A collection of previously unseen footage of David Bowie performing ‘Starman’ during the Ziggy Stardust tour has been uncovered. Check it out below.
In 2019, footage of Bowie’s first TV appearance as Ziggy Stardust was unearthed after it was presumed lost for 47 years. The clip saw the late singer make his debut as his new and most legendary incarnation on ITV’s Lift Off with Ayshea – a month before his now iconic Top Of The Pops appearance.
It was feared that the footage would never be seen again, as it was not stored by the station. However, the performance was recorded by one viewer and was found on an old computer tape five years ago, before later being included in the BBC documentary David Bowie: The First Five Years – Finding Fame.
Now, further footage has been uncovered from that era for fans to see for the first time.
The newly-shared video comes from the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ UK tour that took place between 1972 and 1973 and was filmed by late Bowie collaborator and photographer Mick Rock.
Parlophone Records released the new compilation of tour clips in celebration of the first-ever Dolby Atmos spatial audio version of Bowie’s seminal 1972 album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. The new mix of the album will be available on Blu-Ray Audio on September 6, and you can pre-order it here.
You can check out the footage, alongside a new mix of ‘Starman’, below.
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Earlier this month, Bowie’s widow Iman shared images of a previously unseen painting that the musician created in 2014.
In other Bowie news, his 1974 album ‘Diamond Dogs’ was reissued in May to mark its 50th anniversary. The album, made in the absence of regular guitarist Mick Ronson, saw Bowie taking the lead on the instrument himself, and was made in the aftermath of his failed attempts to adapt Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and a project based on the writing of William S. Burroughs.
Another gem from the Bowie archive was made available for Record Store Day this year in the form of ‘Waiting In The Sky (Before The Starman Came To Earth), a collection of recordings from Trident Studios in 1971 of songs that would go on to form the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ album a year later.
In April, long-time Bowie collaborator Brian Eno spoke about the “powerful” experience of reworking their song ‘Get Real’ for a new climate change-inspired album project ‘Sounds Right’.
A street in Paris was also named after the singer at the start of the year, while one of his handwritten lyric sheets was estimated to fetch up to £100,000 at auction.
In other news, music PR legend Alan Edwards recently told NME how Bowie used to disguise himself in public during the height of his commercial success.
“He told me his secret to not being recognised was to wear a cloth cap and have a Greek newspaper under his arm. That way if anyone ever questioned whether it was him, they’d look closer and think, ‘Well it can’t be… he’s obviously Greek’,” Edwards said.