Kissing the Viper’s FangThey burned the spider in a New Zealand field at the end of the tour, in November 1987. For six months, David Bowie was carting the fifty-foot monstrosity around the world, so that every night at the outset of every show he might perch himself within its mandibles, to be lowered down onto the stage; for six months, too, he had subjected himself to one of the most tightly choreographed and musically structured tours he had ever undertaken.Long before the end, he was sick of the sight of the beast that had once been his pride and joy. He juggled the set list to escape the strictures of the script, even admitted to taking quiet pleasure from the nights that high winds and lousy weather meant the spider could not be erected on the open-air stages that were the only venues that could accommodate the creation.Now it was all over, and it was, Bowie said, “such a relief,” standing and watching as the flames not only consumed the physical manifestation of the Glass Spider tour, but also devoured every last scrap of the psychic grief that had accompanied it: the bad reviews that lurked in every local newspaper, the disappointed catcalls from the audience, and the legion of gremlins that seemed nightly to descend upon the clockwork precision of the show.Many of the problems were of Bowie’s own making. “I overstretched,” he confessed later. He could not be held responsible for the musical mood that existed outside the circus, the growing realization in the pages of the music press and the hearts of his public that rock had grown bloated, tired and disgusting. But he was responsible for the Glass Spider, the crowning conceit in the spiral of ostentation that had consumed rock ’n’ roll in the years since Live Aid. It was his show, his vision, his music and, at the end of the day, his white elephant. “It was so big and so unwieldy, and everybody had a problem, all the time, every day. [And] I just had to grit my teeth and get through it, which is not a great way of working.”The year 1987 was not the best time to be David Bowie. Indeed, the 1980s had scarcely been kind to him. Exiting the 1970s on the crest of a wave that looked like it would break, he opened the new decade with what is still one of his most enjoyable and farsighted records, 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). But a growing fascination with his burgeoning acting career (he made his big-screen debut in 1979, alongside Marlene Dietrich in Just a Gigolo), and a corresponding dissatisfaction with his record label of the past decade, rca, saw him fritter away the first years of the decade with little more than a handful of dilettante musings.He quickly regained his equilibrium, however, signing a massive, multimillion-dollar deal with emi America, and rewarding them with a multimillion-earning new album, the Niles Rodgers–produced slickness of 1983’s Let’s Dance. A tour that same year amplified the record’s popularity. It was only at the back of the mind that one sensed how the new album was almost absent from the two-hour concerts... just four songs out of eight were even rehearsed for the show, and one of them (“Cat People”) was a remake of an earlier movie theme. After all, Bowie had adecade’s worth of albums to draw from, and a new army of fans. They’d probably already bought Let’s Dance — now it was time to teach them the rest of the repertoire.Meanwhile, dark murmurings of dissatisfaction were leaking out of the...
Dave Thompson (Author)
Dave Thompson is the author of more than 80 books, including Cream: The World's First Supergroup, Go Phish, Moonage Daydream, Never Fade Away, and Smoke on the Water. In 1998, he was ranked one of rock's five foremost authors in Mojo magazine. He lives in London and Delaware.