WHEN David Bowie played four nights at the Glasgow Apollo in June 1978, hundreds of fans kept a ‘silent vigil’ outside the Albany Hotel after every performance.
The legendary singer and showman was always a hit when he came to the city – and the adoration was mutual.
“I’ve been coming here for 10 years and it has always been a favourite of mine,” he said in a BBC Reporting Scotland news report.
He described the audience as “exceptionally exciting” and said they “seem very intoxicated by the idea of a theatrical show” adding that the atmosphere was “electric”.
Bowie had played at the Apollo and its former incarnation as Green’s Playhouse many times over the previous decades, but this was his first visit back in five years.
Mike Garson, Bowie’s veteran pianist who was originally hired for only eight weeks in 1972, recalls the 1973 gig with great fondness. In an interview with The Herald, he said: “I have great memories of people flying off the balcony at Green’s Playhouse in January 1973. Glasgow was always a wild place to play where the fans had a deep love of the music.
“It was a triumphant evening and of the thousands of shows I did with David that would be in the top three along with the Hammersmith Odeon in ’73 and Isle of Wight Festival 2004.”
Bowie continued to appear in the city throughout his career.
In November 1995, he played at the SECC, and the Glasgow Times’s sister newspaper The Herald reported: “Bowie in 1995 can rock it up most deftly, despite sporting a daft-looking raggedy, barefoot, lightly-coated-in-flour ensemble which is not going to set the fashion-world alight.”
The reviewer’s flowery prose summed up a good night had by all, by the sounds of it: “Bowie’s arc’ing warble sounds better than ever. Whatever the year. Whatever fresh genre - industrial-opera? - Bowie’s just invented. The old boy keeps swinging, yes.”
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In 1997, he performed at the Barrowland and legend has it that when one of the venue’s famous stars fell from the roof, Bowie picked it up and put it in his pocket.
In November 2003, he brough his mammoth A Reality Tour to the SECC, the final stop on the long European segment.
“Glasgow got to hear a career-spanning repertoire”, our reviewer said. “Gone were the overblown pretensions of previous years, replaced instead by a minimal stage-set and a friendly Bowie, laughing and joking. From The Man Who Sold the World to a sprinkling of songs from the new album, it was two-and-a-half hours of straight-up rock ‘n’ roll.”
Bowie, whose groundbreaking music inspired generations during a career spanning six decades, died at the age of 69 in January 2016, after being diagnosed with cancer.
When his death was announced, fans told the Glasgow Evening Times how much they loved and admired him.
Derek McIntyre, 55, was at one of Bowie’s first city gigs, at the Apollo in 1973.
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Derek, who was then 13, was allowed to travel into Glasgow from East Kilbride for the occasion. “I remember getting the bus in and being so excited,” he told us.
“I’d persuaded my parents to let me go with my friends.
“Everyone thinks of Bowie’s iconic status now but he had an iconic status then. There was a magical thing about him.
“He was so different from anything else.”
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