

David Bowie in 1995, photo by David LaChapelle



The rehearsals for David Bowie’s Outside tour of 1995—the one where Nine Inch Nails were the opening act/co-headliner and Trent Reznor performed with the headliner, too—began in NYC at Complete Music Studios. They later continued at the William D. Mullins Memorial Center, an auditorium at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where Bowie’s backing group—Reeves Gabrels and Carlos Alomar on guitars; Gail Ann Dorsey, bass guitar, vocals; Zack Alford, drums; Mike Garson, piano; George Simms, backing vocals, keyboards; and musical director Peter Schwartz on synthesizer—were joined by Reznor and his band.

Bowie told HUMO magazine about the tour:

I personally did like the combination of NIN and me, but my fans didn’t. Bad luck! It also was an extremely young audience, between about 12 and 17 years old. My starting point was simply: I’ve just made an adventurous album, what can I do now to turn the concerts as adventurous. Looking at it in that way, it seemed logical to confront myself with the NIN audience. I knew it would be hard to captivate them by music they never heard, by an artist whose name was the only familiar thing.

Since this footage is Reznorless, I think it’s safe to assume that this might have been shot at one of the NYC rehearsal dates. Shot with a hand-held camera, it’s a marvellously fly-on-the-wall document with excellent audio. It’s obviously taken from a very low generation video source. Watch this one while you can, as I doubt it will be on YouTube for very much longer.





Hat tip to Douglas Hovey of Bridgeport, CT!