Live: The 1980 Floor Show, Marquee Club, London

The second night of David Bowie’s stage production The 1980 Floor Show took place on 19 October 1973.

The variety show was staged at London’s Marquee Club, with 200 tickets given to members of Bowie’s fan club. It was filmed by NBC and broadcast in America on 16 November in the series The Midnight Special.

The show was designed to give Bowie some much-needed exposure in America. Although he was a household name by this point, a final US leg of the Ziggy Stardust Tour had been cancelled due to poor ticket sales.

At that time no one would book us. We were considered a freaky band, and got booed at every gig we did. The only place that would let us play regularly was The Marquee, and then only on Saturday afternoons for a free audience.

The 1980 Floor Show was Bowie’s final appearance at Ziggy Stardust. It also included performances by Marianne Faithfull, The Troggs, and Carmen. The compere was Amanda Lear.

Because of Burgess’s use of Russian words and street slang in the novel A Clockwork Orange, I got quite passionate about the Russian underground for a couple of months, and for the 1980 Floor Show even renamed Amanda Lear ‘Octobriana’ after the Russian radical comic book heroine.

Bowie’s band was Mick Ronson on guitar and vocals, Mark Carr-Pritchard on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass, Mike Garson on keyboards, and Aynsley Dunbar on drums. The backing singers were the Astronettes: Ava Cherry, Jason Guess, and Geoff MacCormack.

The Marquee show, which was filmed over three nights from 18th to 20th October, was the last time that David and Mick Ronson were on stage together in the Ziggy period. This was the end of Ziggy Stardust. It would have been called 1984 but David couldn’t get the rights for the book from Orwell’s widow, so he decided to call it the 1980 Floor Show. A simple play on words. I also wrote a piece on it for Rolling Stone.

The focus of this night was Marianne Faithfull’s performance of ‘As Tears Go By’, and Bowie’s ‘Time’. Several takes of each were filmed, allowing the two stage cameras to capture the correct angles.

We lost money from Bowie initially, but that made itself back fifty times over. We did lose money, like, you remember the Rainbow show we did? We lost about six or seven thousand pounds on that just in the production. But it was worth it, because Dave was doing what he wanted to do, and he didn’t care about money, and I’m the same.

The setlist

Top prize for silliness went to the outfits for our interpretation of Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’, which I sang in due with Marianne Faithfull. Because of her convent background, I felt Marianne would carry the moment superbly as a nun, albeit without a back panel to her habit, revealing her splendid arse. Not shown on the tele, natch.

As we had lots of vinyl lying around, I opted for a shiny red Angel of Death, with black feather wings on the chest. Daft? You bet.

The costumes for The 1980 Floor Show were designed by Freddie Buretti, Kansai Yamamoto, and Natasha Korniloff. Matt Mattox’s choreography featured a sequence of dancers spelling out the show’s title with their bodies.

Among the new costumes for the 1980 Floor Show was a keyhole motif. I saw something like it originally pictured from Tristan Tzara’s 1923 production La Coeur à Gaz (the Gas Heart), inspired by the Zurich-based cabaret voltaire movement.

I have always loved Tristan Tzara’s outrageous stage clobber (which was designed by Sonia Delaunay) and eventually, in the late Seventies, staged three songs for Saturday Night Live based very heavily on his wonders.