Image - Media Wales
On this day, 21 June 1987, rock legend David Bowie played Cardiff Arms Park on his Glass Spider tour.
Support was provided by Big Country and The Screaming Blue Messiahs.
David Bowie embarked on the The Glass Spider Tour in support of the album Never Let Me Down. The concert tour was the most ambitious by David Bowie surpassing the previous Serious Moonlight Tour in terms of audience figures and number of performances.
It has been estimated by the conclusion of the tour a total of three million people had attended beating his previous record set on the 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour.
Image - Media Wales
Setlist
Purple Haze
(The Jimi Hendrix Experience song)
Up the Hill Backwards
Glass Spider
Up the Hill Backwards
(Reprise)
Day-In Day-Out
Bang Bang
(Iggy Pop cover)
Absolute Beginners
Loving the Alien
China Girl
(Iggy Pop cover)
Fashion
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
All the Madmen
Never Let Me Down
Big Brother
Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family
'87 and Cry
"Heroes"
Time Will Crawl
Beat of Your Drum
Sons of the Silent Age
Dancing With the Big Boys
Zeroes
Let's Dance
Fame
The review
It was simply the biggest and best rock concert Wales has seen. A total of 50,000 people paid £750,000 to see a legend and it was worth every penny.
David Bowie, 40, fit and fantastic, sent the National Stadium in Cardiff wild with excitement with a set of hits, ancient and modern.
A taste of everything from Heroes from 1977 to Zeroes from his latest album, Never Let Me Down, echoed around a stadium more used to the hymns and arias of the rugby multitudes and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The goal posts at the East Terrace end were replaced with a vast stage enveloped by a giant spider which incorporated a series of looping and stretching antennae.
On either side masking the whole of the daunting 260- speaker cabinet sound system were huge scaffolding towers painted gold.
Suddenly the strains of the Hendrix classic Purple Haze, played incongruously on strings, broke the silence of expectation which had hushed the stadium.
Enter guitarist Carlos Alomar to evoke the huge spider to free its brood and a host of spider -dancers descend followed by the main man himself suspended in a silver throne, speaking on a telephone.
Clad in blood red Teddy-boy style suit he threw himself into new material – Glass Spider , Day In – Day Out – surrounded and almost submerged by superb dancers and video crew.
For Bang Bang, Bowie was joined by a Latin dancer, whose seemingly endless leg draped over his shoulder.
And all the while the spiders – now not of Mars – wound around the web of scaffolding, followed by the roving video cameras, which relayed the action to two giant screens either side of the stage.
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Tour band 1987 – The Glass Spider Tour
• David Bowie – vocals, guitar
• Peter Frampton – guitar, vocals
• Carlos Alomar – guitar, backing vocals, music director
• Carmine Rojas – bass guitar
• Alan Childs – drums
• Erdal Kızılçay – keyboards, trumpet, congas, violin, backing vocals
• Richard Cottle – keyboards, saxophone, tambourine, backing vocals
Tour dancers
• Melissa Hurley
• Constance Marie
• Spazz Attack (Craig Allen Rothwell)
• Viktor Manoel
• Stephen Nichols
• Toni Basil (choreography)
