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DAVID BOWIE - A Reality Tour
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Written by Mark Reed
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Monday, 01 February 2010
The future of the past
With Bowie in a virtual retirement and who can blame him the thin great white duke, or whatever guise he has entered now has become what he never previously entertained, a retrospective, a nostalgia show. This his umpteenth reissue of recent years, plugs the alleged gap in his oeuvre with yet another concert album. (Hot on the heels of Santa Monica 72 and VH1 Storytellers).
A Reality Tour is the audio document of his final tour. In its bluntest form, its nothing more and nothing less than an audio port of the DVD of the same with three extra songs appended at the end. And since (aside from a rudderless 80s) Bowie never truly went through a fallow period, its an artistically valid albeit belated and baffling release that seems motivated largely by a desire to keep the Bowie Gravy Train rolling than anything else.
By 2003, Bowie, having reached his late fifties, had reclined into the elder statesmen role the final phase of his career being a leather jacketed, lean old man, thankfully avoiding the clichιs of Growing Old Disgracefully. Whilst there were areas he brushed over, such as 1987s Never Let Me Down, he seemed a man at peace with his body of work and appreciative of many parts of it.
Thus, dispensing with the acrid taste of nostalgia, Bowie covers all bases of his career from an opening Rebel, Rebel(with a little too much cowbell) to the final Reality (represented by five songs.. five songs more than most artists play from their latest album on tour these days). And whilst popular conception is that Bowie was on the wane at the end of his career, this is nonsense. He was one of the few of that generation (alongside Pink Floyd, and not much else) that remained consistently alert and alive.
So
the Bowie Pension Fund motive aside, A Reality Tour is a worthy and valid live package, containing 32 songs from Bowies final concert run, and whilst it seems that he may be, to all intents and purposes, dormant now and who can blame him? this is proof that to the end, Bowie was, at all points, both moving himself to new places, and moving us to a different place with him. Reality is often underwhelming and disappointing : not Bowies Reality.Only registered users can write comments.
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