On 23rd January 1990, David Bowie announced his Sound And Vision world tour. This tour would run from March 4th until September 29th that year. During the tour, he invited each local audience to decide on a ‘greatest hits’ running order. This was organised through local radio stations. The tour surpassed Bowie’s previous Serious Moonlight (1983) and Glass Spider (1987) tours’ statistics. It visited 27 countries. The tour included a total of 108 performances.
At the time Bowie looked forward to retiring his old hits. He said of the tour “It’s time to put about 30 or 40 songs to bed and it’s my intention that this will be the last time I’ll ever do those songs completely, because if I want to make a break from what I’ve done up until now, I’ve got to make it concise and not have it as a habit to drop back into. It’s so easy to kind of keep going on and saying, well, you can rely on those songs, you can rely on that to have a career or something, and I’m not sure I want that.” Having seen him a few times after the Sound and Vision tour he didn’t entirely retire all of them!
Cheekily and rather amusingly the NME ran a spoof campaign, in response to the telephone poll called ‘Just Say Gnome’. This was a great attempt to have “The Laughing Gnome” included in the set-lists. Apparently Bowie had considered playing “The Laughing Gnome” in the style of The Velvet Underground until he found out the voting had been perpetrated by the NME. Hearing it played that way would have been quite interesting in my opinion. As a footnote, during his A Reality Tour, Bowie performed “The Laughing Gnome” with his band during a November 2003 soundcheck at Wembley Stadium.
I saw him on that tour at the Milton Keynes Bowl on 4th August. The set list that day was:
“Space Oddity”
“Rebel Rebel”
“Ashes to Ashes”
“Fashion”
“Life on Mars?”
“Pretty Pink Rose”
“Sound and Vision”
“Blue Jean”
“Let’s Dance”
“Stay”
“Ziggy Stardust”
“China Girl”
“Station to Station”
“Young Americans”
“Suffragette City”
“Fame”
“Heroes”
The four song encore consisted of:
“Changes”
“The Jean Genie”
“White Light/White Heat”
“Modern Love”
The support acts that day were Two Way Street (whatever happened to them?), The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Gene Loves Jezebel and Kim Wilde.
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