Ready to take on the world

Press, 31 March 1983, Page 10

Ready to take on the world

NZPA London At a huge press conferLondon last week, .Dawd Bowie announced his plans for 1983 — a 90-date world tour. Bowie’s tour, called “Serious Moonlight” for the European section at least, will also take him to Scandinavia, the United States, Japan, and Australasia. “This is the first concert tour I’ve done for five or six years. It’s more than exciting, it’s kind of terrifying and that, possibly, can help the performance,” he said. Bowie said that he was proud that his band for the tour would include Carlos Alomar (who accompanied him on the 1978 world jaunt), and other top musicians, including the Chic drummer, Tony Thompson. The stage show would be “elaborately simple, tasteful, yet trashy,” he said, and the material would include something from each period since “The Man Who Sold The World.” Bowie’s latest single and album, both called “Let’s Dance,” are due for worldwide release in April. The album is his first under his new contract for EMI America. “I didn’t like RCA because they didn’t like me,” he said of his former record company of about 13 years standing. “I think I released several very interesting, intelligent, and important albums on RCA which they didn’t seem to have much time for,” said Bowie. He said his challenge now was to “counter strange, nihilistic, albeit romantic, quality to music that seems to be overshadowing everything — style over content, and I think it is being accepted as the value of music at the moment; more so in Europe than in America. I want to get more into the guts of the lyrics,” he said. His new album was “a lot more immediate. It deals with things hopefully on a more humanist level than

I’ve dealt with stuff before. It’s not as detached or as falsely objective as my stuff seems to have been,” he said. “The unusual’s being touched so prolifically now that I wanted to get back into something more grassroots,” said Bowie. He recently came to New Zealand to work on the film, “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,” about a Japanese prisoner of war camp. “Working with Oshima (the director) was really

quite an experience. I’ve never been offered a role where I had the chance to take advantage of my interest in interpreting the character so much,” said Bowie. “I feel it’s the best piece of work I’ve done yet,” he said. Bowie said that he had more movie plans, and he is more interested in directing now. He did an Aboriginal video for the “Let’s Dance” single. He has plans to work on a video with Iggy Pop, whom

he partnered musically in the mid-19705, and, as busy as ever, he is now painting a portrait of William Burroughs, and exhibiting woodcuts throughout Europe. The “Serious Moonlight” tour beings on May 20 at Frankfurt Festhalle, with further dates at Lyons and Nantes, before playing in Britain, at Wembley Stadium June 2,3, and 4, and Birmingham on June 5 and 6. Tickets to the Wembley shows cost SNZ23.