Sound+Vision Tour - Tour History

Tour History

The impetus for the tour was EMI and Rykodisc being keen for Bowie to promote his back-catalogue re-issue programme that had started in 1989 with the release of the Sound and Vision box set.

It was stated that Bowie would never perform these greatest hits on tour again. Bowie said "knowing I won't ever have those songs to rely on again spurs me to keep doing new things, which is good for an artist." He looked forward to retiring his old songs, stating:

It's time to put about 30 or 40 songs to bed and it's my intention that this will be the last time I'll ever do those songs completely, because if I want to make a break from what I've done up until now, I've got to make it concise and not have it as a habit to drop back into. It's so easy to kind of keep going on and saying, well, you can rely on those songs, you can rely on that to have a career or something, and I'm not sure I want that. —March 1990

He would state in another contemporary interview that "I want to finish off that old phase and start again. By the time I'm in my later forties, I will have built up a whole new repertoire."

It has been noted that Bowie is "famous" for claiming retirement in the past, so many critics and observers did not fully believe Bowie when he said he would not play these songs again.

It was also announced that the set-list for any given performance of the tour would be partially determined by the most popular titles logged in a telephone poll (by calling the number 1-900-2-BOWIE-90), and mail-in ballots were made available to vote by in territories where telephone technology was not available. Bowie did in fact build the tour's setlist from calls to the phone number from all over the world, saying "What I ended up doing was taking about seven or eight from England, another seven or eight from the rest of Europe and the rest I made up from America so it's a good sampling of what everybody wanted in all the continents." The first shows of the tour held in March 1990 in Canada were performed before any telephone polls were completed, leading Bowie to guess at the list of songs the audience wanted to hear. In the US, the songs "Fame," "Let's Dance" and "Changes" topped the list of songs requested by fans, while in Europe the songs "Heroes" and "Blue Jean" were the leaders.

The NME in response to the telephone poll ran a spoof campaign, Just Say Gnome, in an effort to have "The Laughing Gnome" included in the set-lists. Bowie had considered playing "The Laughing Gnome" "in the style of the Velvets or something" until he found out the voting had been perpetrated by the music magazine.

Bowie spent the early few months of 1990 preparing for the tour in a rehearsal hall on Manhattan's west side.

After the tour, Bowie returned to his band Tin Machine for their second album.