Serious Moonlight Tour

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.

Set design

Bowie himself had a hand in the set design for the tour, which included giant columns (affectionately referred to as "condoms") as well as a large moon and a giant hand. The 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.

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 (soundboard tapes from the rehearsals exist), 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

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.

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". 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:

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.

The last show of the tour (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.

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 November 26 show in Auckland became – at the time – the most attended concert in the Southern Hemisphere with over 80,000 people in attendance.

Setlist

This is the setlist from the performance of Pacific Coliseum, Vancouver, Canada, 12 September 1983.

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 (Putting Out Fire)"
11. "China Girl"
12. "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)"
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:

1. "Star"
2. "Stay"
3. "The Jean Genie"

Encore 2:

1. "Modern Love"

Personnel