Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

tour. But the truth of it was, the business didn’t
warrant a tour like that. David’s stardom was kind of
illusory, it was more in the press. It didn’t translate
into real numbers. So the promoters were very
hesitant to do the kind of deal and the, you know,
really major arena tour that Defries wanted to do.
‘Retiring’ was a business decision.”
“NME had already gone to press by the time he
made the statement onstage. Already had our front
page ready,” Shaar Murray says. “Bowie knew when
the papers went to press. He knew that somebody
had to have the story before he made the
announcement, otherwise it would be almost a full
week before the music press could cover it.
Somebody from the MainMan office called me to
ask for a contact number for Jeff Beck.” Beck ended
up sitting in with the Spiders but does not appear in
the Pennebaker film. “Ronno [Mick Ronson] wanted
to invite Jeff to the show. I gave them the number,
then it was, ‘Can you hold on a second, Charles,
David would like a word,’ then David came on the
phone and basically said this was going to be the
last Spiders show. Cleverly ambiguous. He wanted
the NME to know in advance. The previous week. I
went of course straight in and told the editor. We
started working on that front page immediately.
Everybody in the office was sworn to secrecy. He
told me I was the only person who’d be getting this
story. He’d picked the NME. If anybody let it slip, if it
reached the ears of anybody on any of the other
music papers, it would be considered virtually a