David Bowie - Welcome To The Blackout (Live London '78)

David Bowie always moved in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform, and few machinations were weirder than this blast of greatness: a stunning live album taped 45 years ago but shelved for the subsequent four and a half decades. Welcome To The Blackout was recorded during two Earls Court shows in the summer of 1978 on Bowie’s Isolar II Tour, more usually known as the Low/“Heroes” Tour. After a limited-edition 3LP vinyl edition became Record Store Day’s best-selling item this April, we now have this 2CD release.

After nearly expiring from his Los Angeles cocaine madness, Bowie had fled to Berlin with Iggy Pop and was by ‘78 two-thirds of the way through his Low/”Heroes”/Lodger trilogy of albums with Brian Eno. Eno was also meant to helm the band on the Isolar II world tour but had to drop out on health grounds, leaving the rejigged band just two weeks to rehearse under the tutelage of Bowie’s sideman, Carlos Alomar. It didn’t show. On Welcome To The Blackout they sound slick, fierce and formidable. The tour set list naturally drew heavily on Low and “Heroes” and was thus elevated by the stark, bleak brilliance of both albums. After the portentous opening dirge of Warszawa, an extended, six-minute roust through “Heroes” is a thrill; rarefied New Wave pop before the term even existed.

Bowie is in superb voice throughout, an imperious benign musical dictator dry drawling his way through Be My Wife and the arid funk of Low’s Speed Of Life. The perennial cracked actor, he gives a masterful impersonation of jittery paranoia on a version of Breaking Glass that ends when you are willing it to go on. For all of his arty obliqueness, Bowie was always a canny crowd-pleaser, and his post-interval tour set list boasted an impeccable run of six tracks from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: Five Years, Soul Love, Star, Hang On To Yourself, Ziggy Stardust and Suffragette City. It all showcased a recovering genius on top of his game. The closing TVC15 and Rebel Rebel are pop sacred texts, and – best of all – Welcome To The Blackout is a live album that doesn’t sound like one: producer Tony Visconti ruthlessly excised all of the crowd noise from proceedings. Well worth the wait.

Ripped to double CD package in FLAC

So Blackout is of a piece with Stage the double-album that captured parts of Bowie’s Isolar II tour putting all squabbles aside, Welcome to the Blackout is a triumph. It captures a couple of gigs two months further on than Stage in the Isolar II tour, so Bowie’s voice is, at times, a little more worn. But it’s also far more visceral and fleshy and real-sounding. Of course, there’s still the cool remoteness that some feel spoiled Stage, most notably in the tracks from Low and Heroes, the albums Bowie was touring behind. But those songs are meant to sound chilly. An exception is ‘Be My Wife’ which, on Low, is performed with a depressive detachment but here sounds warm and practically sincere, especially for an artist who almost always managed to avoid being earnest. Overall, there’s more energy and a greater sense of the artist and band being at ease. The crowd noise isn’t mixed so far back, so there’s a more pronounced feeling of this being an event. “Heroes” sounds absolutely terrific; more thrilling than in it studio iteration. “Jean Genie” is considerably more vigorous here than in its Stage counterpart. In fact, track for track, Welcome to the Blackout betters its rival. While it has a very similar running order and track-list to Stage, it also boasts songs that didn’t appear on that album, even in its augmented guise. These are: “Sound and Vision” and “Rebel Rebel”. During the intro to the former, Bowie even says what sounds like, “here’s one we haven’t done before”, which goes some way towards explaining why it’s a rather looser, less streamlined performance than the others.

Originally released as a Record Store Day exclusive in April 2018 but swiftly receiving a CD and digital release, Welcome to the Blackout (Live London '78) gathers 24 highlights from David Bowie's two-night stint at Earls Court on June 30 and July 1, 1978. Apart from "Sound and Vision" and "Be My Wife," which appeared on a 1995 compilation, this album consists of previously unreleased -- but heavily bootlegged -- live performances, all dating from the end of Bowie's 1978 tour. Stage, which came out a few months after this performance, captures the same tour, but Welcome to the Blackout isn't as stiff as that contemporaneously released double album. Bowie and band -- which includes guitarists Adrian Belew and Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis, along with Roger Powell, a keyboardist who served in Todd Rundgren's Utopia -- are loose, sometimes rushing a tempo and sometimes settling into it, as they do on a louche "Heroes" that kicks off the record. The positioning of "Heroes" is telling: it's not here as a triumphant closer but a grooving keynote, setting the pace for a set where Bowie attempts to find the right balance between art and a party. He doesn't always get it right -- Powell tends to overwhelm on the suite of Ziggy Stardust numbers, painting everything with swathes of synths -- but the performance is invigorating even with its flaws.