Toronto Globe Mail - 17 June 1974
David Bowie gives weekend of rock a stunning finale David Bowie’s concert at O’Keefe Centre last night was the most spectacular rock show I have ever seen. So spectacular, in fact, that the music in this first of two concerts was almost lost in the sets, lights, costumes and machinery. Virtually all of the 20 songs in Bowie’s set, which lasted over an hour and a half without intermission, were really mini-drama, three-to-five minute stories told in song, dance, mime and special effects. Some examples: The set itself (and it is a complete set, not just a few gigantic props of the sort Yes showed up with on its last time through Toronto) is a disintegrating metropolis called Hunger City. Speakers and lights are concealed by crumbling skyscrapers dripping huge globules of slag. A catwalk 20 feet above the stage became a bridge on which Bowie, standing under a dirty yellow streetlight, sang Sweet Things, a sad ballad of homosexual cruising. For Space Oddity, Bowie playing out the doomed Major Tom, swung out from a tower in a cantilevered chair on a hydraulic boom that had him, at one point, sitting almost over the first row. He sang Big Brother from the top of what looked like a space capsule. It then opened up into a mirrored room with floor-to-ceiling black lights and a huge hand that folded out into a staircase.	In addition to machines, Bowie used props like chairs for Jean Genie and a rope for Diamond Dogs. His dogs were Warren Peace and Gui Andrisano, who sang back-up vocals, danced, mimed and shuffled props microphones around for Bowie with machine-like precision. Everything about the show was precise. Attention to detail showed in little things like the fact that Bowie sang Space Oddity into a telephone rather than a standard microphone. In Cracked Actor Bowie was to have his face powdered off. The puff was right at hand. Nothing was ever misplaced. The whole show was carefully rehearsed and well it might be. The choreography alone was more complex than that in many roadshow musicals I have seen. Not to mention the batteries of extra stage lights including three movable spotlights on top of the towers as well as the four standard spots at the back of the hall. The sound quality was good. Bowie’s seven-piece band was good, and Bowie himself in a powder-blue modified zoot suit was amazing. He has the moves of a trained actor and the assurance of a star, a star in the old show-biz sense rather than the rock’n’roll one. A trouper who entertains with everything he can bring to bear on an audience. But what of the music – since is supposedly the point of the exercise? It’s up and down. Moonage Daydream and Drive-in Saturday are weak numbers but, unless you’re listening carefully, you won’t notice that fact. Bowie carries his poorer efforts on the strength of his stage presentation. ROBERT MARTIN
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