Live: Music Hall, Aberdeen

David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars performed two shows at Aberdeen’s Music Hall on 16 May 1973.

It was the 113th date of the Ziggy Stardust Tour, which had begun on 29 January 1972.

The Aberdeen gigs, the first concerts of our UK 1973 tour, were a resounding success, and they banished all memories of the ‘Earls Court Performing Disaster’. We played both a matinee and an evening show at the Music Hall, Aberdeen – the grand old theatre which was just walking distance along the road from our hotel in Union Street. Not that we could walk about much, the street was packed with fans and we waved like rock royalty down to them from our hotel windows above. It was no night to think of a party anyway, we had made a long train journey and played two shows, and I slept like a log (woke up in the fireplace) in spite of the crowd outside and the rattling pipes and plumbing noises that are a feature of most grand old hotels that are well past their glory days.

The setlist

• ‘Hang On To Yourself’
• ‘Ziggy Stardust’
• ‘Watch That Man’
• ‘Quicksand’
• ‘Life On Mars?’
• ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’
• ‘Moonage Daydream’
• ‘Changes’
• ‘Space Oddity’
• ‘The Jean Genie’
• ‘Time’
• ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’
• ‘Drive-In Saturday’
• ‘Suffragette City’

Bowie returned to Earls Court on 29 and 30 June and 1 July 1978 during the Isolar II Tour.