Album Review: Bowie Vienna ’78

Oh, dear. This live album from David Bowie’s Isolar tour from 1978 suffers from all the problems bootlegs- official or not- often have, namely, dodgy sound, audience chatter and a general sense of immense disappointment at the quality.

There’s even a sense of Bowie and the band going through the motions- witness a knackered sounding ‘Jean Genie’ where he does that faux-Cockney phrasing, something he’d often been parodied for.

Or there’s a workmanlike ‘Soul Love’ with terrible backing vocals: it’s all pretty depressing. The band were great, including Carlos Alomar and Adrian Belew, but the feeling of touring burnout persists throughout the recording. Not vintage Bowie by any means, paving the way for the populist eighties, and what he referred to as “my Phil Collins period”. Urrggghhh.