Product: Ziggy Stardust [VHS]
Rating: 4.0
The dust is there but the stars have disappeared
David Bowie is a myth. A myth in the cinema and in music. He systematically played on sexual roles and he tried to look like a woman and yet be a man. This concert in Hammersmith in London shows this choice rather well in the way he dresses, he has his face made-up and he behaves on stage. The backstage scenes are not really interesting and the sequences on the audience are plainly uninteresting. The latter concentrates on girls and women as if David Bowie was a model to them : their makeup, their dresses, their hair and head-dresses, etc. But their behavior is banal and even very standard for many concerts of this type, without any frenzy. There remains the music. It is rock and roll from an older period, the seventies and the eighties. It is very rhythmic, very melodious and even at times mesmerizing, but it does not have any of the power and even violence we have become used to since then. In one word it is very moderate, though definitely charming in the melodious and harmonic arrangements. Yet the remastering must have changed a few things because I seem to remember that music as being more aggressive and more feeling-raking. David Bowie acting on the stage is rather simple though effective : he shows his shaved legs in an enticing way but we do regret the lack or loss of the hermaphrodite and ambiguous signals and messages of old. David Bowie must have aged and he has followed the politically-correct evolution of the stage. In other words, in this gay-proud period of ours, he seems to wish not to show anything that could push him into that gay territory. He did not hesitate when it was by far nor recommended but now he seems to establish a distance between this new era and him, hence the emphasis on girls and women in the audience and on girls and women in the bachstage scenes. The myth has suffered with time because it has been edited and even rewritten. So, close your eyes and dream : when he sings of his love for an unnamed you we can reconstruct the vision of old and the impression we experienced then : he is talking to any you , female or male. But the visual show does not indeed. And the extras of the DVD are far ftrom being an enlarging approach of the character : we would have liked some more materials about his films and about his performance as a musician. But none of these here.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU