Fact #82587
When:
Short story:
At Claridges Hotel, London, England, UK, Europe, David Bowie holds a press conference to launch his album Let's Dance, and the accompanying Serious Moonlight tour.
Full article:
Bernard Doherty : I had recently been appointed Head of the Music Dept at the London office of the global PR company Rogers And Cowan, and my first superstar client was David Bowie, who had just signed to EMI Records and he was about to release the Let's Dance album. The Serious Moonlight tour had also been booked. This was a massive tour. I remember looking at the dates and the venues and thinking 'Fuck! This is a step up from Jethro Tull and The Chieftains, mate.'
I was flown out to Switzerland where I met Bowie and Coco Schwab, who looked after him, and the American Gail Davies, who ran David's office in New York. This was in a posh hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. I was supposed to be going there with the game plan of how we going to launch the European leg of the Serious Moonlight tour. Now, even though I had never even been into Claridges Hotel, I knew it was somewhere you'd never expect anyone to launch a tour. A club was more the thing, or take over Shepherd's Bush Empire and do a sneaky couple of songs live, but David had developed an amazing, sophisticated look, that wedge haircut that Gary Kemp and David Sylvian have been trying to imitate ever since.
The cover of the album showed David in a boxing pose, and he played me the tracks and asked how I thought we should launch it. He was used to Tony DeFries throwing him ten ideas and he'd pick the one he liked. So I said, 'No-one will expect what we're going to do. They might expect you to go down the Old Kent Road to Henry Cooper's gym and do photos there. Looking at you in that blue suit, you would look perfectly at home in the best hotel in the world. I'm suggesting that we launch this tour and the album in Claridges Hotel, and we serve the most impeccable food, quail's eggs, smoked salmon, let's go right upmarket'. He loved that idea, EMI wrote the cheque, about £50,000 as I remember, we flew journalists in from all over Europe, and I was running the whole thing.
The only minor hitch was that David arrived wearing a brand new pair of ridiculously expensive crocodile shoes, but they still had the price label on the bottom. We had to quickly get someone with some sandpaper to scrape it off before he faced the media. Otherwise, it went wonderfully, a hugely successful launch.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, April 2012)
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I was flown out to Switzerland where I met Bowie and Coco Schwab, who looked after him, and the American Gail Davies, who ran David's office in New York. This was in a posh hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. I was supposed to be going there with the game plan of how we going to launch the European leg of the Serious Moonlight tour. Now, even though I had never even been into Claridges Hotel, I knew it was somewhere you'd never expect anyone to launch a tour. A club was more the thing, or take over Shepherd's Bush Empire and do a sneaky couple of songs live, but David had developed an amazing, sophisticated look, that wedge haircut that Gary Kemp and David Sylvian have been trying to imitate ever since.
The cover of the album showed David in a boxing pose, and he played me the tracks and asked how I thought we should launch it. He was used to Tony DeFries throwing him ten ideas and he'd pick the one he liked. So I said, 'No-one will expect what we're going to do. They might expect you to go down the Old Kent Road to Henry Cooper's gym and do photos there. Looking at you in that blue suit, you would look perfectly at home in the best hotel in the world. I'm suggesting that we launch this tour and the album in Claridges Hotel, and we serve the most impeccable food, quail's eggs, smoked salmon, let's go right upmarket'. He loved that idea, EMI wrote the cheque, about £50,000 as I remember, we flew journalists in from all over Europe, and I was running the whole thing.
The only minor hitch was that David arrived wearing a brand new pair of ridiculously expensive crocodile shoes, but they still had the price label on the bottom. We had to quickly get someone with some sandpaper to scrape it off before he faced the media. Otherwise, it went wonderfully, a hugely successful launch.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, April 2012)