David Bowie, Ringo Starr and their hair, relaxing back stage.
Omg I’ve never seen this before
This is from a remarkable 1974 BBC documentary called Cracked Actor. They re-run it every so often, but it’s also available online if you poke around a bit. By far the best documentation (and really, darn near the ONLY documentation) we have of one of the artistically ambitious tours undertaken by anyone to date, very quickly stripped down soon after this as David turned the corner from glam to soul. He was clearly having a bit of trouble personally, and the interviews are difficult to watch, but my god, the performances are stunning.
There’s also a bit from Ziggy’s final show (D.A. Pennebaker’s famous footage), as well as a few other shows on this tour, and for my money, 1974 really is where all pieces started coming together, as David leaves the intentional fakery of Ziggy, and Ziggy’s musically conservative, retro vibe behind to become something truly new.
Here’s part 1 of Cracked Actor, noting again that if you can’t see this in your territory or if it gets taken down, just keep poking around (including beyond YouTube). It’s out there, I promise, in every sense of that phrase, and worth every bit of effort to track it down.
