Sound+Vision Tour

Bowie's previous Glass Spider Tour and two most recent albums (Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987)) had all been critically dismissed, and Bowie was looking for a way to rejuvenate himself artistically. To this end, Bowie wanted to avoid having to play his old hits live forever, and used the release of the Sound + Vision box set as the impetus for a tour, despite having no new material recorded. Bowie took a break from his band Tin Machine for "Sound+Vision", telling the band he was contractually obligated to do the tour. He invited fellow Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels to tour with him, but Gabrels declined, and instead suggested Adrian Belew, with whom both Gabrels and Bowie had worked previously. Gabrels called Belew and said “'I have this friend who is going on tour, and he needs a guitar player. He asked me and I can’t do it, but I thought you might want to do it,' and I put David on the phone." It was stated that Bowie would never perform these greatest hits on tour again. Bowie looked forward to retiring his old hits, saying "It's time to put about 30 or 40 songs to bed and it's my intention that this will be the last time I'll ever do those songs completely, because if I want to make a break from what I've done up until now, I've got to make it concise and not have it as a habit to drop back into. It's so easy to kind of keep going on and saying, well, you can rely on those songs, you can rely on that to have a career or something, and I'm not sure I want that." Bowie spent the early few months of 1990 preparing for the tour in a rehearsal hall on Manhattan's west side. ==Song selection==

It was announced that the set-list for any given performance of the tour would be partially determined by the most popular titles logged in a telephone poll Mail-in ballots were made available to vote by in territories where telephone technology was not available. Bowie had considered playing "The Laughing Gnome" in the style of The Velvet Underground until he found out the voting had been perpetrated by the music magazine. ==Set design==

Édouard Lock (of La La La Human Steps) co-conceived and was artistic director for this tour. He added that this tour is "nowhere near as ambitious as Glass Spider in size, but qualitatively, in essence, I think it's as theatrical." The scrim would occasionally be lowered in front of or behind Bowie, Video recordings of La La La Human Steps' Louise Lecavalier performing dances in time to the music and images of Bowie singing, playing instruments, miming or otherwise performing to certain songs were projected on the scrim & screens during the show. ==Fame '90==

With no new material recorded, to coincide with the tour, Bowie released an updated remix of his 1975 single "Fame", titled "Fame '90". He had wanted to remix one of his successful US singles, and "Let's Dance" was considered, but was rejected as Bowie thought it too recent. For the music video, he danced with Louise Lecavalier, one of the main dancers of La La La Human Steps. A remix of the song was included on the soundtrack for the movie Pretty Woman (1990), and the US version of the video replaces some of Bowie's music videos for scenes from the movie. ==Live recordings==

Bowie wanted to record the concert, something he hadn't always done before, saying "We're intending to film it for posterity; I should hope so. I've always regretted not having filmed things like the 'Diamond Dogs' show. We never filmed the 'Station to Station' show. Or the 'soul' show with Dave Sanborn and those guys. I have absolutely no footage of those things. It's terrible. ... It's infuriating." Despite this, no official recording of the show has been made available to the public in either audio or video form. A number of performances were filmed and recorded for television and radio broadcasts: ==Contemporary reception and reviews==

, Croatia, Yugoslavia Rolling Stone described the 1990 summer concert season "a concert season to remember", and included the Sound+Vision Tour as one of its highlights. They said "Louise Lecavalier of Montreal's La La La Human Steps dance troupe provides avant-garde acrobatics, and several [musical] numbers are graced by stunning short films, including a clip for "Ashes to Ashes" that has to be seen to be believed. Otherwise, there are no pyrotechnics, no laser beams and, best of all, no glass spiders," and a review of the show in Seattle called the visuals "a knockout" and praised Bowie as an innovator, only complaining that the music itself seemed "mechanical." While some shows on the North American tour did not sell out, such as in Seattle and some dates in Florida, overall the tour was well-attended. It sold out, often over multiple nights, in cities such as San Francisco, Sacramento, Philadelphia and Detroit. The UK show at Milton Keynes Bowl was reviewed negatively by Melody Maker magazine, who called parts of the performance "flat" and dismissed the song "Pretty Pink Rose" as "a tall heap of shite." ==Tour incidents==

Mid-tour, Bowie, Erdal Kızılçay and guitarist Adrian Belew joined blues artist Buddy Guy in Chicago for a performance at Guy's Legends Night Club, which coincided with the NAMM Expo, where Guy was celebrated. A month later in Philadelphia, Bowie stopped his performance in the middle of the song "Young Americans" to speak out against music censorship, specifically due to the controversy over 2 Live Crew's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, saying "I've been listening to the album by 2 Live Crew. It's not the best album that's ever been made, but when I heard they banned it, I went out and bought it. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech – it's one of the most important things we have." The concert in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, held on 5 September 1990, was the city's last great concert before the country descended into war and broke up. During the show in Modena a few days later, Bowie stopped his performance while in the middle of "Station to Station" and said onstage "Ok, I'm gonna have to pick some easier songs, or I'm never gonna get through half of these... Let's try Fame." then Bowie proceeded to take his guitar and throw it at the other side of the stage. It is said that Bowie had a cold and he became frustrated that it was affecting his vocals. ==Tour statistics==

The tour opened at the Colisée de Québec – Quebec City in total. The tour was estimated to have grossed $20M (or roughly $M today, adjusted for inflation). ==Tour legacy==

Bowie felt that a burden had been lifted by retiring the old hits he felt he was forced to perform, and said "[Retiring my old hits on tour] was a very selfish thing to do, but it gave me an immense sense of freedom, to feel that I couldn't rely on any of those things. It's like I'm approaching it all from the ground up now, starting with 'Okay, we know what songs we needn't do anymore. What, of my past, did I really like?' You pick things that were really good songs, and you try to recontextualize them, by giving them current, contemporary rhythms. And we've been knocking around ideas like 'Shopping for Girls' from Tin Machine, 'Repetition' and 'Quicksand' from Hunky Dory. Certain songs that I probably haven't ever performed onstage. They're working shoulder to shoulder with the new material, and I'm starting to see continuity in the way that I work." Generally, most songs that Bowie performed on the tour were played live in years to come, with only a small number of songs from the Sound+Vision Tour set list truly being retired forever; the most notable songs never to be played live again were "Young Americans", "TVC 15" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide". Bowie only played "Space Oddity" on tour a single time afterwards, although Bowie did perform the song three times on other occasions. For the rest of the decade, Bowie would in fact tend to play his lesser-known songs, only occasionally punctuated by his well-known older "hits", and bias towards playing material written after 1990; it wasn't until 2000, around the time of his appearance at the Glastonbury Festival (released in 2018 as Glastonbury 2000), that he regularly started performing his older songs on tour again. After the end of the Sound+Vision tour, Bowie returned to his band Tin Machine for their second album. ==Tour band==

Bowie specifically chose a smaller band for the tour, saying in a contemporary interview that "It's a much smaller sound. It's not quite as orchestrated as any of the other tours. The plus of that is that there is a certain kind of drive and tightness that you get with that embryonic line-up, where everybody is totally reliant on the other two or three guys, so everybody gives a lot more." Keyboardist Rick Fox wasn't invested in the tour; he would occasionally eat dinner on stage, and on at least one occasion turned off his own keyboards and played his own songs while sampled parts of Bowie's songs were playing. • David Bowie – vocals, guitar, saxophone • Erdal Kızılçay – bass guitar, backing vocals • Rick Fox – keyboards, backing vocals • Michael Hodges – drums ==Setlist==

This performance is from the Milton Keynes Bowl, Milton Keynes, England show at 5 August 1990. • "Space Oddity" • "Rebel Rebel" • "Ashes to Ashes" • "Fashion" • "Life on Mars?" • "Pretty Pink Rose" • "Sound and Vision" • "Blue Jean" • "Let's Dance" • "Stay" • "Ziggy Stardust" • "China Girl" • "Station to Station" • "Young Americans" • "Suffragette City" • "Fame" • ""Heroes""Encore • "Changes" • "The Jean Genie" • "White Light/White Heat" • "Modern Love" ==Tour dates==

From David Bowie • "Space Oddity" From Hunky Dory • "Changes" • "Life on Mars?" • "Queen Bitch" From The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars • "Starman" • "Ziggy Stardust" • "Suffragette City" • "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" From Aladdin Sane • "Panic in Detroit" • "The Jean Genie" From '''''Live Santa Monica '72''''' • "I'm Waiting for the Man" (from The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) by The Velvet Underground and Nico; written by Lou Reed; outtake from 1966 to 1972 sessions) From Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture • "White Light/White Heat" (originally from White Light/White Heat (1968) by The Velvet Underground; written by Lou Reed) From Diamond Dogs • "Rebel Rebel" From Young Americans • "Young Americans" • "Fame" (Bowie, John Lennon, Carlos Alomar) From Station to Station • "Station to Station" • "Golden Years" • "TVC 15" • "Stay" From Low • "Sound and Vision" • "Be My Wife" From "Heroes" • ""Heroes"" (Bowie, Brian Eno) From Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) • "Ashes to Ashes" • "Fashion" From '''''Let's Dance''''' • "Modern Love" • "China Girl" (originally from The Idiot (1977) by Iggy Pop; written by Pop and Bowie) • "Let's Dance" From Tonight • "Blue Jean" Other songs: • "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (from ''The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan'' (1963) by Bob Dylan; written by Dylan) • "Alabama Song" (originally from Bertolt Brecht's opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; written by Brecht and Kurt Weill; released a non-album single (1980)) • "Amsterdam" (originally from Olympia 1964 by Jacques Brel, written by Brel & Mort Shuman; B-side of the "Sorrow" single (1973)) • "Baby, Please Don't Go" (originally a single (1935) by Big Joe Williams) • "Baby What You Want Me to Do" (originally a single (1959) by Jimmy Reed; famously covered by Elvis Presley (1968)) • "Fame '90 (House mix)" (new version of said song from Young Americans (originally from 1975); released as a single in 1990) • "Heartbreak Hotel" (originally a single (1956) by Elvis Presley, written by Presley, Mae Boren Axton and Thomas Durden) • ""Helden"" (German language version of the song from "Heroes"; appears on some versions of the ""Heroes"" single) • "John, I'm Only Dancing" (released as a non-album single in 1972 with a sax version released the following year; written by Bowie) • "Pretty Pink Rose" (from Young Lions (1990) by Adrian Belew; written by Bowie) • "You and I and George" (traditional) • "Gloria" (originally by Them, it was first released as a B-side to the "Baby, Please Don't Go" single (1964) and later found on The Angry Young Them (1965); written by Van Morrison) ==References==