Serious Moonlight Tour


The Serious Moonlight Tour was launched in May 1983 in support of David Bowie's album Let's Dance. The tour opened at the Vorst Forest Nationaal, Brussels, on 18 May 1983 and ended in the Hong Kong Coliseum on 8 December 1983; 15 countries visited, 96 performances, and over 2.6M tickets sold. The tour garnered mostly favorable reviews from the press.
It was, at the time, his longest, largest and most successful concert tour to date, although it has since been surpassed in length, attendance and gross revenue by subsequent Bowie tours.

Development

The tour, designed to support Bowie's latest album Let's Dance, was initially designed to be a smaller tour, playing to the likes of sub-10,000-seat indoor venues around the world, similar to previous Bowie tours. However, the success of Let's Dance caused unexpectedly high demand for tickets: there were 250,000 requests for 44,000 tickets at one show, for example, and as a result the tour was changed to instead play in a variety of larger outdoor and festival-style venues. The largest crowd for a single show during the tour was 80,000 in Auckland, New Zealand, while the largest crowd for a festival date was 300,000 at the US 83 Festival in California. The tour sold out at every venue it played.
Bowie used boxing to get in shape for the tour. His son Duncan Jones pointed out years later that "Each round is approximately the same length as a song, so if you can get your cardio up enough to do a full 12 or so rounds, you’re ready to go!"

Set design

Bowie himself had a hand in the set design for the tour, which included giant columns as well as a large moon and a giant hand. The stage was deliberately given a vertical feeling and an overall design that Bowie called a combination of classicism and modernism. The weight of one set was 32 tons.

Tour musicians

Bowie hired mostly musicians he'd used on his previous albums, though some of the musicians from his 1978 tour were re-hired for this tour, including Carlos Alomar, who was the designated band leader for the tour. Stevie Ray Vaughan, who had contributed guitar solos to six of the songs on Let's Dance and who was up and coming, was to join the tour, also to please the American audience. Vaughan showed up for rehearsals in Dallas in April, but Vaughan showed up with a cocaine habit, a hard-partying wife and an entourage looking for easy access to drugs. Given that Bowie himself had moved to Berlin in the late 1970s to try and kick his own cocaine habit, Bowie and Vaughan's management failed to come to an agreement on how to temper the situation, and in the end Vaughan pulled out of the tour. Vaughan was replaced by longtime Bowie guitarist Earl Slick.

Song selection

Faced with high demand for tickets for the tour, Bowie decided to play his more recognizable songs from his repertoire, saying a few years later that his goal was to give the fans the songs that they'd heard on the radio over the past 15 years, calling the setlist a collection of songs that the fans "probably didn't realize when added up are a great body of work". Bowie and Carlos Alomar selected an initial list of songs for the tour, 35 of which they rehearsed for the tour. One song that was on the rehearsal's song list that never actually got to the rehearsal stage was "Across the Universe", which Bowie had covered in 1975 on his Young Americans album. The setlist for the tour was the basis for the track list for the 1989 box set Sound + Vision.

Tour rehearsals

Initially the band rehearsed in a studio in Manhattan before moving near Dallas for dress rehearsals.
Each band member wore a costume which was designed "down to the smallest detail", as if a character in a play. Two sets of each person's costumes were made and worn on alternate nights, and everyone got to keep one set at the conclusion of the tour as a souvenir. The bands' costumes were a nod, a "slight parody", on all the New Romantic bands that were growing in popularity at the time.

Tour performances

To counteract counterfeiting, tickets and backstage passes were printed with small flaws that casual observers would not notice, but tour staff and security were trained to spot.
On 30 June 1983, the performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London was a charity show for the Brixton Neighbourhood Community Association in the presence of Princess Michael of Kent. The 13 July 1983 Montreal Forum performance was recorded and broadcast on American FM radio and other radio stations worldwide. The concert on 12 September in Vancouver was recorded for the concert video Serious Moonlight, that was released in 1984 and on DVD in 2006.
At the Canadian National Exhibition Stadium performance on 4 September 1983 in Toronto, Bowie introduced special guest Mick Ronson, who borrowed Earl Slick's guitar and performed "The Jean Genie" with Bowie and band. Mick had only been asked to play the day before, and he later recalled:
The last show of the tour was the third anniversary of John Lennon's death, whom Bowie and Slick had previously worked with in the studio. Slick suggested to Bowie a few days prior to the show that they play "Across the Universe" as a tribute; but Bowie said, "Well if we're going to do it, we might as well do 'Imagine'." They rehearsed the song a couple of times on 5 December and then performed the song on the final night of the tour as a tribute to their friend.

Legacy

The tour was a high point of commercial success for Bowie, who found his new popularity perplexing. Bowie would later remark that with the success of Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight Tour, he had lost track of who his fans were or what they wanted. One critic would later call this tour his "most accessible" because "it had few props and one costume change, from peach suit to blue."
Bowie later specifically tried to avoid repeating the formula for success from his Serious Moonlight Tour with his 1987 Glass Spider Tour.
The 26 November show in Auckland became – at the time – the most attended concert in the Southern Hemisphere with over 80,000 people in attendance.

Set list

This is the set list from the performance in Vancouver, Canada, on 12 September 1983. It's not intended to represent all shows throughout the tour.
  1. "Look Back in Anger"
  2. "Heroes"
  3. "What in the World"
  4. "Golden Years"
  5. "Fashion"
  6. "Let's Dance"
  7. "Breaking Glass"
  8. "Life on Mars?"
  9. "Sorrow"
  10. "Cat People "
  11. "China Girl"
  12. "Scary Monsters "
  13. "Rebel Rebel"
  14. "White Light/White Heat"
  15. "Station to Station"
  16. "Cracked Actor"
  17. "Ashes to Ashes"
  18. "Space Oddity"
  19. "Young Americans"
  20. "Fame"
  21. "TVC 15"
;Encore
  2. "Star"
  3. "Stay"
  4. "The Jean Genie"
  5. "Modern Love"

    Personnel

Song list

From David Bowie
From Hunky Dory
From The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
From Aladdin Sane
From Pin Ups
From Diamond Dogs
From Young Americans
From Station to Station
From Low
From "Heroes"
From Lodger
From Scary Monsters
From Let's Dance
Other songs: