Stand and Deliver!

Last week the Sydney edition of MX - a bastion of journalism - threw up as its 'music memory' the day Bowie announced his Sound+Vision world…ish tour:

January 23, 1990

David Bowie announced his Sound+Vision tour during which he invited each local audience to decide on a "greatest hits" running order, organised through local radio stations. The tour spanned five continents in seven months.

What Sydney MX failed to tell you was… well, it was a lot.

See, cos I do remember the Sound+Vision tour of 1990. I don't remember what the five continents were in those seven months. What I do remember is that Australia wasn't one of them.

Sound+Vision - in addition to being a great song, and single, from the album Low - was also an excellent boxed set spanning Bowie's career and featuring a wealth of unreleased tracks and alternate mixes along with greatest hits, delivered chronologically, across a bunch of discs. Sound+Visioncame out in time for Christmas 1989 (I was working in a music shop at the time; I remember the arvo the order arrived in the store. Very exciting.) Makes sense there'd be a world tour behind it - a 'greatest hits of my life'. (There was a later edition of the boxed set, that took it up to the end of the next decade… that's another story for another blogpost.)

It kick-started a furious Bowie re-issue campaign in which his albums were reissued on CD, lovingly remastered with bonus tracks and excellent booklets, often reproducing original artwork (the 'dress cover' of Man Who Sold the World , for example).

I remember vividly the disappointment I felt knowing Bowie wasn't heading downunder for the Sound+Vision tour. I'd only seen Bowie live once: the Glass Spider Tour a few years earlier. The Sound+Vision tour was putting a bit of distance between itself and that.

As I wasn't going to see Bowie live in 1990, I felt totally justified in splurging on a bootleg album from that tour: Sound + Vision Japan 90. I bought it from Red Eye Records in the city.

David Bowie: Sound + Vision Japan 90 bootleg vinyl cover art

It was a double album with both records in the one sleeve - no gatefold for those bootleggers, even if they did actually go to the trouble of printing labels Not all bootleg records come with labels; rarely so stylish, that's for sure. The bootleggers were going to some effort to draw from official cannon with this apocryphal release.

So back to MX from last week: I don't think the editors remember much about the Sound+Vision Tour of 1990. Because they've used a photo of Bowie from the wrong period. That's the thing about David Bowie: he changes image regularly. You can match photo of him to the time it was taken fairly easily. And that's the thing about News Ltd: with such an extensive database, if they wanted to, they could have got it right. Talk about Bowie in 1990? Find a photo of Bowie from 1990. Oh, you know, maybe employ someone who'll know the difference.

The Bowie image in the above clipping isn't from Sound+Vision 1990; it's from around the mid-t0-late-’90s - before the Reality tour, after Outside (or 1. Outside to give it its correct name; 1. Outside: The Nathan Adler Diaries if we're being pedantic). But I'm disingenuously being vague. Any fan worth their weight in Bowie Bonds knows it's from the tour that followed the Earthling album.

Still, good on 'em for trying.