David Bowie’s relationship with Edinburgh is specific and documented without being particularly well known outside the city. He played the city during each of his major touring periods through the 1970s – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Thin White Duke – and Edinburgh received each incarnation with the particular quality of attention that the city gives to performers it considers worth taking seriously.
The Edinburgh shows from this period were at the Odeon on Clerk Street, a 3,000-capacity cinema that doubled as a concert venue throughout the 1970s before being converted for other purposes and eventually demolished. The Odeon’s sightlines were poor – the stalls seating was flat – but the acoustics were adequate and the capacity was sufficient for an act at Bowie’s level in that period.
The Diamond Dogs Tour
The Diamond Dogs tour in 1974 was, by the standards of what had been staged in British rock venues to that point, an extraordinary production. Bowie had designed it with Jules Fisher around a post-apocalyptic cityscape set that required equipment trucks on a scale that most British venues could barely accommodate. The set included a cherry picker that carried Bowie over the audience, a suspended catwalk, and lighting technology that was at the frontier of what was technically possible in 1974.
The tour’s North American version was significantly more elaborate than the European one – the full set could not be replicated in older British venues. What Edinburgh received was a scaled version that was still, by the experience of most audiences, unlike anything they had seen. The production values, the choreography, the deliberate theatricality of the performance – Bowie treating a rock concert as a piece of total theatre – were distinct from what contemporary acts were doing.
The album the tour was supporting, Diamond Dogs, had been conceived as a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. The rights were not available, which redirected the project into something more oblique and arguably more interesting. The Edinburgh audiences were receiving a show built around a science fiction dystopia, performed by a man who had already abandoned Ziggy Stardust onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon the previous year and was in the process of abandoning Diamond Dogs for the soul influences of Young Americans. The restlessness was the point.
The Station Hotel
The North British Hotel – now the Balmoral – at the east end of Princes Street was Edinburgh’s premier hotel through the 1970s and the place where visiting rock acts of sufficient stature stayed. Bowie stayed there on his Edinburgh visits. The specific stories attached to his Station Hotel stays overlap with accounts from other guests and staff of that period and belong to the category of rock mythology that is more atmospheric than verifiable.
What is verifiable is that Bowie was in Edinburgh during the period of maximum creative intensity – the transition from glam rock persona to the Berlin Trilogy that produced Low, Heroes and Lodger between 1977 and 1979. The Thin White Duke period, which culminated with Station to Station in 1976, was also the period of his most serious cocaine use; his autobiographical accounts of those years describe a man barely coherent, living on peppers and milk, convinced of a Nazi occult conspiracy. Edinburgh’s gothic architecture and perpetual grey light were a congenial environment for that state of mind.
The Legacy
Bowie’s death in January 2016 produced memorial gatherings in Edinburgh as in other British cities. The Odeon where he had played is gone. The Balmoral retains its Bowie connection without advertising it as heavily as the Edinburgh cafe circuit advertises its Potter connection. The music remains. Station to Station, recorded in the year of the Thin White Duke tour, is regularly cited by Edinburgh musicians as a formative influence across genres and decades. That is a more durable legacy than a plaque.
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