David Bowie’s Reality Tour travelled the world in 2003 and 2004. A DVD was shot in Dublin over the course of November 22nd and 23rd 2003. This dvd has been available since October of 2004. But since Bowie is now pretty much retired after suffering a heart attack during the Reality Tour (his final tour to date) they just recently released a CD version as well as digital versions.
You can preview the tracks using the handy Amazon widget:
This newly released audio only version includes 3 additional songs: Fall Dogs Bomb The Moon, Breaking Glass, and China Girl. I personally attended The Reality Tour when it hit NYC and can tell you that it was a great show. The set is both a compilation of greatest hits with a bunch of new songs from the new Reality album. Reality unfortunately wasn’t a huge hit. I still defend it though as it has some pretty good songs on it. But even if you skip over those you still have a live show featuring tons of great classic material for a pretty good price.
This post is the beginning of a new series here at Media Decay that will be almost like a recommendation area for concerts. Basically it’s writeups of some particularly special concerts I’ve either attended or heard. One feature of these is that I’m going to do my best to include at least some audio from the shows in these posts, although if a show is available commercially this will be more complex. I hope you enjoy the first installment of this series and come back for more. It should be monthly. Click a song title to stream that song.
The first installment is all about David Bowie. A consummate showman and the definition of rock star, I’ve managed to see him live twice before he retired from music (if you didn’t know Bowie is retired from music due to his heart being fucked). The very first time I got to see him was this show, perhaps the best concert I have ever experienced (and I’ve been to a lot of concerts).
The date was January 9th 1997. The place NYC’s legendary Madison Square Garden where many years before Bowie had already put on one of the greatest shows of all time that would be released as the movie Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars. This show was to celebrate the legendary rocker turning 50 (his actual birthday was the 8th). As a way to celebrate this milestone he decided that he wanted to share the stage with acts that he’d influenced and who had influenced him in return. We’ll get to who exactly that was in a minute.
Bandslam is a film about a high school kid named Will (Gaelan Connell) who’s entire life is about music but has no one to share that passion with. This all changes when he moves to New Jersey and his new high school is crazy about this competition called “Band Slam”, a battle of the bands where the winner receives a record deal. He winds up managing the new band of one of the coolest girls in the school (Aly Michalka) while falling for another girl (Vanessa Hudgens) with hidden musical talents of her own.
The big problem with this film is firmly in it’s marketing. I barely payed any attention when this was released in August. I couldn’t care less. It looked like a High School Musical knock-off and even featured one of the stars of HSM. As a 26 year old I could care less about that kind of stuff. So I wrote this off, as did lots of other people because this made no money, despite Vanessa Hudgens and Aly Michalka who through the internet I’ve learned is in a somewhat popular band Aly & AJ. However bored on a Friday night with nothing better to do I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised.
