracked Actor Play Video
• Ashes to Ashes Play Video
• Space Oddity Play Video
• Young Americans Play Video
• TVC15 Play Video
• Fame Play Video
• Star Play Video
• Sorrow ( The McCoys  cover) Play Video
• Cat People (Putting Out Fire) Play Video
• Stay Play Video
• The Jean Genie Play Video
• Modern Love Play Video

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18 activities (last edit by pomes27 , 7 Mar 2020, 17:44 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Golden Years
• Station to Station
• Cat People (Putting Out Fire)
• Let's Dance
• Modern Love
• Ashes to Ashes
• Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
• China Girl by Iggy Pop
• Sorrow by The McCoys
• White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground
• Cracked Actor
• The Jean Genie
• Look Back in Anger
• Breaking Glass
• What in the World
• Young Americans
• "Heroes"
• Space Oddity
• Rebel Rebel
• Life on Mars?
• Guitar Solo

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David Bowie Gig Timeline

• Jul 01 1983 Milton Keynes National Bowl Milton Keynes, England Add time Add time
• Jul 02 1983 Milton Keynes National Bowl Milton Keynes, England Add time Add time
• Jul 03 1983 Milton Keynes National Bowl This Setlist Milton Keynes, England Add time Add time
• Jul 11 1983 Colisée de Québec Quebec City, QC, Canada Add time Add time
• Jul 12 1983 Forum de Montréal Montreal, QC, Canada Add time Add time

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David Bowie’s Orwell: how Nineteen Eighty-Four shaped Diamond Dogs

On a bright, cold day in April 1973, David Bowie and his percussionist, Geoff MacCormack, boarded the Trans-Siberian railway in Khabarovsk. The aviophobic singer was taking the long way home to London from his Japanese tour. The week-long journey to Moscow was a lark to begin with, but the closer they got to the capital, the thicker the atmosphere of tension and suspicion became. In Moscow, Bowie watched a day-long military parade from the window of his hotel on Red Square. “On my trips through Russia I thought, well, this is what fascism must have felt like,” he later said. “They marched like them. They saluted like them.” As the train to Paris passed through the no man’s land between East and West Berlin, the two men were stunned into silence by the still bombed-out ruins.

This heavy trip intensified Bowie’s growing sense of paranoia and panic. On the last leg of the journey home, he spoke to Roy Hollingworth from Melody Maker about how it had changed him. “You see, Roy,” he said, chain-smoking manically, “after what I’ve seen of the state of this world, I’ve never been so damned scared in my life.”

One did not need to have travelled through Brezhnev’s Russia to feel fearful in stagflation-hit 1970s Britain, which, as well as the three-day week, saw the return of blackouts, petrol rationing and an IRA bombing campaign. Millions of Britons still listened to Slade and the Osmonds, went to see Live and Let Die and The Way We Were , relaxed in front of Are You Being Served? and Porridge , enjoyed their extra days off and generally went about their business. But Bowie’s antennae were attuned to shriller frequencies. His song Life on Mars? had looked for a way forward among the debris of the 1960s; Five Years was a histrionic countdown to Armageddon; the ominous parenthetical in Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?) pencilled in a third world war. “I’m an awful pessimist,” Bowie confessed to NME . It was not at all surprising that his mind was turning to writing a rock musical based on Nineteen Eighty-Four .

By 1973, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four had passed 1m in the UK and at least 10m in the US. Rock bands had assimilated the novel into rallying cries for the counterculture. “Oh, where will you be when your freedom is dead 14 years from tonight?” asked Spirit on their single 1984, released during the dying weeks of the 60s. “We don’t want no Big Brother scene,” cried John Lennon on Only People. In Stevie Wonder’s cool, contemptuous Big Brother, BB represented the Nixon administration. Orwell’s dictator was now another name for The Man.

Bowie had been obsessed with Orwell’s novel since growing up in postwar Bromley, in a house less than a mile away from the birthplace of HG Wells. “You always felt you were in 1984,” he said. “That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in… It was a terribly inhibiting place.”

In November 1973, Bowie told William Burroughs that he was adapting the novel for television and gave his NBC TV special the mischievous title The 1980 Floor Show . During the show, he debuted a new song called 1984/Dodo, one of 20 he claimed to have written for the adaptation, although attempts to write an actual script with the American playwright Tony Ingrassia had come to nothing.

He was therefore furious when Sonia Orwell refused permission for his rock musical. “For a person who married a socialist with communist leanings, she was the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life,” he told Circus writer Ben Edmonds. “‘Good heavens, put it to music?’ It really was like that.” Doubtless, Sonia did hate the idea, but then she had approved almost no adaptations in any medium since the fiasco of the 1956 movie and she certainly didn’t meet Bowie, so that anecdote can be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s debatable whether a hypermodern, hedonistic, bisexual rock star would have had better luck with a 70-year-old Orwell.

Bowie’s eighth studio album, initially titled We Are the Dead , was, therefore, a salvage operation. “To be quite honest with you… the whole thing was originally 19-bloody-84,” he told Edmonds. “She put the clappers on [the musical] by saying no. So I, at the last minute, quickly changed it into a new concept album called Diamond Dogs . I didn’t ever want to do Diamond Dogs as a stage musical; what I wanted was 1984 .”

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Released: 24 May 1974

Available on: Diamond Dogs David Live Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74) I’m Only Dancing (The Soul Tour 74)

‘1984’ was written as the title track for David Bowie’s proposed theatrical version of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four .

When we were recording Diamond Dogs we worked on the song ‘1984’, and he was already referencing Barry White. He wanted the hi-hat and the strings to sound like they would on a Barry White record. He was already anticipating the sound of Young Americans . He had already moved on.

In October 1973 Bowie began rehearsing The 1980 Floor Show , held at the Marquee Club in London. It was his final performance as Ziggy Stardust.

The show included songs from Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups , plus a medley of the new songs ‘1984’ and ‘Dodo’ . The 1980 Floor Show also featured guest performances from Marianne Faithfull, The Troggs, Amanda Lear, and Carmen, and had the Astronettes (Ava Cherry, Jason Guess, and Geoffrey MacCormack) performing as Bowie’s backing singers.

During a day’s filming at the Marquee on 20 October 1973, Bowie introduced ‘1984’ with the words: “We’ve written a musical, and this is the title song called ‘1984’. We’ll be doing the show in March next year.”

‘1984’/‘Dodo’ were the opening numbers of The 1980 Floor Show when it was broadcast by NBC in America on 16 November, as part of the Midnight Special series.

Bowie began planning his stage production of Nineteen Eighty-Four after completing Pin Ups in 1973. However, he was denied the rights to the novel by Orwell’s widow Sonia Brownell, so reworked the concept into Diamond Dogs . Although the Hunger City concept was Bowie’s own, the origins of the project were most apparent in the trio of songs ‘We Are The Dead’ , ‘1984’, and ‘Big Brother’ , all of which directly quoted Orwell.

The release

‘1984’ was released as a single in the US and New Zealand in August 1974, with ‘Queen Bitch’ on the b-side.

It was also issued as a single in Japan in October 1974, coupled with ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ .

The ‘1984’/ ‘Dodo’ medley, recorded in October 1973, was eventually released on the 1989 Rykodisc box set Sound + Vision , and again in 2004 on the 30th anniversary reissue of Diamond Dogs .

In the end, my version of ‘Dodo’/‘1984’ failed to make the cut for Diamond Dogs . It did, however, eventually appear on one of the many compilations down the road.

I love this song. What can I say? It’s just so infectious. He’s taking in 1974 about 1984 and here we are in 2020 and it’s crazier than ever. I’m not going to go there now, though. I’m having too much fun talking about this music. #TimsTwitterListeningParty — Mike Garson (@mikegarson) July 12, 2020

On 19 April 2014, for Record Store Day, a picture disc 7″ single was released, with the album version of ‘1984’ on one side, and Bowie’s performance of the song on The Dick Cavett Show on the b-side.

It was only released in the USA, and limited to 4,000 copies. The picture disc had a photograph of Bowie and William Burroughs on one side, and a Dick Cavett Show performance shot on the other.

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Zig Brother: When David Bowie Tried to Turn George Orwell’s 1984 Into a Musical

By ellen gutoskey | mar 11, 2021.

The track list for David Bowie ’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs offers a couple obvious clues about one source of inspiration: song titles include both “1984” and “Big Brother.” But Bowie didn’t just want to use themes from George Orwell’s 1984 on the record. As Open Culture reports , he initially hoped to turn the 1949 dystopian classic into a full-fledged musical of its own.

What form that musical was ultimately meant to take isn’t totally clear. According to Christopher Sandford’s biography Bowie: Loving the Alien , the adaptation would've been “a West End musical, with an accompanying album and film.” But in a Rolling Stone interview with William S. Burroughs from February 1974—just months before the release of Diamond Dogs —Bowie himself mentioned he was “doing Orwell’s 1984 on television.” It’s possible the project went through several iterations when the “ Space Oddity ” singer was still brainstorming it. But thanks to Orwell’s widow, Sonia (believed to be the basis for 1984 's Julia), the musical never progressed past the incubation stage.

“My office approached Mrs. Orwell, because I said, ‘Office, I want to do 1984 as a musical, go get me the rights,’” Bowie explained in 1993, according to David Buckley’s Strange Fascination: David Bowie, the Definitive Story . “And they duly trooped off to see Mrs. Orwell, who in so many words said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your gourd, do you think I’m turning this over to that as a musical?’ So, they came back and said, ‘Sorry, David, you can’t write it.’” Since Bowie had already started “putting bits of it down” in the studio, the surprise rejection forced him to pivot quickly. His ill-fated musical became a concept album with Orwellian overtones.

Though Sonia Orwell passed away in 1980, Bowie never resurrected his original plans for her husband’s harrowing tale. But in January 2020, producers at Australia’s New Theatre did stage a 1984 musical that Sonia surely would have disapproved of. The production was described as a “light-hearted comedy” featuring “tap-dancing in torture chambers, rats with razzle-dazzle, [and] Big Brother with even bigger star power.”

[h/t Open Culture ]

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Tonight: A New Dawn For David Bowie’s Overlooked 80s Album

A classy collection of accomplished pop, David Bowie’s ‘Tonight’ album deserves to step out from the shadows.

At least in the commercial sense, the success of David Bowie ’s 16th studio album, Tonight , was pretty much a fait accompli. Arriving in the autumn of 1984, just nine months after the completion of his enormous Serious Moonlight world tour, the record shot to No.1 and basked in Bowie’s reputation as a global superstar – and yet history often finds it sitting in the shadow of its illustrious predecessor, 1983’s Let’s Dance .

Listen to ‘Tonight’ here .

“they were quite raunchy songs”.

In retrospect, it’s reasonable to think of Tonight as a victim of circumstance. The Nile Rodgers-produced Let’s Dance didn’t just conquer the charts globally; critics universally hailed it as the very epitome of cutting-edge pop in 1983. Accordingly, Bowie’s next release was going to come under intense scrutiny.

Consequently, Bowie was under pressure to deliver the goods – and fast. EMI were keen to capitalise on the Serious Moonlight tour, for which Bowie sold out all 96 performances in 15 countries, and they wanted him to head back into the studio straight away. It was hardly the ideal premise for creativity, not least because Bowie rarely wrote songs while on tour. As the sessions started, he had two highly promising new tunes in the works – Blue Jean and Loving The Alien – though several other tracks were only partially prepared.

“They were really just jams,” engineer Hugh Padgham recalled in an interview with Musician magazine in December 1984. “David had some riffs on a tape, in his head, and the band would jam on them, and we’d make a bit of a song out of it. But they were quite raunchy songs. I couldn’t tell you why he didn’t put them on the album, but I would have loved to have finished them.”

“It’s really got the band sound that I wanted”

Bowie decamped to Le Studio, in the mountains near Morin-Heights, Québec, to record Tonight . His band included longtime guitarist/bandleader Carlos Alomar along with several stalwarts from the Let’s Dance sessions, including bassist Carmine Rojas and drummer Omar Hakim. Surprisingly, however, Bowie decided not to recall Nile Rodgers to produce. Instead, Hugh Padgham (who had mixed The Police’s Synchronicity at the same recording facility) manned the console alongside a new face, former Heatwave bassist Derek Bramble, who had previously worked with ex-Linx soul singer David Grant.

Speaking to Soulinterviews.com in 2012, Bramble was still incredulous at receiving the call. “He’d just done Let’s Dance with Nile, but he was looking for a young, hip producer. My name came up and he came searching for me and asked if I wanted to produce his record. I said ‘Yes’ and that was it. I thought my manager was playing a trick on me, but Bowie really did want me to do it. I went and, as they say, the rest is history.”

At least partly out of practicality, Bowie encouraged a collaborative approach for Tonight . The rubbery funk of Tumble And Twirl and the agreeably bellicose Dancing With The Big Boys were both co-written with close friend Iggy Pop, while the tracklist also included an eclectic bunch of covers. Among these were several songs previously recorded by Iggy, including Neighbourhood Threat, Don’t Look Down and the album’s title track. Bowie and his team gave the latter a reggae-flavoured makeover, and he recorded it as a duet with Tina Turner . Bowie had recently instilled Turner’s career with renewed impetus, as he helped convince Capitol Records to re-sign her for her wildly successful Private Dancer album, and Turner willingly returned the favour, putting in an emotive performance for the song.

Tonight became one of the album’s three singles, along with the alluring Blue Jean and the bona fide classic Loving The Alien. Instilled with the otherworldly grace inherent in the best David Bowie songs , Loving The Alien exuded what the BBC’s Chris Jones described as “a strange, distant beauty… like watching a ballet through a telescope”, and Hugh Padgham recalled that the song brought out the very best in Bowie the vocalist.

“David had the most amazing voice and recording technique,” he told Bowie biographer Christopher Sandford. “I had never worked with anyone who was able to sing a perfect vocal in just one or two takes at the most. He was a true, true professional.”

“A dizzying variety of mood and technique”

Released on 24 September 1984, in a sleeve whose homage to British performance-artists Gilbert & George stands as one of David Bowie’s most striking album covers – Tonight presented an agreeably accomplished set of modern, sophisticated pop songs and, with hindsight, it earns its place as a worthy successor to Let’s Dance . In the short term, it also achieved what EMI required: topping the UK charts, hitting the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 and yielding two hit singles courtesy of Blue Jean and Loving The Alien. It’s also worth recalling that the promotional push for the former included Julien Temple’s short film Jazzin’ For Blue Jean – a Grammy Award-winner for Best Video, Short Form in 1985.

Critics, too, were kinder to the record than memory might suggest. Though Tonight had its detractors, the NME praised its “dizzying variety of mood and technique”, and Billboard suggested “the once and future [Bowie] takes yet another turn, saving more edgy, passionate dance-rock for the second side while throwing the spotlight on surprisingly restrained ballads and midtempo rockers”. Retrospective reviews have also improved Tonight ’s standing, with The New Statesman ’s 2006 reappraisal bullishly stating, “No album that begins with the seven-minute masterpiece Loving The Alien and contains the rocking Blue Jean should have received the drubbing it got.”

“I think this album gave me a chance, like Pin Ups did a few years ago, to do some covers I’ve always wanted to do,” Bowie told the NME at the time.

“What I suppose I really wanted to do was work with Iggy again, and that’s something I’ve not done for a long time,” he furthered. “I’ve got to a point on that I really wanted to get to, where it’s really an organic sound, and it’s mainly saxophones. I think there’s only two lead guitar solos on it. No synthesisers to speak of… It’s really got the band sound that I wanted.”

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