David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 7: In Concert, Milton Keynes National Bowl, Milton Keynes, Britain, 8-5-1990

I had previously posted six albums of David Bowie performing for the BBC, from the years 1967 to 1980. I had thought I was done with his BBC material, since I'm not a big fan of his music after the mid-1980s. But then I came across this concert broadcast on BBC radio in 1990, and couldn't resist posting it.

In 1987, put out the album "Never Let Me Down," which wasn't well received. He supported it with a worldwide"Glass Spider" concert tour, which was criticized as overblown and pretentious. He regrouped in 1988 with a new band, Tin Machine, that had a very different sound. However, while this band's first album had a better critical reception, its sales were disappointing. In 1990, his record company put out a career spanning box set called "Sound + Vision." Bowie decided to take a break from his Tin Machine band and put on a world tour to promote the box set. 

He famously and repeatedly claimed that he would use this tour to exclusively play his older hits, and then would retire them. However, the claim wasn't entirely true. He did retire some of his songs, such as "Space Oddity" and "Young Americans." And from this point on, he tended to play lesser known songs from his back catalog more often. But he did play many of his older hits on subsequent tours. In any case, those claims helped fill the seats, causing most of the concerts to sell out. 

To make a long story short, this concert (and the tour as a whole) is a great selection of his favorite songs from his entire music career up until that point. He didn't play any songs from his 1987 album "Never Let Me Down," nor did he play any Tin Machine songs. But guitarist Adrian Belew was in the tour band (which consisted of just five musicians, in contrast to a much bigger sound for the Glass Spider tour). Bowie wrote and sang lead on a song off Belew's 1990 album "Young Lions," and Bowie sang that sole new song in this concert.

Normally, BBC broadcast recordings are pretty close to flawless. But this one had a serious flaw: Bowie's vocals were relatively low in the mix. Happily, that was something I could fix, thanks to audio editing programs like X-Minus. I used that program to boost his vocals on every song here. I didn't feel the need to add "[Edit]" to the titles of all the songs, since the treatment was the same for all the songs. But you will find that one on song, "Station to Station," because that song had an additional problem. There was a section above five seconds long in the middle of the song that was missing. Luckily, it was in a place that was repeated elsewhere, so I fixed it by patching in a section from elsewhere in the song.

Other than "Pretty Pink Rose" there aren't really any surprises here, since it's a greatest hits type show. But he did perform the Them hit "Gloria" as part of a medley with "The Jean Genie." He never officially released his version of that song.

I understand that this show took place in front of an audience of 60,000 people during a summer heat wave. Many suffered from dehydration, sunburn, and heat exhaustion. However, you can't tell that at all just listening to this recording.

This concert is an hour and 47 minutes long.

01 Space Oddity (David Bowie)
02 Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
03 Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)
04 Fashion (David Bowie)
05 talk (David Bowie)
06 Life on Mars (David Bowie)
07 talk (David Bowie)
08 Pretty Pink Rose (David Bowie)
09 Sound and Vision (David Bowie)
10 Blue Jean (David Bowie)
11 Let's Dance (David Bowie)
12 Stay (David Bowie)
13 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
14 China Girl (David Bowie)
15 Station to Station [Edit] (David Bowie)
16 Young Americans (David Bowie)
17 Suffragette City (David Bowie)
18 Fame (David Bowie)
19 'Heroes' (David Bowie)
20 Changes (David Bowie)
21 The Jean Genie - Gloria (David Bowie)
22 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie)
23 Modern Love (David Bowie)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dznSB

The photo chosen for the cover is the only high-resolution one I could find where I was 100% sure it came from this exact concert. So I used it, even though it's a bit odd with his hands on his face.