David Bowie 2nd July 1983 Milton Keynes Bowl Serious Moonlight: Lets Dance!

David Bowie 2nd July 1983 Milton Keynes Bowl Serious Moonlight
Support Acts: The Beat, Icehouse
By 1983 David Bowie was of sufficient stature to play three nights at the Milton Keynes Bowl, which holds 65,000 people. The (quite colourful) ticket (see right) doesn’t tell me which day I attended, but I am pretty certain it was the Saturday, which was the second of the three gigs. My mate and I drove to Milton Keynes, which is around a 450 mile round trip. I’d been having problems with one of the brakes on my car, and unfortunately it just about locked after after around 100 miles, to the extent that I could only drive very slowly, leaving us stranded near the Wetherby roundabout. I phoned the AA who came out but could fix the car at the road side, so they told me to leave the car in a local car park, hide the keys in an agreed spot (!) and that they would come and pick it up and take it home for me. We were determined to get to the gig, so I phoned my dad, who drove down, picked us up an hour or so later and drove us to the Bowl.
I remember the day as being red hot; I recall little about the support acts, other than they were not that impressive. This was, in my view, not one of Bowie’s best performances. Bowie’s approach to the songs, and the band set up, was moving him away from being a rock star to becoming an all round singer/entertainer and broaden his audience. This worked in terms of making his music more accessible to a general audience, but lost something else along the way.
Although I enjoyed the show, I felt I’d lost the David Bowie I’d grown to love over the past 10 years. Don’t get me wrong; you couldn’t fault anything: the stage set, the performance, the band were all great. But it was David Bowie becoming an entertainer, a professional, (re)becoming Anthony Newley in terms of aiming for broad appeal; and Ziggy had become a memory. Although general consensus is that this was a great gig, I left somewhat disappointed, feeling let down. Two years later I saw Bowie in Wembley Stadium at Live Aid, and he was great again. However, there were further disappointments to come in the form of the 1987 Glass Spider tour (which I will comment on tomorrow) and Tin Machine (see my blog the other day).
After the gig we managed to find my dad who had been waiting in a local pub, having a pie and a coffee, and he drove us home. We must have got back around 4am, I would guess. The next morning my car was delivered to our house (thank you AA); I took it to the garage the next day to be repaired.
Setlist: Star; Heroes; What in the World; Golden Years; Fashion; Let’s Dance; Breaking Glass; Life on Mars?; Sorrow; Cat People; China Girl; Scary Monsters; Rebel Rebel; White Light/White Heat; Station to Station; Cracked Actor; Ashes to Ashes; Space Oddity; Young Americans; TVC15; Fame; Stay; The Jean Genie; Modern Love