Cracked Actor - A Film About David Bowie

 

I'm currently reading a book about Bowie (more on that soon) and it has made me look up a few things that I was not familiar with previously, including a clip of Peter Noone singing "Oh You Pretty Things" (fairly surreal) and this documentary, which escaped me at the time - and ever since, until now! (Although I'm sure I've seen some clips, at least, here'n'there.)

This is somewhat a documentation of the Young Americans tour, although the music that it highlights is his previous work, played with the updated band, which means that it is not as rockin' as it was with the Spiders and the presentation is more theatrical. I never saw him live, so I've had to rely on videos, but for one thing, I didn't realize that on this tour he would lip-sync (as opposed to playing live, as he did with the Spiders) "Space Oddity" while sitting on a crane that was going over the heads of the crowd!

He is interviewed, as well, and while the book says he was blasted out of his mind on cocaine, he doesn't come off too badly, and he is well spoken, overall, if a bit pretentious, which is his thing, in a way. I mean, he references Hamlet in one of his song performances here, for crissakes...

It is kinda funny how when they show the audience, so many of them are truly plain'n'normal looking and only a handful dressed up. The hype would make it sound like the entire crowd looked like Ziggy when in fact it was just a few. But Ziggy hangs over everything and when they show clips from the Ziggy concerts it just shows how much better those performances were than his lackluster "thin white duke" gigs.

I believe that this doc was done in order to advertise Bowie's latest character, but unfortunately, it just shows a watered down, kinda TV variety-show version of a once great rock'n'roll star. While his Ziggy costumes were wilder, the Ziggy concert was a rock'n'roll show, with a red-hot, hard rock band (that was very capable of playing ballads, when needed) but this line-up seems to just be session musicians playing it safe'n'clean and frankly, fairly boring. I wish I had seen Ziggy, but I'm sure I would have been disappointed with this show.