Serious Moonlight Tour
| Tour by David Bowie | |
 |
|
| Associated album | Let's Dance |
|---|---|
| Start date | 18 May 1983 |
| End date | 8 December 1983 |
| Legs | 8 |
| No. of shows | 96 |
| David Bowie concert chronology | |
The Serious Moonlight Tour was launched in May 1983 in support of David Bowie's album Let's Dance (1983). The tour opened at the Vorst Forest Nationaal, Brussels, on 18 May 1983 and ended in the Hong Kong Coliseum on 8 December 1983; 15 countries visited, 96 performances, and over 2.6M tickets sold. The tour garnered mostly favorable reviews from the press. It was, at the time, his longest, largest and most successful concert tour to date, although it has since been surpassed in length, attendance and gross revenue by subsequent Bowie tours.
The tour, designed to support Bowie's latest album Let's Dance, was initially designed to be a smaller tour, playing to the likes of sub-10,000-seat indoor venues around the world, similar to previous Bowie tours. However, the success of Let's Dance caused unexpectedly high demand for tickets: there were 250,000 requests for 44,000 tickets at one show, for example, and as a result the tour was changed to instead play in a variety of larger outdoor and festival-style venues. The largest crowd for a single show during the tour was 80,000 in Auckland, New Zealand, while the largest crowd for a festival date was 300,000 at the US 83 Festival in California. The tour sold out at every venue it played.
Bowie himself had a hand in the set design for the tour, which included giant columns (affectionately referred to as "condoms") as well as a large moon and a giant hand. The stage was deliberately given a vertical feeling (especially due to the columns) and an overall design that Bowie called a combination of classicism and modernism. The weight of one set (of which there were two) was 32 tons.
Bowie hired mostly musicians he'd used on his previous albums, though some of the musicians from his 1978 tour were re-hired for this tour, including Carlos Alomar, who was the designated band leader for the tour.Stevie Ray Vaughan, who had contributed guitar solos to six of the songs on Let's Dance and who was up and coming, was to join the tour, also to please the American audience. Vaughan showed up for rehearsals in Dallas in April (soundboard tapes from the rehearsals exist), but Vaughan showed up with a cocaine habit, a hard-partying wife and an entourage looking for easy access to drugs. Given that Bowie himself had moved to Berlin in the late 1970s to try and kick his own cocaine habit, Bowie and Vaughan's management failed to come to an agreement on how to temper the situation, and in the end Vaughan pulled out of the tour. Vaughan was replaced by longtime Bowie guitarist Earl Slick.
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