It’s a thin line between the cool and the ridiculous. As Eddie Izzard explains it – a guy leaning against a wall with a cocktail stick between his teeth is cool, whereas a guy leaning against a wall with two cocktail sticks between his teeth is ridiculous. Similarly in music the divide between the chic and the shocking – Ziggy and Alvin Stardust – is as thin as heavily applied eye-liner. However, and here’s the rub kids, this line is rubbed out and redrawn again and again by the one type of person you should never take completely seriously: the Music Critic.
And so, if you have an Andy Williams CD, you’re cool, but if it’s Johnny Mathis, well that’s just a bit lame, isn’t it? And if you are into soft rock’s great Trojan horse, The Darkness, then you are knowing and post-modern whereas a Mr. Big album will get you ten years to life from the fashion police.
And music critics are cynically fickle, so while they may scorn one artist one moment, there will inevitably come a day (decided on by a combination of planetary alignment and bowel movements) when they suddenly feel they can get more professional mileage out of championing them.
And so this review is an exhortation to the reader not to waste time waiting for painfully trendy people to decide when it’s acceptable to like something, and instead to indulge themselves in one of rock’s great gigs.
The Serious Moonlight Tour DVD was filmed in Vancouver in 1983 and includes 21 tracks that span Bowie’s work up to (and including) the Niles Rodgers produced Let’s Dance album. And it’s Bowie at his showy best.
What we have is the circus; the lights, the costumes, the black-edged romanticism of it all. And, supremely, we have the songs –and what songs – Bowie swaggers and hipsways through columns of light, summoning up tracks as wondrous as ‘Heroes’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Golden Years’.
Musically, it’s all so sumptuous – dogfighting guitars, a gothic Mardi Gras of horn arrangements, and Bowie’s vocals, leaping and lunging like Chinese dragons. Visually, too, it’s something of a feast. Bowie’s pre-fame days spent with the Lindsey Kemp mime group helped create one of the most mesmerizing and fluid performers in any artistic field, and with each song here, he creates micro-movies of gesture and expression that invite parody and awe in equal measure.
Although the DVD comes across as a best of set (‘Fashion’, ‘Space Oddity’, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ etc) this concert was to promote the mega selling Let’s Dance album and as such it’s a heady slice of 80’s styles. Viewers should therefore be warned that our hero sports pastel suits with shoulder pads whilst backing musicians cavort around in safari suits, Nehru jackets and fedoras.
Right now, the 80’s are the decade du jour, its fashions held up to affectionate ridicule and Serious Moonlight is almost a distillation of its heroically camp aesthetics. This means that ironically, Bowie’s most commercially successful foray into the mainstream now comes across as kitsch and other-worldly as Ziggy Stardust ever did. But it’s as downright wonderful, too.
And so, in the spirit of one of rock’s great individualists, why not feel free to enjoy this great concert (with a documentary on the Far East leg of the tour included on the DVD) without waiting for permission from the fashion police?