The Best David Bowie Live Albums

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best David Bowie live albums

Last year, I took on an ambitious and highly subjective project of determining the best Neil Young live album, which isn’t a particularly easy thing to do for someone with a couple dozen (official) live recordings. For someone like David Bowie, at one time, it might have been considerably easier. During his lifetime, he only released nine live albums, one available only to website subscribers, one a Coca-Cola-sponsored recording of his 50th birthday concert, and one of them a document of his appearance on VH1 Storytellers. An odd assortment to be sure, but with Stage and Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, at least you had some pretty easy frontrunners, even if the limited selection couldn’t possibly encapsulate all the different incarnations of his various stage personalities, his stylistic evolution, or even his magnetic presence.

Now, it’s a little more complicated. The past nine years have seen the release of no fewer than 15 posthumous live recordings from throughout his career, many of them accompanying the release of career-spanning box sets, some of them Record Store Day exclusives, many of them finally seeing the official release of a long-bootlegged show. To some degree, yes, a lot of these are record label cash-ins, and not all of them are essential (your appreciation of the ’90s-era concerts will likely depend heavily on your enjoyment of the material from those albums). But the lion’s share of them offer a reminder of the kind of showman that Bowie was, the level of talent he surrounded himself with, and how, on his best nights, he’d give you the best show you’d ever seen.

I actually had the benefit of seeing David Bowie live in 2002, during Moby’s Area2 tour, along with Moby, who was fine, and Busta Rhymes, who was mostly bitter that everyone was there to see David Bowie. But Bowie, at a festival show in his fifties and probably only with a performance that ranked somewhere near the middle of his thousands of shows, gave one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. With about a third of the set reserved for his then-new Heathen, he spent most of his time touring the catalog, including a generous batch of hits—opening with “Life on Mars?” and wrapping up with “Ziggy Stardust”—as well as deep cuts like “Stay,” “Always Crashing in the Same Car” and “Breaking Glass.”

More than 20 years later (and nine years after his death), I’m still fascinated and endlessly curious about the shows I didn’t see. For while there are plenty of bands with the ability to replicate their set night after night, year after year, a random drop into any Bowie set from any era yields wildly different results. Typically great, but hey, even Ziggy Stardust had off nights. So I made a list of the five best David Bowie live albums, based on hours and hours of listening, ranked entirely subjectively based on what thrilled me most (including the song choices, which include one or two that manage to repeatedly end up on the best on nearly all of these). There were some easy cuts; Storytellers didn’t make it, and despite the interesting novelty of it, Glass Spider didn’t either. It got a little more difficult with records like Glastonbury 2000 and Serious Moonlight, as well as all the various archival releases that cropped up in the past nine years. But my personal, subjective ranking is settled, so here we go.

Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums included are chosen by our editors and contributors.


best david bowie live albums - A Reality Tour

5. A Reality Tour (2010)

As a general rule, my favorite live albums are rarely from late in an artist’s career. I find myself drawn to the live sets that capture a fleeting moment in time, one that I’ll never be able to experience otherwise. With David Bowie, for obvious reasons, that applies to every live album, but considering I did happen to make it to one of the Area2 shows, I’m less drawn to the play-the-hits material. That being said, even his 21st century live recordings are still pretty fantastic and mostly unpredictable, but while there’s something of an air of myth surrounding his Glastonbury set, 2010’s A Reality Tour, featuring recordings from his 2004 tour behind Reality, is a lot more interesting, in part because of the choice of material. Certainly, the hits are there—the set begins with “Rebel Rebel” and it’s all showmanship and playing up the crowd reaction. Whether or not it’s the best version of that song (it’s not) doesn’t matter—it sounds fun. And that’s one of the best signs of a great live album, when you think to yourself, “I would have loved to see that firsthand.” One of the other benefits of a late-career packed-with-hits performance is that you get a little bit of everything, like ’90s-era highlights including “Hallo Spaceboy.” And some of the arrangements here are both unconventional and unexpected, like the stripped-down, mostly acoustic “Loving the Alien.” It sounds great, and there are no bad songs, even if a song like “Fantastic Voyage” feels a little stripped of the Berlin era’s idiosyncrasies. But if you want a set full of hits, deep cuts, interesting covers (Iggy Pop’s “Sister Midnight,” which is technically not a cover since he wrote it) and later standouts, this is the rare live album that offers a little bit of everything to every kind of Bowie fan.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon


best david bowie live albums - Cracked Actor

4. Cracked Actor (Live in Los Angeles ’74) (2017)

Bowie’s mid-’70s period tends to be polarizing for perfectly understandable reasons, his cocaine addiction and erratic behavior finding him at a personal low while producing albums that, likewise, tend to be pretty polarizing. Your views on 1974’s Diamond Dogs or 1975’s Young Americans largely depend on whether you enjoy funk-soul Bowie. Me? I love it, but I get why Ziggy acolytes might not be on board with his self-styled “plastic soul.” Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74) was recorded on tour between those two albums, and though he did play songs from the latter on that tour, despite it not having been released yet, none of them appear here. That said, this is the most groove you’ll hear on any Bowie live album, thanks to personnel like keyboardist Mike Garson, bassist Doug Rauch (who also played with Santana and Betty Davis), saxophonist David Sanborn and even a young Luther Vandross on backup vocals. More than a rock concert, it’s steeped in jazz and funk, and there’s a level of pageantry that shines through on this material, even if we unfortunately can’t see the elaborate Hunger City sets of the 1984-themed Diamond Dogs tour. But when the show kicks off with “1984,” the grooves go hard and it’s clear we’re in for a damn show. And there’s no shortage of standouts here, like “Aladdin Sane,” which takes on the cosmic groove of jazz fusion. Or “Cracked Actor,” with its wild synths. And “The Jean Genie,” as I’ll repeatedly discover, turns out to be one of the runaway favorites. While Bowie’s previous document of this era, David Live, has its share of detractors on account of both sound quality and its performances, Cracked Actor has neither of those problems. The sound is rich and robust, and the detailed intricacy of these arrangements comes through much better—not to mention Bowie himself has a much more impressive presence here. On paper the gulf between them shouldn’t be so vast, and yet it’s a world of difference.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon


David Bowie - Live Santa Monica '72

3. Santa Monica ’72 (1994)

In my limited but fairly conclusive research on what listeners in various internet communities consider the best Bowie live album, Santa Monica ’72 came up probably more than any other Bowie live recording. It’s been something of a collector’s favorite for decades, heavily bootlegged for years before it finally received an official CD release in 1994. And while it features a markedly similar setlist to Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture (also a long-celebrated release), there’s a rawness and an uproariousness to this set that, even at the Spiders from Mars’ full glam-rock glory, at times shares more in common with the blazing proto-punk of The Stooges. Take, for instance, the opening bombast of “Hang On to Yourself,” which I can only describe as punk as fuck. As such, some of the songs that get the biggest boost in this context are those from The Man Who Sold the World, an excellent and—by Bowie standards at least—underrated record with proto-metal underpinnings that didn’t quite capture Sabbath’s heavy roar. Here, however, standouts like “The Supermen” and in particular “Width of a Circle” absolutely do. Elsewhere, Bowie showcases his more theatrical side with a dramatic, powerful take on Jacques Brel’s “My Death.” But more than anything, it’s about the moments that just fucking wail, like “Suffragette City,” with the band firing on all cylinders.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)


2. Welcome to the Blackout ’78/Stage (2018/1978)

This is sort of a tie and it sort of isn’t. Maybe one of these is number two and the other one is 2.5, but they’re hard to separate. Stage, originally released in 1978, captured Bowie’s Isolar II tour during his Berlin era, its setlist heavily populated with standouts from Low and “Heroes”, made our list of the 50 best live albums—and there’s a strong argument for it being there. But Welcome to the Blackout ’78, recorded nearly two months later and released in 2018, finds Bowie and his band both tighter and looser. They’re locked in, energized, playing the hell out of these songs, often extending them and changing their shape. There’s no shortage of moments that found me utterly dazzled by the display of showmanship and musicianship on offer. Much like Stage, the instrumental pieces provide atmospheric borders between segments of the set, and the ’77 songs truly come alive here, like the blazing version of “Blackout,” or the artfully deconstructed “Breaking Glass,” ending in an extended outro of drums and vocals. But as with most of these albums, it’s the newly interpreted material from past albums that often stands out most, be it the trippy saxophone effects in “Fame,” or the extended, hard-grooving “The Jean Genie,” which yet again, ends up being one of the best songs here. But I’d be remiss not to mention “Station to Station,” maybe the most colossal song that Bowie ever recorded, which here feels even bigger and more epic.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (Blackout) | Rough Trade (Stage)


best david bowie live albums - Nassau '76

1. Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 (2017)

If you’ve made it this far then you’ve probably picked up on the fact that my picks for the five best Bowie albums (or six, technically I suppose) are all from different tours, different points in his career, and all have their own argument for being in the top spot. Ultimately it comes down to what you want from a Bowie live album—roaring rock energy? Artful arrangements and stagecraft? A little bit of everything? Live Nassau Coliseum ’76, recorded during the first Isolar tour in support of that year’s Station to Station, checks all these boxes and then some. It’s the best Bowie’s ever sounded on a live album, which probably accounts for why this—like Santa Monica ’72—surfaced as an official live album after many years of being bootlegged. Bowie’s band (including guitarist Carlos Alomar, drummer Dennis Davis and keyboardist Tony Kaye of Yes) is on fire, ripping through astonishing versions of “Stay” and “Panic in Detroit.” They fuse “Life on Mars?” and “Five Years” into a powerful medley, and the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man,” which was part of Bowie’s repertoire on earlier tours, gets a more soulful groove here. There’s a freewheeling looseness at times that results in unscripted moments, like when Bowie breaks into a laugh at the beginning of “Changes.” But he and his band simply cook throughout, whether on the monumental opening with “Station to Station” or yes, somehow yet again, “The Jean Genie,” at its most wild and furious and marked by a blazing organ solo. It’s everything I want from a live Bowie set, and honestly all that’s missing is the visual to go with it.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)


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