Serious Moonlight Tour

In 1980, David Bowie had released his album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), at the time expecting to support the album with a tour.[4][5] However, the murder of John Lennon in December 1980 deeply affected Bowie[lower-alpha 1] and as a result, he cancelled his tour plans and withdrew to his home in Switzerland where he became a recluse and continued working.[4][5] Consequently, the Serious Moonlight Tour was Bowie's first tour in 5 years.

This 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.[1]

Bowie used boxing (of which he was a fan) to get in shape for the tour. His son Duncan Jones pointed out years later that "Each round [of boxing] 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!"[6]

Initially, Bowie worked with Derek Boshier to design the stage for the tour, as Boshier had designed the artwork for the Let's Dance album itself. The design proposed by Boshier was an "extravagant design reminiscent of the Diamond Dogs set with multiple platforms and levels, rotating prisms revealing different backdrop designs on each facet, and a gigantic cartoon figure of Bowie with a guitar", but this was rejected as too expensive, so instead Bowie worked with Mark Ravitz to come up with what was the final design,[7] which included four giant columns (affectionately referred to as "condoms") as well as a large moon and a giant hand.[8] Ravitz had designed the set for Bowie's 1974 Diamond Dogs Tour, and would work on Bowie's next touring set as well, the 1987 Glass Spider Tour.[9]

The Serious Moonlight stage was deliberately given a vertical feeling (especially due to the columns) and an overall design that Bowie called a combination of classicism and modernism. The weight of one set (of which there were two) was 32 tons.[1] Lighting the set were 40 Vari-Lites, some of which were set horizontally across the stage, which allowed them to "create set-piece landscapes" for certain songs.[7]

Earl Slick November 1983 during the Serious Moonlight Tour

Bowie used the musicians he'd newly collaborated with on Let's Dance, along with some longer standing collaborators, including Carlos Alomar who was the designated tour band leader.[1][8] 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.[10] Early rehearsals were held in Manhattan[1] without Vaughan and Bowie, and were overseen by Alomar.[7] Rehearsals moved to Las Calinas, Texas in April,[3] where Bowie and Vaughan joined the band,[7][11][12] but Vaughan showed up with a cocaine habit, a hard-partying wife and an entourage looking for easy access to drugs.[13] Given that Bowie himself had moved to Berlin in the late 1970s to try and kick his own cocaine habit,[14][15] 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.[10] Bassist Carmine Rojas called Vaughan's release "one of the most heartbreaking moments he had ever witnessed on the road, Stevie left standing on the sidewalk with his bags surrounding him."[16] Bowie, who was in Europe promoting the album and tour when the disagreement arose, did not have a say in Vaughan's departure.[16] This happened less than one week before the tour's opening night, and as a result, Vaughan's replacement Earl Slick spent the next few days in his hotel room, learning all of the 31 songs on the setlist.[16]

Each band member wore a costume which was designed "down to the smallest detail", as if a character in a play.[17] 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.[3] The bands' costumes were a nod, a "slight parody", on all the New Romantic bands that were growing in popularity at the time.[1]

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".[18] Bowie and Carlos Alomar selected an initial list of songs for the tour, 35 of which they rehearsed for the tour.[1] 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.[3] The setlist for the tour was the basis for the track list for the 1989 box set Sound + Vision.[19] Some of Bowie's less well-known songs, such as "Joe the Lion" and "Wild Is the Wind" were performed only on early dates of the tour.[20]

David Bowie on stage during the 1983 tour

Various artists opened for Bowie across different legs, including UB40, Icehouse, The Tubes, The Beat and Peter Gabriel.[21] 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.[1]

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.[21] The show raised nearly £100,000 for charity (about £330,000 in today's currency), and was performed without the standard set.[21] The 13 July 1983 Montreal Forum performance was recorded and broadcast on American FM radio and other radio stations worldwide, and it was from this concert that the live version of "Modern Love" was recorded.[22] 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.[22] There were discussions to release a live CD from these performances as well, but that idea was later discarded.[22]

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.[22] Mick had only been asked to play the day before when he had been backstage at the previous night's show, and he later recalled:

I was playing Slick's guitar ... I had heard Slick play solos all night so I decided not to play solos and I just went out and thrashed the guitar. I really thrashed the guitar, I was waving the guitar above my head and all sorts of things. It was funny afterwards because David said, 'You should have seen [Earl Slick's] face...' meaning he looked petrified. I had his prize guitar and I was swinging it around my head and Slick's going 'Waaaa... watch my guitar', you know. I was banging into it and it was going round my head. Poor Slick. I mean, I didn't know it was his special guitar, I just thought it was a guitar, a lump of wood with six strings.[3]

The last show of the tour, on 8 December 1983, 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 (in Bangkok) and then performed the song on the final night of the tour as a tribute to their friend.[3]

David Bowie in a 1983 promotional picture

The tour was a commercial high point for Bowie, who found his new popularity perplexing. He later remarked that, with the success of Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight Tour, he lost track of who his fans were or what they wanted.[23] One critic would later call this tour his "most accessible" because "it had few props and one costume change, from peach suit to blue."[24]

"The 'Blond Ambition' tour, as we ended up calling it, in 1984 [sic] was pretty good," Bowie conceded in 2003. "We'd booked it before everything went huge and it really was quite innovative. It was the first big theatrical-show-type tour there had been. Madonna and Prince came to see it and it had an influence."[25]

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.[26]

Bowie specifically tried to avoid repeating the Serious Moonlight Tour's successful formula for his 1987 Glass Spider Tour.[27]

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.

• David Bowie – lead vocals, guitar, saxophone
• Earl Slick – guitar
• Carlos Alomar – guitar, backing vocals, music director
• Carmine Rojas – bass guitar
• Tony Thompson – drums, percussion
• Dave Lebolt – keyboards, synthesizers
• Steve Elson – saxophones
• Stan Harrison – saxophones, woodwinds
• Lenny Pickett – saxophones, woodwinds
• George Simms – backing vocals
• Frank Simms – backing vocals

• Buckley, David (2005) [1999]. Strange Fascination: The Definitive Biography of David Bowie (Revised ed.). Virgin Books. ISBN 9780753510025.
• Pegg, Nicholas (2016). The Complete David Bowie (Revised and updated ed.). London: Titan Books. ISBN 978-1-78565-365-0.