David Bowie Serious Moonlight Tour Full Show

May 9, 2024 12:03 PM

David Bowie Live | 1983 | Sydney | Serious Moonlight Tour | Pro shot | Complete Concert [1h50m] "On the 20th November 1983, David Bowie performed his final Australian concert of the Serious Moonlight tour. This Betamax recording was taken from a sight screen feed made at that time. The first couple of numbers, plus the end have some artefacts but, as it hasn't been viewed in nearly 40 years, the quality overall has held up well. The audio was in mono and has been remastered to bring it out more."

A document that I had no idea existed. Enjoy!

posted by hippybear (16 comments total)

Wow - this is so cool!

The story behind the video (shown in the full description below the video) is really interesting, too.

Thanks so much for posting this, hippybear! I'm very happy to get to see this.
posted by kristi at 12:14 PM on May 9

I "got into" Bowie over this album. I was 15. This was "late Bowie" and all the cooler kids and hip young adults thought it was trash, DB selling out, the MTV years yadda yadda yadda. But I loved it (and so did millions of others) and 40 years later it holds up. Turns out, too, that it was more middle Bowie than late, and man was he productive thereafter. I look forward to watching this, never got to see him live.
posted by chavenet at 2:06 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

This period may not have been his best work, but hot damn is it good pop music.

It seems awfully suspicious that our current timeline went all to hell right after David Bowie returned to his home planet in January of 2016.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 3:17 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

At the time of this album, discovering white pop against a childhood backdrop of Motown and 70s R&B (*), Bowie felt like one of the "dead and embarrassing hand of the 70s weighing on the youth of today" bunch, like Genesis or the Stones. If we are being honest, "put on your red shoes and dance the blues" is an almost impossibly terrible lyric. But there was a lot worse out there, and he ended up aging better than most. I didn't, and don't, really give a damn about male (especially) androgyny as an aesthetic, so I was dead to that whole spectacle, but over the years I've grown to really appreciate the 70s material musically.

(*) There was an imaginative late-night DJ where I grew up whose shows forged the link between 70s black music and house music and all kinds of crazy stuff coming out of Europe, the man single-handedly responsible for me not growing up into a mere classical music nerd, and I'm sure he would've played older Bowie, but somehow I don't remember it.
posted by praemunire at 3:57 PM on May 9

all the cooler kids and hip young adults thought it was trash, DB selling out, the MTV years yadda yadda yadda.

I could be way off base here, but I always had the sense that Bowie knew exactly what he was doing during this period and it was as much a commentary or statement about the state of pop music at the time as it was just straight forward pop music itself.

Either way, this is a treat, thanks hippybear.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 4:19 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

I always had the sense that Bowie knew exactly what he was doing during this period

The Wikipedia article about the Let's Dance album has some background as to why he chose Rogers as a producer and what he was planning on doing with this album.

I don't know why anyone would refer to this as Bowie's weaker period when he had three songs off it that have become classics of the rock genre. That rare for any artist off of any album, truly.

The Wikipedia article about the tour has a lot of background that is quite interesting, including how Stevie Ray Vaughan, whose guitar playing is heavily featured on the album, was kicked off the tour due to his drug habits during a time after Bowie's Thin White Duke period and he was particularly susceptible to relapse.

This is a really interesting time for Bowie because he's newly sober, decided he wants to have hits, gets hits, and then feels immediately trapped by hits leading to him releasing Never Let Me Down and me going to see The Glass Spider Tour which is both a high and a low in my concert attending life. High because Bowie, low because it was total shit.

Anyway, the concert is pretty fascinating. He's doing a theater show concert long before theater show concerts were really happening. I need to watch it again.
posted by hippybear at 4:35 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

I remember hearing at the time (on the radio, so shrug) that SRV left to focus on Double Trouble, I just assumed because I heard it at the time that was the case, but this is an interesting wrinkle, I guess!
posted by stevil at 5:14 PM on May 9

I don't know why anyone would refer to this as Bowie's weaker period when he had three songs off it that have become classics of the rock genre.

well, for me, it just isn't up to what came before (ie: pretty much everything he released through the 1970s, up to and including 1980's Scary Monsters). Not that I didn't appreciate hearing Bowie on the radio and in clubs (it's not as if any of the Let's Dance songs were bad, just not as good).

Oh, and by the way, I was at the gig in question. In fact, I was discussing it with friends just the other night. We agreed that it looks better on TV, that the same basic show hit harder, was more fun, was more everything earlier that year when he hit town with The Tubes and Peter Gabriel supporting. Now that was a show, which I reported on previously ...

Maybe halfway through the set, it was time for a visit to the porto-potties which were way at the back, a football field away from the main stage. And then right in the middle of it, enclosed in that stinky, plastic cubicle, the band kicked into the big deal opening of Let's Dance. I'm sure I laughed. Yup, that about sums it up, this album goes straight down the drain ...

Except as I exited back into the massive room (BC Place being an enclosed stadium), I spotted something I hadn't noticed before. Just to my right, there was a section for disabled folks -- people on crutches, in wheelchairs, their attendants. And they were all moving, grooving, dancing anyway they could.

I laughed again, this time at my self-important self, then headed back into the density of the crowd with all my prejudices annihilated, now committed to enjoying what was one hell of a rock show ... particularly once they got into Station to Station.
posted by philip-random at 6:43 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

Well, you were at a show in Vancouver several months before this show in Australia. Unless you typed "Vancouver" in your original comment when you meant to type "Sydney".
posted by hippybear at 6:48 PM on May 9

no, I got it wrong. They also shot and released the second Vancouver concert -- same basic setlist, I'm pretty sure.
posted by philip-random at 8:12 PM on May 9

I was at that show in Vancouver. Still remember what a departure and how mindblowing it was.

(So is there a way to filter hippybear's posts from my feed? Because I have WORK to do, Dammit. Now, none of it's gonna get done. Again. )
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 10:13 PM on May 9

I don't know why anyone would refer to this as Bowie's weaker period when he had three songs off it that have become classics of the rock genre.

No one would, now [even if they would still rank the earlier work higher]; but in 1983, lemme tell ya.
posted by chavenet at 1:50 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

I attended one of the shows that year at what was then called the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland. It was a very good show [not great audience audio on YouTube].
posted by terrapin at 4:44 AM on May 10

I am away from my desk, so I fired up Tailscale so I could VNC into my hoarding machine and kick off a yt-dlp session. Which is to say, thanks, as always, hippybear.
posted by ob1quixote at 8:00 AM on May 10

I was SO happy to see him on this tour in July 1983 in Detroit. I’d gotten into Bowie around 1978 and was too young and/or clueless to catch him on that year’s world tour. Between 1978 and 1983 I gobbled up everything from Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust to Lodger and Scary Monsters. Taking all that in, it spun me off into exploring the careers of Robert Fripp, Eno, and Adrian Belew which you can imagine sent me off in many wonderful directions.

So, after five years of eating, drinking and sleeping all things Bowie, I’d have been happy if he’d showed up with an acoustic guitar and just played the entirety of his first album.

At the time, in the back of our heads, we knew Let’s Dance was a little commercial and man, we wished Belew was with him for this tour.

We enjoyed the hell out of the concert though and I’m so glad I saw him when I did.

Bowie (along with The Beatles and Neil Young) is one of the three major tree trunks of my musical life. Everything musical ive enjoyed since can be tracked back to my obsession with one of those three artists.

Thanks for posting this hippybear!
posted by marxchivist at 11:35 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]

I unapologetically love Let’s Dance - the unwrapping and first playing of the album was on one of the most beautiful and best days of my life, and this was the only Bowie tour I ever saw, so I’m really looking forward to this- thanks.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:29 AM on May 11 [1 favorite]