Ziggy Stardust Tour

Ziggy Stardust Tour

The Ziggy Stardust Tour was a concert tour by David Bowie during 1972–73. Bowie was accompanied by his backing group, the Spiders from Mars, and integrated choreography, costumes and make-up into the live shows. The tour lasted a year and a half and included three legs in the UK, two in the US and one in Japan.

About Ziggy Stardust Tour in brief

Summary Ziggy Stardust TourThe Ziggy Stardust Tour was a concert tour by David Bowie during 1972–73. Bowie was accompanied by his backing group, the Spiders from Mars, and integrated choreography, costumes and make-up into the live shows. The tour lasted a year and a half and included three legs in the UK, two in the US and one in Japan. It moved from small pub and club gigs at the beginning, to highly publicised sold-out shows at the end. At the tour’s last gig at the Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973, Bowie shocked fans by announcing that it was the last show he would do with the Spider from Mars. Bowie’s management spent USD 25,000 to fly them, along with US representatives of their record label RCA Records, to preview his live work before starting a major US tour that autumn.

The concerts drew rave reviews from the press and led to the tour being extended for a further two months. A concert on 20 October 1974 was broadcast on radio, heavily bootlegged before being released in 1994. The press coverage of the tour turned Bowie into a star in the U.S. and he was featured on the front cover of Rolling Stone The year after the tour ended. Bowie asked the audience to bring toys along to the concert that could be redistributed to the children before Christmas, and asked his friend Geoffrey MacCormack to be the musical line-up on the UK leg of 1973. The first leg of the US opened in September 1972. Bowie travelled to the US by boat as he did not like flying.