2023-08-15 15:00:08
British singer David Bowie next to his Rolls Royce in May 1973. AP
A few weeks away, the marketing, Friday August 11, of the reissue of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars. The Motion Picture, in a set of two CDs and a Blu-ray, would have matched its “50th Anniversary Edition” subtitle. It was on July 3, 1973, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, birthplace of David Bowie (1947-2016), that this concert was recorded and filmed, which has become one of the highlights of the musician’s saga. This publication presents for the first time the entire evening.
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Almost at the end, Bowie announces: “Not only is this the last show of this tour, but also the last show we will ever do. THANKS. » And continues with the aptly named song Rock’n’Roll Suicide. The public screams, the articles that will report on the evening highlight this statement, sometimes playing with the ambiguity of the end of Bowie’s career.
Bowie has been on tour for a year and a half. Since January 29, 1972, he has played everywhere in England, Scotland and Wales, the United States and Japan (nine dates, including one in Hiroshima). Nearly 200 concerts, with a few breaks. The Ziggy Stardust Tour, which began before the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (June 1972), the album that made Bowie a star, has to stop after this evening. With, perhaps, the prospect of resuming in Europe, in the United States.
“Big Exit”
But Bowie can’t take it anymore. This stage incarnation of the character of Ziggy Stardust merges with his daily life, devours it. He wants to leave this double. He informed a few relatives, including guitarist Mick Ronson (1946-1993), who is also preparing a first solo album, but not the two other musicians of his group The Spiders From Mars – who accompanied his rise –, bassist Trevor Bolder (1950-2013) and drummer Woody Woodmansey. He also warned journalist Charles Shaar Murray, who is to publish an article in the magazine New Musical Expresson newsstands the day after the concert.
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In the booklet of this reissue, Murray writes that a real star “knows not only how to make a grand entrance, but also a grand exit”. If there is a time envisaged to quickly publish the recording and the film, it was not until 1983 that a double album was marketed at the same time as the distribution in the cinema of the montage produced by the American Donn Alan Pennebaker (1925-2019).
Ecstatic faces
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