dancing in the street
In 1996 the BBC screened a series of documentaries about the history of rock and roll called "Dancing In The Street". One episode was titled "Hang On To Yourself" and featured, amongst other things, a short piece on the Diamond Dogs tour. As well as the US TV ad for "Diamond Dogs", the programme mainly used live clips taken from the Cracked Actor documentary - "Moonage Daydream", "Time", "Space Oddity" and "Cracked Actor". However, it also featured the Diamond Dogs tour set creators - Jules Fisher and Mark Ravitz - who used a model of the set to demonstrate how it was designed to operate.
	Narrator: For his Diamond Dogs Tour of 1974, which took him right across the States, he reworked his old songs and image. Out went the make-up and stockings, in came nicely cut soul-boy suits.
	Mike Garson: When I played the tune "Time" during the Diamond Dogs Tour… was a very theatrical tour and the band was actually in the pit… it was very much like taking a musical Broadway on the road… a show on the road. And it had a 1920's and 30's setting feel and I played like a swing-style piano… stride music it was called, in fact, with avant-garde touching.
	Narrator: The new ingredient that really started to help sell Bowie on his return to America was his revolutionary use of a full stage set. Bands had used light shows before, but this was the first time a rock star had gone to a team of Broadway designers.
	Jules Fisher: There were four towers that were the basis of the design and they were made of newsprint that could be torn apart. So Bowie actually climbed one of these towers and destroyed the building during the concert. There was also a bridge across here and during the concert the bridge lowered down to the stage so that he could step off of it and sing downstage and at the end it raised up again. And a cherry-picker arm. There was a door that opened up and this cherry-picker arm came forward and went… extended out over the first six rows of the audience.
	David Bowie: The first time a cherry-picker, I think - subsequently used by many others - was used in rock and roll… was standing upright like that with an office chair on top and it was set in the window of a skyscraper. And I was sitting on the office chair… on a telephone like some kind of male secretary. And the cherry-picker started coming out and it went out… and it went out forty foot over the audience's heads. And because of the beautiful lighting that we had you didn't see the rest of the cherry-picker, you only saw the office chair suspended out there. The end of the song finished, I put the telephone back into its cradle but the bloody thing didn't go back. So, I was just stuck out there and I thought, "What the hell do I do out here?" And the next song started so I think I did about three or four songs on this chair just… I thought, "What am I going to do when the show finishes? I can't go anywhere! I'm going to have to jump! They'd better catch me!" I thought, "No, Iggy's already done that!"
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