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David Bowie  

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Forty five years ago I was sat anxious, fidgeting, watching the clock, willing the hours by, impossibly excited but frustrated as time seemed stood resolutely still.
I was on the drabbest caravan site imaginable somewhere on Lancashire’s Fylde Coast. No-one in my family can even remember where it was.
I was 14 years old, a tubby little schoolboy stuck in the middle of a mundane family holiday in the middle of nowhere.
But the night which followed that endless day changed my life.
It was May 31, 1973 and the biggest sensation in pop since The Beatles was about to be beamed down into my home town.
David Bowie and The Spiders From Mars brought the Aladdin Sane tour to the stage of King George’s Hall in previously grey, depressing, drab, dismal, monochrome cotton town Blackburn. It actually might have been quite a bright, sunny day to be honest.
It was my first live gig and in another four decades there would never be another to send my head into a whirl and my insides feeling like they were revolving around my body at Formula 1 speed for two hours.
If you had been allowed those years of hindsight you would have chosen that band, that frontman, that time to see rock’n’roll made flesh for the very first time.
Let’s set the scene. Ours wasn’t a particularly hip household. We had a record player – one of those suitcase Dansettes on legs  - and by the end of my third year at school I had a collection of singles and a handful of albums.
But Bolan and The Jackson 5 had to vie with Jack Jones and Helen Reddy for turntable time.
I’d been to a couple of those end-of-pier shows and perhaps the biggest names I’d seen to that point in terms of chart action were Dana and Frank Ifield.
Even at 12 and 13 you knew that wasn’t where it was at.
One of those same summers I’d sat in the TV lounge of a bed and breakfast in Scarborough and seen Marc Bolan on TOTP have a strange, unspoken effect on a bunch of slightly older holidaying teenage girls that I didn’t quite understand. I knew it was a direction you’d probably like to go in but hadn’t a clue how to set off, never mind arrive there.
It certainly wasn’t any reaction a middle-aged guy singing “I Remember You” in a suit provoked.
But the only time I’d ever sat in the stalls at King George’s Hall before that night was at tedious, interminable school speech nights, a mandatory but utterly dreaded annual event.
I was only allowed to go to the Bowie gig because an adult was taking me.
Fortunately it wasn’t my dad, who might have been utterly outraged by the spectacle.
His workmate John, it had emerged, was a huge fan, which at least lent my pre-occupation with Ziggy some adult-endorsed credibility.
I had bought the Ziggy album after an unexpected windfall. After seeing the Bolan effect and placing a personal ad in “Disco Songwords” or some such publication stating “Boy, 13, into T Rex, wants girl penfriend” I received about 400 replies.
With almost more bags of letters from pre-pubescent females than the beleaguered postman could carry, I launched the one entrepreneurial success of my life and sold them for 2p a time at school.
“The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars” cost me £2.18 from Reidys in Blackburn. I still have it with the sticker on somewhere.
But dad came home one night with some sage advice: “John at work reckons you should get an LP called Hunky Dory. Says it’s even better.”
My letter-selling profits allowed for that and that Christmas of ’72 I got the Space Oddity and Man Who sold The World re-issues and by the time Aladdin Sane came out in April of 1973 – delivered to my house by an RCA rep at tea-time on release day in a van after insufficient copies were available to satisfy pre-orders – I was in a frenzy over the fact that Bowie was playing not one but two Lancashire dates.
John had bought his wife and myself tickets for both shows  and consented to take me, to allay any parental fears that I would be whisked away from the venue by a make-up wearing gay cult who sang lyrics like “I’ve got eyes in my backside that see electric tomatoes” (“Go on then, what on earth does that mean?”  I was regularly quizzed) never to return.
He was a cool guy, John. Maybe about 30 then, beautiful wife, great house, posh car and the most fabulous huge stereo system I’d ever seen in the huge modernised cottage I waited in, having been transported from Knott End or wherever, to be taken to the show.
I wish I could remember the journey there and the crowd but the next thing I can remember is sitting in the front row balcony waiting for the lights to go out.
They eventually did and Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” as distorted through A Clockwork Orange (which of course I hadn’t seen or read) played...
Here’s the best thing. There was no support act that night. No hammy pub-rock band in jeans and t-shirts cranking out blues licks or Chuck Berry licks. No Fumble or Stealers Wheel or any such.
As the hall darkened and Ode came to mad climax, strobe lights – something else I’d never seen – flashed and momentarily illuminated figures walked across the stage with great coloured Ziggy/Aladdin flashes briefly visible then invisible on the backdrop behind.
Two of the first three guys I saw walk on that stage, Mick Ronson and Trevor Bolder, are no longer with us but along with Woody Woodmansey  there could have been no more striking, futuristic prelude to the drama to come as a maelstrom of spangly tights, stack heels, hair spikey or platinum and enormous Dickensian sideburns flashed in and out of vision in a blur of white light and bacofoil costumes.
Ducks Deluxe sauntering on an hour and a half before the main act just wouldn't have been the same.
A nano-second of silence and darkness and then...
“Bam-bam-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Bam-Bam....” Ronno thrashed the intro to “Hang  Onto Yourself” out on his Les Paul, all billowy blouse and black sparkly matador pants and your eyes turned to centre stage where Bowie stood in a Japanese costume practically impossible to move in, bright orange barnet and pale face, arms extended...
“Well she’s a tongue-twisting storm...”
Of course what I can actually recollect is mixed up with what I’ve seen many times from the Hammersmith film by Don Pennebaker, basically the same show.
But what I can remember is the gulping, gasping slack-jawed feeling of awe to be in the moment, the presence, the time.
a pair of girls - future Mrs ronson and Bowie hairstyle creator Suzi Fussey one of them - came oput in black cat type costumes and pulled from either side to reveal that the ensemble was velcroed together down the front and suddenly Bowie was posed there in a silky white tunic with matching thigh-length boots.
It was often said that hitherto macho/straight builders fancied him and though not many would have admitted it in 1972 East Lancashire at that juncture, it's still possible to imagine why.
"Ziggy Stardust" was freed from his Yansai Kamamoto wardrobe restrictions and free to gyrate as he wished in a series of numbers which even today in display cases at the V and A museum people are paying good money to gaze in wonder at.
By the fourth number, “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud (segued into “All The Young Dudes” and “Oh you Pretty Things” ) I had got my breath back and recall the astonished wonderment of seeing these songs I knew so well played by the people who created them in the same bloody room I was sat in!
The mirrorball shimmering as David strummed the 12-string intro to “Space Oddity” ...I hadn’t noticed that at school prize night....the strobey guitar fight with Ronno in “Width Of a Circle” ...the mimed “gap in the wall” routine...myriad costume changes while Mick solo’ed .....Garson’s insane jazz stylings....”Suffragette City” practically blowing the roof off....the closing “Gimme your hands” set-piece of “Rock’n’Roll Suicide.”
Incredible. Simply incredible to see that at 14, before you saw any other live band in the whole wide world..
...
 #competition

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Heathen Tour, Hammersmith Apollo London, 2nd October 2002

The stage was surprisingly bare, and industrial by previous concert stages where my brother and I had seen David Bowie, but the starkness meant that the five truss lighting towers across the back of the stage stood out all the more. Even unlit it was obvious the letters made up out of many lamps at the top of each tower spelt out 'B' 'O' 'W' 'I' 'E', and below each of the letters (about half way up each truss) were a smaller double bank of lamps as well.

I was pretty excited to see this even before it was lit-up, I mean you could only get away with that if you're as famous as David Bowie, and as my brother and I hadn't seen Bowie in concert since the Sound & Vision tour over ten years previous this looked like a real statement of 'I'M BACK'!

I could write on about the many other lighting effects that we're being used, the layout of the stage, positioning of the other musicians and their part but I really should get to the man himself...

David Bowie entered the stage to a very long piano intro to Life on Mars, and what a great show opener, and we wouldn't have been the only ones delighted seeing as on the Sound & Vision tour (1990) he said he would not be performing the old 'favourites' anymore (he was tired of them) but, fortunately for us this was not the first time that 'true to form'(his words) he had broken his promise.

And no doubt everyone was equally delighted with his dandy get-up - a very shiny (silk apparently) bright blue tonic type suit of a cutaway single breasted (single button) jacket with peak lapels, the trousers, perhaps a little too narrow for my liking sat well with the black Chelsea boots. His white shirt had unusual cuffs as much as I could make out, the black waistcoat not matching the suit was a nice twist and a bright silver (pocket watch?) chain from lapel buttonhole to breast pocket added a bit of sparkle.

I cannot remember the whole setlist (especially in order) though I can write about the most memorable ones that left the greatest impression upon me, and the overall impression that so many numbers from my favourite David Bow album 'LOW' were being included made me feel so lucky as I had been too young to see him performing these live in 1977 - What a bonus in addition the the 'Heathen' album being such a fantastic new album in itself. And other songs from his Berlin period too, 'Heroes' and 'Alabama Song' which in particular I had not heard him perform live before and was even more entertaining than the version I was familiar with from CD.

David took to the keyboard for 'Speed of Life', and played a harmonica for 'A new career in a new town' and on another number he picked up a Stylophone to play out the ending on. That too was surprise!

I remember thinking at the time 'WOW, if the concert was being recorded for another live album this concert would be even better that the 'Stage' album which I have played so much over the years not being able to go to the tour at that time. I mean 'Stage' is damned good BUT this band for 'Heathen' tour were brilliant, the sound was so full but perfectly clear with individual parts being discernible and all played with so much energy.

I do not have the words to describe how exciting it was being in the audience for that show, and the lighting added to that (yes, the lighting again - so simple, so effective) throughout the performance, the letters illuminating in sequence, or running in a frenzy, flashed on and off or slowly brought up and faded down to suit the song.

He sang the songs from the new album with much emotion, so much so that you thought he was going to cry at one point whilst singing the title track 'Heathen'. '5:15 and 'Sunday' may have been written specifically for his vocal range now and might be why those in particular sounded so good, his singing voice sounding smooth and crooning but still able to rise to belt it out when impact was needed.

Amongst the other surprises that night was 'The Bewlay Brothers' which David said he had never performed live before - Marvelous.

Altogether the concert was nearly three hours long (in two sets) and in the second half the band really picked up the pace - the audience often on their feet so the good old Hammersmith Odeon (as it will always be to me) was literally rocking, and you could sense the adulation from the audience for him. We were all enthralled.

The songs that really rocked were 'Look back in Anger', 'Hallo Spaceboy', 'I'm afraid of Americans', and of course 'Ziggy Stardust' the final song of the night. After which David and his band all held hands at the front of the stage for the final applause, and, when they left the stage the only lights left one were the one's that spelt 'B' 'O' 'W' 'I' 'E'.

David Bowie is a legend and a was true rockstar... as a newspaper critic said at the time "Whatever he had, he has still got it", and as I said at the time "For a man of fifty (plus), that should give us all hope".

I was fortunate to see David Bowie in concert several times over the years, but this one, the Heathen tour, will always be the one I remember as being the greatest with the man at the height of his powers.

#competition

My biggest regret to this day (5 December 2018), and that includes, family, friends, love, food, travel, culture, cars, football and shopping - is not seeing David as Ziggy in 1973. I was that close, and I mean close, to getting a ticket for Salisbury City Hall on the now legendary tour. Trouble was, I was 14, didn't have transport (I didn't live in Salisbury), but I did have the £1.70 ticket price. I thought 'Oh Well, there'll be other times'. Well there weren't - not for Ziggy - he was dead, put to bed by his Master at the end of that tour - Oh Dear!

Still, I've made up for it since, having seen 'The Master' at work on many occasions. 'The first time is always the best time', they say, and so it was for me. Having missed the Diamond Dogs Tour in 1974, coz he only did it Stateside, I was waiting with eager anicipation, each time I got the NME on a Thursday during those Bowie-obsessed days.

Then in late '75 an announcement was made - 'David Bowie to Play Six Nights at Wembley'. Whooppee! I thought, let's get tickets! So, being the decent chap that I am, I proceeded to get twenty, yes, twenty, tickets for all my school mates (and fellow Bowie nuts).

My cheque was duly sent back by the box office saing that there weren't twenty tickets for the Saturday (May 8) available.

I had to hurriedly re-apply for the Thursday (May 6), and hope we could get in. In the post they landed, twenty brown & white tickets, each for £2.75. (I'm ashamed that, these days, tickets are horrendously priced, plus the dreadful booking fee on top!)

I decided to hire a coach to take us from my school, to Wembley, on a weekday afternoon. The Headmaster wasn't thrilled, but let us go with his semi-permission! 'Wembley, here we come!' We arrived in plenty of time to survey the scene outside the Empire Pool (as the SSE Arena was then called). An array of punks, new romantics and beautiful people were milling about, all there for a common goal - to see the Thin White Duke. Once inside, the lights dimmed, but not for any support band; instead we were 'treated' to a showing of the Bunuel/Dali film 'Un Chien Andalou'. Everyone gasped at the eye-cut scene! This was Bowie's World after all!

Cue another period of heart-beating excitement, before the lights dimmed once again, and this time, the air was filled with a shrill feedback-laden guitar screech, emitting the opening chords of Station to Station, followed by the distinct sound of the two-bar motif of eletric piano, bass guitar, and so on. Then, from behind the bright bars of vertical white light came His Nibs marching onto stage - it was a Wow! moment! The place erupted, with eight thousand screaming, adoring Bowiephiles all baying to the Master! This was the only place to be in London, nay, the World tonight! Station to Station became Suffragette City, through Fame, Word on a Wing, Stay, then the Velvets cover Waiting for the Man, which was a nice surprise. Back to his own stuff with Queen Bitch - I couldn't believe he was doing this one, a real sucker punch! Then a tear came to my eye for Life On Mars? which segued into Five Years - I was at Ziggy after all! An enormous drum solo during Panic in Detroit during which Bowie had a coffee and a fag! The band introduction during Changes, followed by TVC15, and finishing with three standout tracks in Diamond Dogs, Rebel Rebel and The Jean Genie. What a Show, What a Man, What a Night - the greatest moment - my life had been transformed forever!

The phenonaminal and talented David Bowie had decided that he wanted to do one more tour, the 'Hours Tour' before the this millemimnum came upon us. The tour only had eight shows. It would be his last English concert that century. I had to go.

He decided to play a small venue, the legendary 'Astoria Theatre' in Londona on 2nd Dember 1999. I desperately wanted to go because I had seen him several times, all in Arenas, having been too young to see his 'Ziggy Stardust tour'. I felt, to see him in in a relatively small venue which was basically a nightclub, would be the next best thing.

I could not believe my luck when I scored two tickets, the venue had a capacity of 2000, ironically!

My younger sister, influenced by my continually playing Bowie's records in my room, virtually her whole life, was also a massive fan, it was a no brainier that I would have to take her and treat her to the concert. The day arrived for the concert, I decided to leave work early and get to the venue quickly in the the hope of getting a good standing position, it was a toss up as to who was the more excited sibling? I remember struggling to sleep the night before due to excitement of seeing my 'hero' the next day.

We got into the club and managed to stand about two rows from the front, slightly left of centre stage. Debate began about what would be the opening song, my thought process was 'Changes', it had to be with the end of the 20 century looming, I was right. The man was on immaculate form, he sang as good as I have ever heard, no pretensions, no elaborate custome just him and his music, pure Bowie and pure magic.

Hit after hit came, the atmosphere was electric, it was one of those concerts where everything gelled, the arist was just so happy to be performing and the 'small' audience were beyond extactic to be there. It was clear from the sancranised lips that everyone who was lucky enough to get a ticket seemed to have deserved it. Bowie sensed the crowd were 100 percent fans and seemed to up his game to give, in my option, the performance of his life.

I have never been to a concert were there was a feeling of harmony and contentment between artist and audience which washed over all of us from beginning to end, the last time I felt that was at Wembley with Live Aid.

The high light for me was hearing and seeing him, as if he was in my living room, perform my personally favourite song 'Life on Mars'. For me it was was not a "God awful small affair" but the biggest love story a fan could have for an artist.

I do not know if it was the fact that not only could I see his two different coloured eyes , without the aid of a video screen, but the tears in them that made this concert so special and so unique to me, this concert made this 'Lad Insane' for more Bowie and very very grateful I got to be in that intimate moment with one of the greatest artists of any centuryif not all time.

Alistair Gibbins

[email protected]

I've always considered Bowie's 2000 headline set my favourite Glastonbury performance and it comfortably ranks as one of my top three shows of all time. Bowie hadn't played the festival since an unpaid 4 am acoustic set in 1971, so his return was long overdue. The press had been banging on about how he never played the old 70's hits anymore and he'd been doing drum 'n' bass heavy tours in support of 'Earthling' around this time, so the prospects weren't great. He came out in a fabulous Alexander Mcqueen long coat reminiscent of the Hunky Dory era and was backed by a great band including Earl Slick on guitar and Gail Ann Dorsey on bass. He kicked off with a song I didn't know (Wild Is The Wind', as it turned out) and I was thinking 'here we go...I'm not going to know any of this', but then went into 'China Girl', 'Changes' and 'Life On Mars?', at which point I knew we were in for a real treat. I know you could waste hours trying to make the perfect Bowie setlist, but in the moment, this felt just about as good as it gets - 'Rebel Rebel', 'Ashes to Ashes', 'Fame', 'All the Young Dudes', 'The Man Who Sold The World' all played in quick succession. I was hoping for some Ziggy material and was delighted when 'Starman' put in an appearance and he closed the set with a remarkable run through 'Under Pressure' with Gail doing an outstanding job with the Freddie Mercury part - a really breathtaking climax to the show. There then followed one hell of an encore, opening with a rocking 'Ziggy Stardust' before going into "Heroes", which was another incredible moment - Slick absolutely nailed the guitar part and the crowd were totally blissed-out for it. Soon everyone was going nuts again for 'Let's Dance' and then he closed with an obscure track from 'Earthling' called 'I'm Afraid of Americans'. I find it hard to convey how amazing this show was, but it has stuck with me ever since and one of the first things I did when I heard of Bowie's death was to look up old clips of this performance, as it will always be my abiding memory of this incredible artist. Rather fittingly, this remains the last show I ever saw at Glastonbury, as there was no festival in 2001 and I never got back into the habit of going after that - not a bad final memory from this iconic festival. #competition

When Bowie formed Tin Machine with some of his music pals some folk wondered when he was going to cut it out and give them another greatest hits show. On November 11th 1991 in a packed Brixton Academy hard rock fans and Bowie fans alike gathered for a Bowie unemcumbered by a curated persona and his back catalogue baggage. One of the crowd at least was in their own bar-room brawl as they lobbed a bottle at the stage and hit David in the face. Recovering after some first aid, the professional returned bandaged. In jeans and tee shirt David sent his voice soaring over his urgent guitar, throwing in a smattering of sax. The seasoned Tin Machine mates belted out tight, honest, thoughtful rock, while a doll baby tied to the drumkit bounced along, listlessly underscoring the darker tunes like 'I Can't Read' and 'Under the God'. It was a truly joint enterprise with Hunt, Gabrels and Hunt also taking the mics for a spin. David danced with his shirt off, relaxed and goofing about. The band were enjoying it so much they played a second set, taking this epic to two hours, during which they played one of Bowie's best, simple love songs 'Amazing', and it was. David grinning, bouncing off other musical pros and digging the jam session was perhaps the closest to the man David Bowie that it was possible for an audience to get. Leaving the crowd on a high after a headbanging 'Crack City', with an extended version of 'Heaven in Here', it certainly was a slice of rock heaven that Bowie gave us that night. #competition

West Point Arena, November 26, 1995.

It was a cold and wet November evening, the parking fields had turned to mud and the organisers were struggling to get everyone into the venue in time for the show. Though we had turned up at the gates nice and early, by the time we were parked we had missed Morrissey do his support turn, that did not worry us though, we were here for David tonight.

You could have cut the air with a knife, the level of anticipation as the audience waited for him to take to the stage, and when he did the place erupted, a release of a joint excitement and an outpouring of love at the man who had already given us so much.

Launching in Motel, David worked through a set list that featured tracks from his latest work 'Outside' quite heavily, but he also did not disappoint the hardened fans, with Look Back in Anger coming in second and Scary Monsters being played fourth.

David was alive tonight, the venue was far from ideal, but that did not stop him from making it his own. By the time he bought the set to a close with Under Pressure followed by Moonage Daydream, any who had doubted him at the start of the evening were converted.

Me I never doubted, unfortunately this was the only time I ever got to see David live, but what a night it was, any anyway how many people can truly say that they saw David Bowie play in a cow-shed.

Barrowland, Glasgow, 22 July 1997. Earthling Tour.

Having seen Mr B on the polished Serious Moonlight tour, I was keen to experience his latest incarnation when he toured to promote Earthling. The gig was taking place on the day I arrived back in the UK from our family holiday in Spain. Only realised two weeks before the gig that we were flying into Manchester, and not Glasgow(where we live)! Arrived Manchester 2.30pm, grabbed the luggage, wife, and kids and zoomed home. Arrived home around 7 pm, left luggage, wife, kids outside the house and drove straight to Barrowland, still in shorts and t-shirt. Just made it in time to see David wander, smiling, on-stage as the entire packed crowd were singing along to Changes which was being played over the PA. What a gig. Usual varied back-catalogue set with almost half of the Earthling album played. Bowie was casually dressed in a smock-type top and was obviously enjoying himself. The crowd loved it though it was boiling hot. I even poured half a pint of lager over my head to cool off a bit. Highlight for me, apart from his excellent tight band, was seeing him stand on the monitor at the front of the stage conducting the crowd to a singalong of the end of 'Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. This was Bowie at the top of his game, -with a stripped down band playing hits and gems and showcasing new material.

David Jones changed to David Bowie as he wanted to be distinct and individualistic from other music artists including his namesake from the “supergroup “ The Monkees”. His music is unique yet he had the imagination to continually experiment and still entertain. His immersion into his musical character(s) namely Ziggy Stardust made him box office gold with his stagecshows been well ahead of his peers especially in the 70’s & 80’s . His album back catalogue will open the eyes of new followers where they will hear the raw , maybe simple tunes of the Laughing Gnome to the progessive Space Oddity to Life on Mars ( tv hit!) to his Sound and vision. He , embraced the 80’s with two albums of note , Lets Dance to the Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.These with other Live Albums released through the decades and compilations too . Not to mention Sountrack contributions, to actually review and critique his work would be almost impossible to , you should just live his live by exploring his music and enjoy his creations!

I’ve only ever seen David Bowie once in my lifetime, it was in 2003 when he was supported by the Dandy Warhols, another band I really like. I couldn’t get Bowie tickets for love or money, but I ended up with a spare Blur ticket (they were playing the Barrowlands that same month. Bowie, Dandy Warhols and Blur all playing in Glasgow at the same time, what a time to be alive), so I swapped my spare Blur ticket for a Bowie ticket.

It was a standing ticket and me and my friend managed to get close to the front to see Bowie for what would be my one and only time. He looked great, the songs were incredible and Bowie was just a fantastic performer; great on-stage banter that I still remember 15 years later (he told a story about drinking in a pub in Glasgow and seeing a drunken Scottish guy with blood all over his face just calmly walk in for a pint).

It really was a special moment that almost didn’t happen. I’ve been to hundreds of live shows over the years but Bowie was just something else.

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When David Bowie Launched His Eye-Popping ‘Glass Spider’ Tour

David Bowie  was a performer ahead of his time – in his music, his image and his live performances. His 1987 Glass Spider tour was the biggest live spectacle of his career, an undertaking so massive that Bowie would never attempt to repeat it, despite the trek's success.

The tour was in support of the Never Let Me Down  album, which was intended as a return to rock for Bowie after exploring mainstream pop on previous releases. He conceptualized a big, bold, innovative experiment in blending an arena rock show with theatrical elements, groundbreaking staging and choreography.

"It's written and structured with various thematic devices," Bowie said at the time. "If this works the way I hope it does, then the next step for me will be to write a piece specifically for arenas and stadiums, which is almost like taking a musical on the road that has one narrative form all the way through, with a cast of characters, and is written for epic theater. I'm testing the waters with this tour."

Bowie assembled a team that included five dancers (under the direction of choreographer Toni Basil, famous for the No. 1 hit "Mickey"), saxophone, trumpet, congas and violin. He tapped Peter Frampton – who had just launched a semi-successful comeback after several years of retirement – to play guitar on both the album and tour.

Watch David Bowie Perform on the Glass Spider Tour

The entire ensemble rehearsed for 12 hours a day in New York before kicking off the tour on May 30, 1987 at Stadion Feijenoord in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The set list included the bulk of the new album, as well as a number of lesser-known songs from Bowie's catalog. The massive stage set consisted of a giant spider with vacuum tube legs that were lit from the inside, and Bowie would emerge from the spider's head for the show's dramatic encore.

The tour was financially the most successful of Bowie's career to that time, but both it and the album it supported were met with a mixed critical reception. Though Bowie would later state that he felt the tour paved the way for many elements that became important in subsequent live productions from other acts, he found the rigors of the show so exhausting that he chose to scale down his future road shows.

The tour was documented in a popular home-video release, Glass Spider , a year later in 1988, and then released on DVD in 2007.

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Who Can I Be Now? How David Bowie Spent 1974

David Bowie in September of 1974 onstage in Los Angeles. Terry O'Neill/Getty Images hide caption

David Bowie in September of 1974 onstage in Los Angeles.

To say that 1974 was a year of change and challenge for David Bowie and his fans is an understatement as extreme as the lurid outfits he'd worn as his just-abandoned alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. The incubator for the evolution was Bowie's U.S. tour that year, which began in Montreal on June 14 — 40 years ago this weekend.

In July of 1973, at the peak of his success, Bowie unexpectedly retired Ziggy — the character and vehicle he'd ridden to fame after nearly a decade of trying. In the months that followed, he abandoned his band, his home and the city (London) and country that spawned him. By the spring of 1974, he'd ditched the zipper haircut, platform heels and vivid glam fashions that he, more than anyone, had brought to the mainstream. And by the end of that year he'd basically abandoned rock 'n' roll altogether.

While the Beatles had acclimated the even-then largely complacent rock audience to changes of sound and vision, at the fateful age of 27, Bowie — fueled by exploding creativity, success and not least the white powder to which he'd become addicted — would try the patience of even his most dedicated fans, producing music that wasn't dauntingly strange and experimental (that would come later), but instead too normal and everyday for many of his fans: the R&B that saturated FM radio at the time. That style might have seemed exotic to a Brit, but it was the exact sound that most American rock fans were trying to escape.

That the two studio albums associated with the tour — Diamond Dogs , released in March of '74 was already a departure, being musically more subtle than its comparatively garish predecessor, Aladdin Sane , and Young Americans , put out a year later and featuring Bowie's first U.S. No. 1 single, "Fame" — made him into a star in America is perhaps the strangest twist of all.

The 73-date tour also underwent a stylistic change every bit as tectonic as the one Bowie's music was undergoing. At its outset, the Diamond Dogs tour was by far the most extravagant and expensive rock outing ever mounted: designed by Broadway veterans Jules Fisher and Mark Ravitz and choreographed by Toni Basil, it featured a towering set depicting the post-apocalyptic city in which the loosely conceptual album was based. It included a catwalk that lowered from the rafters to stage level and a cherry-picker that lofted Bowie 40 feet above the first dozen rows of the audience (and occasionally failed to bring him back). But after 10 weeks of shows, due to expense or boredom, he abandoned the set and the setlist, going for a more stripped-down presentation and an overhauled R&B sound.

"I sunk myself back into the music that I considered the bedrock of all popular music: R&B and soul," Bowie recalled to writer David Buckley years later. "I guess from the outside it seemed to be a pretty drastic move. I think I probably lost as many fans as I gained new ones."

It's one of the most drastic image/sound changes in the modern era, and it was just the beginning of the transformations Bowie would make over the next several years. Over the course of the tour, Bowie would drive himself, his band and his audience to the brink: himself to the edge of exhaustion via the physical challenges of the show, overwork and drug abuse; his band to the brink of its musical abilities, energy and salary requirements; his audience to the brink of its patience.

"I went to the Diamond Dogs show [in June] expecting something like Ziggy Stardust," said fan John Neilson, who caught both incarnations of the tour in Detroit. "And then in October I expected to see something like Diamond Dogs, and it was the soul revue. It might as well have been a completely different artist."

The basis for the tour and its initial extravagant set lay in Diamond Dogs ' post-apocalyptic world of street urchins and nefarious characters, like Halloween Jack; the album was the end result of an unsuccessful attempt to create a rock musical from George Orwell's 1984 , which had been blocked by Orwell's widow. While the album — and its classic lead single, "Rebel Rebel," which was finishing a Top 5 run in the U.K. at the time Bowie arrived in New York on April 11 — retained elements of the aborted musical, like Ziggy Stardust , it's a loose concept album not bound to a straight storyline; the songs act as signposts around which listeners can create their own narrative.

David Bowie in February 1974 in the Netherlands. Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns hide caption

David Bowie in February 1974 in the Netherlands.

"I had in my mind this kind of half Wild Boys/1984 world, and there were these ragamuffins, but they were a bit more violent than ragamuffins," Bowie told Buckley. "They'd taken over this barren city, this city that was falling apart. ... I had the Diamond Dogs living in the streets. They were all little Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses, really."

That storyline carried over to the show. Framed by towering skyscrapers, Bowie moved from one elaborate scenario to another: He performed "Sweet Thing" from the catwalk as it gradually lowered to the stage floor; was projected over the audience via the cherry-picker as he sang "Space Oddity" into a red telephone microphone; French-kissed a skull during "Cracked Actor"; sang "Time" behind a giant hand festooned with blinking light bulbs that dropped to reveal Bowie inside a neon light box; performed an elaborate walking mime during "Aladdin Sane" very reminiscent of Michael Jackson's world-famous Moonwalk, unveiled a decade later (Jackson attended one of Bowie's shows in Los Angeles in September). The Ziggy-era platforms and costumes were replaced by a suave new Bowie, clad in an Yves St. Laurent suit and flat shoes, with a bright orange but calm soul-boy haircut.

Bowie's new band was equally state of the art. Herbie Flowers — who'd worked with Bowie since the mid-'60s and played the timeless bassline on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" — and drummer Tony Newman were veteran British session musicians who'd played on Diamond Dogs . Virtuoso pianist Michael Garson and backing singer Geoff MacCormack (aka Warren Peace) remained from Bowie's 1973 band. Classically trained New Yorker Michael Kamen — a future Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated film composer whose scoring work for the Joffrey Ballet had impressed Bowie — was enlisted as musical director. Kamen brought along two musicians from his former rock bands: future superstar jazz saxophonist David Sanborn and 22-year-old guitarist Earl Slick, who would work with Bowie many times in the coming decades, and also performed on John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy .

The latter got a call from Kamen one day in April and was told he'd be hearing from an important musician he refused to identify.

"I get a phone call from the Bowie people the next day and they set up an audition — which is the weirdest f- - -ing thing I've ever done in my life," Slick, who speaks in a Brooklynese as rapid-fire as his solos, recalls. "David's personal assistant meets me at RCA Studios in New York, and she walks me not to the control room, which is dark, but into the main studio. I get out my guitar and I hear a voice with an American accent saying, 'Hey, how ya doin'? Put the headphones on. We're gonna play you some tracks, just play along.' I say, 'What key are they in?' He says, 'Don't worry about it.' And he just starts rolling tape! I'm playing over tracks from Diamond Dogs , which [hadn't been released yet] — I've never heard these songs, I don't know what I'm doing.

"I'm out there for maybe 15 minutes and there's a little bit of chatter between me and this American guy — who turns out to be [longtime Bowie producer] Tony Visconti — and about two minutes later Bowie walks in," he continues. "We hung out for about half an hour, fiddling around with guitars. His assistant says, 'We'll call you in the next couple weeks.' But the phone rang the next day and they said, 'If you want it, you got it.' "

Over the following weeks, the band — filled out by saxophonist Richard Grando, percussionist Pablo Rosario and backing singer Gui Andrisano — worked up radically new arrangements of Bowie's catalog, which were strongly influenced by New York City nightlife. Bowie had become friends with guitarist Carlos Alomar — a veteran of James Brown's and Wilson Pickett's bands, as well as the Apollo Theater's house band — who took the singer to the Apollo and elsewhere to see The Temptations, The Spinners and Marvin Gaye; he also hit Latin clubs and other nightspots in the city's budding disco scene, as well as rock haunts like Max's Kansas City.

That influence was immediately felt not just in the soul covers the band played on the first leg of the tour — Eddie Floyd's 1966 classic "Knock on Wood," the Ohio Players' 1968 song "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow" — but also in the reinventions of Bowie's catalog, which went far beyond the blistering power-trio rock of the Ziggy era. "Aladdin Sane" received a Latin treatment driven by Garson's manic piano; "Jean Genie" slowed to a lounge crawl on the verses and completely dispensed with its signature riff; even the brand-new "Rebel Rebel" got a looser tempo and jazzy backing vocals.

"He was hanging out a lot in New York," fan Kathy Miller recalls. "I remember seeing him and his entourage snowed in during a blizzard at a [April 22] New York Dolls show at Kenny's Castaways, and friends of mine saw him at Puerto Rican discos, black discos. So it was not such a shock to New Yorkers that he gravitated toward that kind of music."

After dress rehearsals at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y. — "Two days? Maybe more, because that was one complicated f- - -ing thing," Slick says — the entire production headed up the Northway to Montreal for the first of what would ultimately be 30 dates of the initial leg of the Diamond Dogs tour. Not surprisingly, the opening night had more than a few rough spots. The sound system was distorted, and the catwalk plummeted dangerously to the stage floor with Bowie on it, a problem that happened more than once.

The kinks were gradually worked out and the tour carried on across the Northeast and South, playing major venues — Cleveland's Public Auditorium for two nights, Detroit's Cobo Hall, Nashville's Municipal Auditorium — but also many smaller, less-likely markets and theaters, like Charleston, W.Va.; Dayton and Toledo, Ohio; Norfolk, Va. While most nights went off without a hitch, the complexity of the set continued to cause problems.

At the Norfolk show, Rob Holland, then 14, recalls, "I remember the cherry-picker got stuck: It moved for a minute and then it moved again to the side of the stage, but then it got stuck and he had to get off of it."

On at least one other night, the cherry-picker extended to its full length but failed to retract, leaving Bowie stranded over the audience. "When he finished the song he had to shimmy along the [cherry-picker's hydraulic] arm back to the stage," Tony Visconti writes in the David Live liner notes. "Members of the audience were standing on their seats trying to grab him and pull him down. On that night, this was perceived as part of the show: David made it seem to look that way, climbing back in a dramatic, purposeful way."

While many were dazzled by the stage and the theatrics, some weren't so impressed. "I really liked the set, but I've always felt it would have been a much better show if they had really exploited it, doing Diamond Dogs semi-theatrically and really using the staging," John Neilson says. "He did use it for 'Sweet Thing,' but the rest of the time it just sorta loomed in the background. It was a kind of wasted opportunity."

Brad Elvis, formerly of The Elvis Brothers and currently in The Romantics and The Handcuffs, caught shows in Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio. "It got a good reaction, but it wasn't like pandemonium," he remembers. He and a couple of friends did, however, spend time with Bowie and band members at a hotel-room party after the Toledo show — where he witnessed the growing R&B influence firsthand.

"There were about five other people in this cramped little room, and they had this big boombox," he says. "Kind of dancey R&B was playing, and one of the [backing singers] was showing Bowie these dance moves. Everybody's dancing, having fun, getting loose, except us — we're watching, wide-eyed."

David Bowie onstage at Madison Square Garden in New York City on July 20, 1974. Ron Galella/WireImage hide caption

David Bowie onstage at Madison Square Garden in New York City on July 20, 1974.

Occasionally parts of the set would be too large for a venue, forcing the crew to scale down the show, but only once on the tour's first leg did Bowie perform without it completely. En route to Tampa, Fla., one of the drivers was stung by a bee and crashed a truck carrying key elements of the set into a swamp. Cancellation was considered but "David would not hear of it," according to an announcement made to the crowd, and the show proceeded. During the set Bowie apologized for it not being "the show I'd hoped to bring you" and played a rare encore.

As the tour's first leg reached its home stretch in mid-July, with a run of six shows at Philadelphia's fabled Tower Theater, the show was beset by a problem that had nothing to do with technology. Eager to get a live album on the market before the tour concluded, Bowie's then-manager, Tony Defries, arranged to have the Tower shows recorded. Live recordings ordinarily entitle the musicians to a much higher fee than Bowie's touring group was receiving (Slick recalls getting $300 per week), but Defries attempted to sidestep that issue.

"Back in the day, if you were recording, there were two microphones on everything: one would go to the [venue's] sound, and one would go to the [mobile recording] truck," Slick says. "At sound check, I didn't think anything of it, but Herbie picked up on it right away. Tony Defries was one of the biggest f- - -ing shysters on the planet, and [earlier that day] I had gotten a letter pushed under my hotel door offering me $300 basically to give my rights over. Not long after that, Herbie is on the phone with everybody saying, 'This is bulls- - -, we're not gonna do this.' Basically, with Herbie being the spokesperson, we said we ain't going onstage until we get an agreement for X amount of money, period. They agreed to it, we signed it — and we didn't get paid, so we sued David. We won, but it took a long, long time to get the money. I know David pitched a serious fit on Herbie, and I think he was kinda s- - - -y for a couple of days, but then everybody got past it."

Still, the bad vibes come through on David Live , released in the fall. Bowie's voice is strained, and the band, while competent, played better on other nights of the tour, as bootleg evidence shows.

The tour wrapped with two nights at Madison Square Garden, Bowie's first performances at the venue.

"The stage show got a lot of advance buzz," Kathy Miller remembers. "We couldn't wait to see this set, and it really lived up to the expectations, it was gorgeous. But the [cherry-picker] reminded me of a telephone repairman — it was not glamorous; it was actually very Spinal Tap ! It looked dangerous and rickety — there really was a sense of, 'Oh, my God, is this going to work?'"

The shows were a triumph, and an after party was held at The Plaza, during which Bowie, Mick Jagger and Bette Midler reportedly disappeared into a walk-in closet for an hour.

"It was quite an unbelievable, unbelievable headache, that tour, but it was spectacular," Bowie told Buckley. "It was truly the first real rock 'n' roll theatrical show that made any sense. A lot of people feel it has never been bettered. It was something else, it really was."

Despite its enormous expense and problems, the tour helped drive Diamond Dogs to No. 5 in the U.S. — by far his highest chart position at the time.

In early August, many of the band members gathered in Philadelphia to begin work on the album that would become Young Americans , which is where the R&B transformation truly took hold.

While Bowie had originally intended to work with the house band at the city's Sigma Sound — which had spawned hits by The O'Jays, Lou Rawls, The Three Degrees and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes — they were unavailable due to a scheduling conflict, and he brought in several members of his touring band, as well as some key new collaborators who would play a huge role in the album: Alomar; his wife, soul singer Robin Clark; and a young friend, future R&B superstar Luther Vandross. The latter two, along for the ride, were playfully riffing on one of the songs in the studio; Bowie loved it and had them sing on nearly every song. It was the first high-profile work of Vandross' career.

Although Bowie was raised on American R&B, like most British musicians of his generation — and he'd even performed James Brown's "You Got to Have a Job" during the Ziggy Stardust era — the resulting sessions produced music that resembled nothing he had ever done before. Alomar, Sanborn and the singers became Bowie's primary musical foils, often working in a soulful call-and-response role with him on songs like "Fascination" (a rewrite of Vandross' composition "Funky Music"), "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and the title track. Bowie, fueled by cocaine, taxed the energy of the musicians by working largely from 11 p.m. until late the following morning.

(The album sessions, which resumed in November and again in January, featured two more star appearances. Bruce Springsteen, whom Bowie had admired since seeing a New York performance in 1972, visited the sessions but ultimately did not contribute to Bowie's cover of his "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City." More fruitful was a visit from Bowie's new friend John Lennon, who was lured to the studio by being asked to contribute to Bowie's excruciatingly overblown cover of Lennon's "Across the Universe," but ended up co-writing "Fame" — a studio creation conjured from Bowie's cover of the Flares' 1961 R&B hit "Footstompin'.")

While he dismissed the album as "plastic" not long after its release, Bowie later recanted. "In 1976 I spouted some nonsense about the album being 'synthetic radio stuff.' I don't believe that for one moment now," he told Buckley. "I was living and breathing soul and R&B at this time. I listened to nothing else. It became America for me."

While Bowie's cocaine appetite was severe before the '74 tour began, it had escalated dramatically by the time dates resumed at the end of the summer. A brief second leg of the tour kicked off with a seven-night run at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, and it was at this time that director Alan Yentob interviewed Bowie and filmed the shows for the hourlong BBC documentary Cracked Actor . The Bowie on display there is an unsettling sight: fidgety, awkward and alarmingly thin and pale, he's intelligent but remote and removed; at other times he's in the throes of cocaine paranoia, wondering whether his car is being followed, sniffling and licking his gums. At one of the Universal concerts, captured on the A Portrait in Flesh bootleg, Bowie speaks to the crowd almost exclusively in a bizarre pseudo-Italian accent, making inscrutable jokes.

The Bowie that emerges in the documentary is so odd and otherworldly that it convinced Nicolas Roeg he'd found the perfect person to portray the alien in his forthcoming film The Man Who Fell to Earth , which would mark Bowie's feature-length debut the following year.

While the set and setlist were retained for the Universal shows and a few more Southwest dates, the show was completely re-conceived during a break over the second half of September. The city set was abandoned, and the new staging relied on dramatic lighting and clever use of silhouettes (a 50-foot shadow of Bowie was projected onto a screen behind the stage for "1984"). Bowie changed his wardrobe and hairstyle yet again, adopting a sweeping pompadour, jackets embellished with shoulder pads, a thick checkered tie, suspenders, baggy pants and occasionally a cane.

Most of all, the band was overhauled to re-create the Young Americans sound: Alomar, Vandross, Clark and three other singers who performed on "Young Americans" were brought on board; and Bowie recruited his fifth different rhythm section in a year's time: rock-solid drummer Dennis Davis (who, like Alomar, would be with Bowie for the rest of the decade) and bassist Emir Ksasan. Garson was made musical director, and Bowie's revamped backing band became the opening act for the tour, cruising through a 30-minute set of smooth takes on songs like "Stormy Monday," The O'Jays' "Love Train" and Vandross' "Funky Music" before concluding, strangest of all, with a lite-R&B treatment of Bowie's own "Memory of a Free Festival," a hippie anthem from his 1969 Space Oddity album. The crowds hated them.

While the Bowie set that followed kicked off reassuringly with either "Rebel Rebel" or "Space Oddity," it then headed straight into R&B and ballad territory: a funked up version of "John I'm Only Dancing," a samba-fied "Sorrow," "Changes." Rocked-up versions of "Moonage Daydream" and "Diamond Dogs" were thrown in, but a huge dollop of the unreleased Young Americans was aired on most nights — along with "Footstompin'," which would form the basis of "Fame" — before the shows concluded with a one-two punch of "Suffragette City" and "Rock and Roll Suicide."

The tour, beginning on Oct. 5 in St. Paul, Minn., soldiered across the Midwest, East and South over the ensuing seven weeks, setting up residencies in several cities — seven nights at New York's Radio City Music Hall, six in Detroit, three in Boston — before closing in Atlanta on Dec. 1. Bowie's precious voice, ravaged by cocaine abuse and months of touring, was hoarse on at least a few occasions. Audiences were nonplussed at best by the new production.

"I'd bought a really glam outfit: a top with bell sleeves, skin-tight jeans and mile-high, red-leather platform boots," recalls Lisa Seckler-Roode, who attended one of the Radio City shows. "People came dressed as Ziggy Stardust, with the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt on their faces. It was sort of like Wigstock: I remember the cops looking at the crowd and shaking their heads.

"But when Bowie came out in that suit," she sighs, "I mean, he looked glorious, but it was such a change that the crowd was totally thrown — the atmosphere was just, ' Huh? What's he doing now?' In retrospect it was a very bold move, but the initial reaction was really confused. I remember going to school the following Monday: 'How was the show?' 'It sucked!' "

Neilson recalls a similar reaction in Detroit. "The soul show threw everyone, since the album wasn't out yet and there was a lot of new material," he says. "The audience reaction was more polite than [hostile], for the most part, because obviously everyone loved Bowie and gave him the benefit of a doubt. But it was muted appreciation at best and probably some quiet disapproval."

At least one musician onstage shared the sentiment. "I gotta be honest with you, I wasn't terribly thrilled with it," says Slick, whose guitar roars out at a searing volume on bootlegs during the rare occasions he got the spotlight. "[During the opening set] there wasn't a whole lot for me to do. For the Bowie set I was back on it, but even with that, the way it was being played wasn't rock 'n' roll anymore."

Bowie's appearance on The Dick Cavett Show , taped early in November during the Radio City stint, is fascinating, mixing new, (relatively) old and obscure: The band charges through a fast "1984," Bowie straps on his Ziggy-era 12-string acoustic as the singers groove for "Young Americans," and concludes with the still-unreleased "Footstompin'."

While Bowie is in strong form, if a bit hoarse, when performing, his interview with Cavett could function as an anti-cocaine ad. He fidgets relentlessly with a cane he used as a prop during the performance, sniffles and appears completely ill at ease — at one point Cavett asks him if he's nervous. "Um ... oh, let's carry on talking," he replies. "Don't ask me that. Otherwise I'll wonder, you see. I'd rather not know if I'm nervous until ... " he trails off.

During the interview, he's perhaps most cogent when explaining his rationale for his new look and sound. "We did the Diamond Dogs tour and took it from New York to Los Angeles, and I felt that that was enough, really. Rather than come back with the same thing, I wanted to give myself an opportunity just to work with the band. ... I got a lot of fulfillment from working in productions like Diamond Dogs or Ziggy Stardust . But now that I'm working with just a band and singing, which is something I haven't done for years, I'm finding a new kind of fulfillment."

Judging from the reaction of fans and the tepid-to-negative reviews the show received, Bowie's audience was not yet ready for that new kind of fulfillment.

Somehow, from such unpromising origins, from such a turbulent, tumultuous, drug-addled year — one that saw Bowie poised for enormous success yet opting not just to challenge his audience but almost to defy it — after 73 concerts and against daunting odds, the tour helped accomplish the ultimate goal: breaking David Bowie in America. Diamond Dogs reached No. 5 on the Billboard charts. David Live went to No. 8. The Young Americans album hit No. 9, and the title track was his first U.S. Top 40 single, peaking at 29. And "Fame" was a global hit single, became Bowie's first U.S. No. 1 and made him into a superstar. In 1975, he relocated to Los Angeles, launched his movie career, and became an all-around entertainer who appeared on both Soul Train and Cher .

(Despite its now-legendary status, Bowie's 1974 tour is tragically ill-documented. Apart from fan-filmed super-8 footage, the only video documentation of the Hunger City set that has surfaced is Fisher and Ravitz discussing this scale model in the 1996 BBC documentary Hang on to Yourself . (the Cracked Actor documentary shows frustratingly little of the stage). Likewise, apart from a one-minute-long, professionally filmed segment from a Radio City show that aired in a VH1 Legends episode, no footage from the soul concerts has emerged, although the Cavett show at least documents some performances. While some sources say Bowie filmed rehearsals and the Garden shows, and the VH1 footage suggests there's more somewhere, Slick says he has no recollection of any shows being filmed.)

And while many, including this writer, consider Young Americans to be his weakest 1970s studio album, that is hardly an insult. In terms of influence, it's hard to know where to begin: Virtually every artist bearing a trace of white soul since its release — from Robert Palmer to Duran Duran, from George Michael to Robbie Williams and far beyond — owes more than a "sho'nuff" and some hair gel to it.

Ultimately, Young Americans and the Soul Tour were way stations: like everything Bowie had done before, he ingested and used them as a foundation for what came next. In this case, it was the pioneering ice-funk of Station to Station , arguably one of his two best albums, and one that paved the way not only for thousands of artists who were influenced by it, but also for the brilliant wave of experimentation that followed over the next five years: Low, Heroes, Lodger and Scary Monsters . But that's another story ...

Sources: David Buckley's stellar liner notes to the deluxe editions of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans , and Tony Visconti's for David Live ; Kevin Cann's David Bowie: Any Day Now, The London Years 1947-74 ; Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray's David Bowie: An Illustrated Record ; Chris Carter's " The Young American" site ; Chris O'Leary's " Pushing Ahead of the Dame" site ; and especially Roger Griffin's " Golden Years" site .

Special thanks to Ira Robbins, Jennifer Kennedy, Julian Stockton and especially everyone who took the time to be interviewed for this article.

David Bowie: 30 things you need to know about the late rock icon

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David Bowie's life was wild and weird, dark and beautiful, and his genius so diverse that it's impossible to catalogue his output, never mind his legacy or his influence.

His is exactly the kind of life that offers up millions of anecdotes, stories, memories and facts. Musician, actor, producer, artist, writer, performer — Bowie was endless, a giant. His passing on Jan. 10 at the relatively young age of 69 seems impossible and unfathomable.

There's no real way to adequately quantify an artist like David Bowie, so instead we dug deep into the archives, reading old interviews and unearthing cool facts and fascinating tidbits from his life. It's a list that could have gone on forever. Instead, consider this is a kaleidoscope overview of 30 things you need to know about David Bowie.

1. By 1970, Bowie had already written 137 songs .

"I've always written all my own songs. I've had 137 published so far and my latest L.P. is all my own. I also did another one years ago when I was the first singer to record an L.P. before doing a single. My stage act consists entirely of my own material, apart from one or two songs that I like very much — 'Port of Amsterdam' by Jacques Brel and 'Buzz the Fuzz' by Biff Rose."

2. Bowie spent years studying under Lindsay Kemp, " Britain's leading exponent of mime ."

"I taught him to exaggerate with his body a well as his voice, and the importance of looking as well as sounding beautiful. Ever since working with me he's practise that, and in each performance he does, his movements are more exquisite.

The mime uses gestures to convey his inner beauty; it's his natural way of doing it, and the only way he can do it marvellously. Bowie does that with his voice, so his gestures aren't truly those of a mime. But he has learned to free his body, and he now dances constantly. This is what I endeavour to teach everyone who studies with me — to free what is already there. Everybody has that dove flying around inside them, and to let it fly is a fabulous experience. That's why Isadora Duncan danced, and Pavlova danced — because they loved the moment when they actually became swans, not just impersonating them as actors do. Pavlova actually became a swan, and had a great time while she was up there. And so am I."

3. David Bowie and Elvis Presley were born 12 years apart, but they shared the same birthday, Jan. 8.

Bowie was asked about this confluence of events a lot in his lifetime. Our favourite Elvis/Bowie quote is from Interview magazine : "At no point did I ever doubt I would be as near as anybody could be to England's Elvis Presley. Even from eight or nine years old, I thought, 'Well, I'll be the greatest rock star in England.' I just made up my mind."

4. Vince Taylor, or "the French Presley", was the inspiration for Bowie's creation, Ziggy Stardust.

"He always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock 'n' roll.... And so he re-emerged in this Ziggy Stardust character," Bowie said in an interview with Q Magazine .

5. Bowie loved a good public library.

In a 2004 interview with Sean Moeller (future founder of the Daytrotter sessions), Bowie recalled flying to New York City to see Presley at Madison Square Garden — a fact Bowie had confirmed for himself by reading the New York Public Library desk reference fourth edition. Here's part of their conversation:

Q: What kinds of things are you getting from that [the New York Public Library desk reference fourth edition]?

A: Dumb things. I just found out what day I went to see Elvis Presley in 1972. They have the calendars from which you can look up any year and found out what any date was. So I now know that I flew over to see Presley on Friday, June the 9th, 1972. I knew it was in June sometime and I kind of knew that he was on around the 9th or 10th at Madison Square Garden and I didn't know which day I'd gone.

I had a gig on the Thursday night at the Polytechnic in Middlesbrough so I dashed down to London that night after the gig, got on the plane early in the morning, just made the concert - I got in late to the concert and he was already doing "Proud Mary." Then that night I had a quick sleep and got up early, early the next morning and got on a flight back to London and played a gig the next night. So I literally saw him between gigs. I absolutely had to see him before anything happened to him. He was pretty good at that time. He was still in pretty great shape and it wasn't that long after the black leather show that was on television.

6. A childhood scrap left him permanently injured.

His left pupil was permanently dilated after George Underwood punched him in the eye over a girl.

7. Bowie considered himself a "prop" for his songs .

"I want to make myself a vehicle, a prop for my songs. I've always been aware of how the actor must clothe himself for the role he is portraying."

8. Bowie's " number one idol " was Little Richard.

"He was pretty much the main man for me. I think it was his sax lineup. I just loved the saxophones in that band. I just felt that that was the group I was going to join when I grew up because I was like nine when he happened in Britain. I just wanted to be a part of that sax lineup." [Bowie began playing the saxophone at the age of nine.]

9. He never whistled in theatre dressing rooms .

"That's something you're told not to do as soon as you start in the theatre — but that's more of a habit. I'm not superstitious about it or anything else."

10. In 1975, Bowie declared that rock was "a boring dead end" and that he was over it.

"There will be no more rock 'n' roll records or tours from me. The last thing I want to be is some useless f--king rock singer." But as Playboy notes in its 1976 feature interview , Bowie's declaration was a tad premature: later that year, he released Station to Station , which Playboy called a new album of "double-fisted rock 'n' roll."

11. In 1976, Bowie told Cameron Crowe, via Playboy, about how he staved off boredom: lying.

"I lie. It's quite easy to do. Nothing matters except whatever it is I'm doing at the moment. I can't keep track of everything I say. I don't give a shit. I can't even remember how much I believe and how much I don't believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven't a clue where I'm gonna be in a year. A raving nut, a flower child or a dictator, some kind of reverend — I don't know. That's what keeps me from getting bored."

12. Corinne "Coco" Schwab, Bowie's longtime personal assistant, best friend and also, allegedly, an ex-lover.

He told rock journalist Lesley-Anne Jones that in the mid-'70s Schwab became the most important person in his life. "My whole lifestyle at that time made me quite bonkers, and I had a complete breakdown. Coco was the one person who told me what a fool I was becoming and she made me snap out of it."

13. He wrote his 1987 song, "Never Let Me Down", about Schwab.

"'Never Let Me Down' is a pivotal track for me. It's probably the most personal thing I've written for ... albums. I don't know if I've written anything quite that emotive of how I feel about somebody. Other tracks I think are too schematic to ... a lot of them are allegorical and I just wanted to sort of right on the nose."

14. Bowie's changeling ability confounded many, maybe even the man himself, but eventually he settled into his own skin — or so he thought.

In 1983, Jones interviewed Bowie again. This is her recollection :

"The spangled, half-strangled, androgynous weirdo who had vanished from the scene five years earlier had metamorphosed into an athlete filming an ad for breakfast cereal. He was barely recognisable: cool, elegant, clean-cut, his hair baby-blond to offset a classy light suit. Instead of the tombstone bits and pieces, he now flashed perfect teeth.

'I was tired of the idea of being a freakish cult figure,' he told me. 'I wanted to do something more accessible, more soulful, a bit more R&B, and I've been overwhelmed by the response. I certainly didn't expect this much limelight. It's a joy to me. I have never performed like this before in my life. I feel so much more relaxed, now that I'm not carting some character around with me any longer. At long last, I think I have learned how to be myself.'"

15. In 1995, though, Bowie had a different recollection about his "Let's Dance" era.

"I went mainstream in a major way with the song 'Let's Dance'. I pandered to that in my next few albums, and what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did 'Let's Dance', and it was driving me mad — because it took all my passion for experimenting away."

16. He was an excellent talent scout.

Luther Vandross supplied the backing vocals on Bowie's 1975 album, Young Americans .

17. He was also willing to help out musicians he loved without making himself the star of the show.

Bowie did the handclaps on T-Rex's "Debora".

18. Bowie was not BFFs with Andy Warhol.

Though Bowie had played Andy Warhol himself in Julian Schnabel's 1996 film, Basquiat , Bowie didn't mince words about the famed artist's legacy in a 2002 interview :

"I'm not sure that there's such a thing as a fond memory of Andy Warhol. He was a strange fish. Even people who say they knew him well, I don't think they did. I certainly didn't know him well."

19. Bowie was a boxing fan .

"I quite like boxing — but that's only because I use it as a training method. Just recently I've started again. You look at yourself and think [pats stomach] that could go. And boxing's not as boring as pumping bleedin' metal all day, which bores the shit out of me."

20. David Bowie starred in the 1980 Broadway production of The Elephant Man .

The New York Times' John Corry called him "splendid."

21. He helped christen a new stadium in Vancouver, B.C.

Bowie performed the first rock concert at Vancouver's BC Place in 1983 , a few weeks following its grand opening, for a crowd of more than 50,000 fans.

22. In 1983, Bowie challenged MTV about the racism in its music video rotation .

Bowie: Why are there practically no blacks on the network?

Mark Goodman: We seem to be doing music that fits into what we want to play on MTV. The company is thinking in terms of narrow-casting.

Bowie: There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't being used on MTV.

Goodman: We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by... a string of other black faces or black music. We have to play music we think an entire country is going to like, and certainly we're a rock and roll station.

Bowie: Don't you think it's a frightening predicament to be in?

Goodman: Yeah, but not less so here than in radio.

Bowie: Don't say, 'Well, it's not me, it's them.' Is it not possible it should be a conviction of the station and of the radio stations to be fair...to make the media more integrated?

23. Bowie also brought some attention to Quebec.

He recorded his 1984 album, Tonight , in Quebec's famed Le Studio.

24. Bowie first collaborated with Montreal dancers La La La Human Steps in 1988.

From CBC Montreal : Édouard Lock, the group's founder, said Bowie made decisions based on the "adventures he wanted to live.... He made society run after himself rather than him trying to see how to best fit into the mores of the time."

25. Bowie participated in a three-day 1987 concert in Berlin, which may have helped change history .

The German Foreign Office tweeted this memorial for Bowie with a link to the video of his performance of "Heroes", which has since been removed from YouTube. 

Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Heroes?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Heroes</a>. Thank you for helping to bring down the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/wall?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#wall</a>. <a href="https://t.co/soaOUWiyVl">https://t.co/soaOUWiyVl</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RIPDavidBowie?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#RIPDavidBowie</a> &mdash; @GermanyDiplo

26. He was immortalized in Hollywood almost 20 years before his death.

He received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1997.

27. Bowie gave the 1999 commencement address at Berklee College of Music.

Bowie reflected on everything from John Lennon (he compares their behaviour together to that of Beavis and Butthead on Crossfire ) to Shirley Bassey, but it's this excerpt that resonates the mostly deeply.

"Music has given me over 40 years of extraordinary experiences. I can't say that life's pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it's allowed me so many moments of companionship when I've been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It's been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in."

Read the speech in its entirety .

28. He wasn't just a visionary artist — he literally became art.

Bowie's life and art were catalogued in David Bowie Is , an incredible museum exhibit that originated at the Victoria and Albert Museum and travelled to Toronto's AGO in 2013. It was an overview of his entire creative life, but it also offered up fascinating insights into his less public self, including this 1978 self-portrait.

29. Bowie rejected most low brow and high brow differentiators.

He voiced the character Lord Royal Highness in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie .

30. He believed that creativity was, essentially, priceless.

In 2013, Bowie made his "Love is Lost" music video for just $12.99 — and a little help from his friends, plus a few creepy/cool puppets from his archives.

Hang out with me on Twitter: @_AndreaWarner

David Bowie’s 1987 Slump Held Its Own Weird Magic

His much-maligned album Never Let Me Down and the dazzling Glass Spider Tour it spawned were the work of a veteran artist in the throes of metamorphosis.

In his 1980 song “Ashes to Ashes,” David Bowie sang of how his long-running character, the doomed astronaut Major Tom, was “hitting an all-time low.” Seven years later, Bowie found himself in similar straits. Never Let Me Down , his seventeenth album, was released in April of 1987 to middling sales and critical hostility. It was his first album in 16 years to fail to crack the British Top Five. The Glass Spider Tour, lavish and overstuffed, kicked off a month later and was equally panned. As the magazine Smash Hits trolled at the time, “If Dame David Bowie is such a bleeding chameleon, why, pray, can’t he change into something more exciting than the skin of an aging rock plodder?”

Bowie turned 40 that year, and he became caught in a backlash against rock’s aging aristocracy. He’d pulled off a coup at the start of the decade with the massive, career-boosting success of his album Let’s Dance , but by 1985, he was hamming it up with Mick Jagger during their hollow cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.” The slickly produced and tepidly executed Never Let Me Down was panned as being just as self-indulgent. Time hasn’t softened that consensus. Thirty years later, in his book On Bowie , Rob Sheffield called Never Let Me Down “an all-time low”—as if to echo Bowie’s own lyrics in “Ashes to Ashes.” Lesser albums by popular artists are routinely relegated to the dustbin of history—or at the very least, the tail end of online rankings and listicles. But there’s as much to be learned from the dead ends and disappointments of great artists like Bowie as there is from their triumphs and masterpieces.

Recommended Reading

Capturing David Bowie

David Bowie's Perfect Farewell

The Resurrections of David Bowie

Never Let Me Down , ironically, was one of Bowie’s biggest letdowns. There was a sly self-awareness about his conversion from cult figure to mainstream figurehead following Let’s Dance , a quality sorely missing from the plasticity of Never Let Me Down . The track “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love)” is stiff and static, and it’s marred even further by a rap verse from the actor Mickey Rourke, who spits some egregious rhymes about Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. Listless arrangements and cellophane-thin tones render the songs as robust as soda fizz. “Too Dizzy,” a song so emblematic of ’80s blandness that it makes Phil Collins sound like Otis Redding, was even removed by Bowie from the album’s reissues. “What, for me, was a bitter disappointment was the way [ Never Let Me Down ] turned out. It wasn’t played with any conviction,” Bowie laments in Christopher Sandford’s book Bowie: Loving the Alien . “It was studio-fied to such an extent that, halfway through the sessions, I was going out to lunch and just leaving everyone to it.”

For all of Bowie’s self-deprecation, Never Let Me Down actually marked an upward creative shift. The artist had more songwriting credits on the album than he did on either of his two previous albums, 1983’s Let’s Dance and 1984’s Tonight . And for the first time since 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps )—the album that contained “Ashes to Ashes”—he does more than just sing; he contributes guitar, harmonica, and keyboards to the recording, closer to the hands-on process he used in his ’70s prime.

Two of the album’s singles, “Day-In Day-Out” and “Never Let Me Down,” fare far better in retrospect than much of the pop-rock of 1987. The former song, despite a muddled if well-meaning message about urban poverty, boasts brassy hooks and a gutsy vocal performance from Bowie; the latter is a mix of crooning atmosphere and sultry danceability drawn straight from his Let’s Dance playbook. Meanwhile, deep cuts and B-sides like the anthemic “Zeroes” and the stripped-down, infectious “Julie” were overlooked in the rush to tag Bowie as yet another ’60s-spawned rocker who, by 1987, had lost his luster.

It’s easy to see why Never Let Me Down left so many Bowie fans and critics crestfallen. After a three-year break from releasing studio albums, this trailblazer known for his restless innovation and reinvention seemed content to tread water. But judged on its own merits, the album reflects an interplay between social consciousness, rosy nostalgia, and Bowie’s growing desire to reconnect with his craft—the superstar remembering he’s a songsmith.

Nowhere is that more evident than on “Glass Spider.” Buried in the middle of Never Let Me Down , the track is a throwback to Bowie’s high-concept work of the ’70s, most obviously Diamond Dogs and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars . It begins with a poetic, spoken-word monologue detailing a mythic creature who would decorate its web with the bones of its prey, “creating a macabre shrine of remains.” What follows is a haunting phantasmagoria tailor-made for newbies who had bought into Bowie after his major work of 1986—a starring role in Jim Henson’s dark fantasy film Labyrinth . At the same time, it dog-whistled to his longtime fans who missed the theatrical, science-fictional Bowie of old. Stark and exquisite, “Glass Spider” remains one of Bowie’s great, underappreciated songs.

The Glass Spider Tour was a more complicated affair. Bowie launched it in May of 1987 with a series of press releases around the world, in which he claimed that the upcoming concerts—spread across seven months and three continents—would be “overflowing with makeup, costumes, and theatrical sets.” It being the excessive ’80s, quantity conferred quality. The set included a 60-foot-tall illuminated spider that hovered menacingly over the stage. Bowie descended from that monstrous prop every night, seated in an office chair and reciting his monologue from “Glass Spider,” except for the nights when it was too windy to safely permit it. The stage show was comically extravagant, with up to a dozen dancers and instrumentalists flanking Bowie at any given time. A loose narrative drove parts of the performance, but the interstitial bits mostly added up to flimsy excuses for catwalks, scaffoldings, garish jumpsuits, astronaut costumes, and lots of gold lamé.

Yet this was Bowie. Although he’d dialed back his thespian tendencies since Let’s Dance , was it really so unreasonable to see him back under the veritable proscenium arch? Critics thought so. This was the year that the most buzzed-about rock album was U2’s The Joshua Tree , released in March—an album that heralded a wholesale rejection of early-’80s glitz in favor of a gritty, earnest air of dressed-down authenticity. Framed in that context, the magazine Sounds dismissed the tour as “frenzied schlock and half-baked goofing.” Chris Roberts, a former staff writer at Melody Maker admitted in David Buckley’s book Strange Fascination , “There was overwhelming peer pressure not to like [The Glass Spider Tour].” Yet, Roberts added, “It was ambitious, challenging, weird, strange, mental, and barmy, and that’s got to be good.”

Indeed, The Glass Spider Tour is as underrated as Never Let Me Down . Released as a concert movie in 1988, Glass Spider shows an acrobatic, outlandish troupe backing their equally larger-than-life frontman. The famed guitarist Peter Frampton, a childhood friend of Bowie’s, adds a fluid virtuosity to the longtime guitarist and bandleader, Carlos Alomar, who performs intrepidly with his hair sculpted into punky spikes. The set list ranges from classics like “Rebel Rebel” to fan favorites like “Sons of the Silent Age,” and from fresh singles like “Day-In Day-Out” to covers of two of Bowie’s prime influences, The Stooges and The Velvet Underground. It’s spectacular, beautiful, charmingly pretentious, and weirdly magical. Dwarfing everything is the six-story spider hunched over the stage—as impossibly grandiose, intimidating, and iconic as Bowie himself.

After the tour ended in New Zealand in November, the band and crew ceremoniously destroyed the massive prop. “It was so great to burn the spider in New Zealand at the end of the tour,” Bowie recalls in Strange Fascinations . “We just put the thing in a field and set light to it. That was such a relief!” Whether or not he realized it at the time, it was a symbolic act. Soon after returning home, Bowie began a new project that would signal a rebirth of sorts: the rock band Tin Machine, a lean, back-to-basics quartet whose self-titled debut in 1989 presaged the rise of alt-rock and grunge. Having hit the height of ego and extravagance on The Glass Spider Tour, Bowie submerged himself in a humble group that erased his name from the marquee. Tin Machine wasn’t particularly well received either, but it put Bowie back on the path of relentless reinvention he’d been walking since the ’60s. He didn’t have to hit rock bottom to get there; he had to be hoisted 60 feet in the air.

Never Let Me Down may indeed be a midlife crisis set to music, an album expressing longing for the glamour of youth as well as a confused desire to recapture it. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with that; it’s no less valid than an album written in the passion of post-adolescence or under the shadow of death. Bowie himself delivered all of the above, and everything in between, throughout his half-century-long career—up to and including his sprawling swan song, 2016’s Blackstar . But with Never Let Me Down , and the attendant spectacle of The Glass Spider Tour, Bowie unwittingly painted a jumbled, overambitious self-portrait of a veteran artist in the throes of metamorphosis. It was uncharted territory, even for a man who built an identity around changes. Which is why, for all its flaws, Bowie’s 1987 work remains some of his most audaciously dazzling, and some of his most human.

Category : David Bowie tours

Subcategories.

This category has the following 9 subcategories, out of 9 total.

• Diamond Dogs Tour ‎ (59 F)
• Earthling Tour ‎ (2 F)
• Glass Spider Tour ‎ (4 F)
• Heathen Tour ‎ (12 F)
• Isolar II – The 1978 World Tour ‎ (1 F)
• Isolar – 1976 Tour ‎ (2 F)
• Serious Moonlight Tour ‎ (6 F)
• Sound+Vision Tour ‎ (2 F)
• Ziggy Stardust Tour ‎ (9 F)

• David Bowie
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“The prolific work of David Bowie has been begging for a proper musical tribute since he died, and it finally got one with the Celebrating David Bowie tour.”

– la weekly, stay tuned for, 2023 lineup & dates, previous critically acclaimed tours, us, europe, uk, australia, japan, canada, mexico,, south america, & iceland.

Special guests and returning performers have included… Sting. Thomas Dolby , Gary Oldman , Joe Bonamassa , Todd Rundgren , Adrian Belew  (Bowie, Zappa, NIN, Talking Heads), Seal , Ewan McGregor , Angelo Moore  (Fishbone), Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads), Gavin Rossdale  (Bush), Joe Elliott  (Def Leppard), Bernard Fanning  (Powderfinger), Simon Le Bon  (Duran Duran), Corey Taylor  (Slipknot/Stone Sour), Perry Farrell  (Jane’s Addiction), Kate Pierson  (B52s), Darren Criss , Ian Astbury  (The Cult), Living Colour , Tony Hadley  (Spandau Ballet), Kazuya Yoshii  (Yellow Monkey), Tom Chaplin  (Keane), La Roux , Royston Langdon (Spacehog), Paul Dempsey  (Something For Kate), Kirk Fletcher , Jeffrey Gaines , R.J. Ronquillo , Kid Ramos, Chris Fishman , The Harlem Gospel Choir , The Selah Gospel Choir , SinfoniaNord , Magik*Magik Orchestra , ISS Commander Chris Hadfield …and former Bowie touring & recording musicians from the Spiders From Mars to Blackstar eras such as  Adrian Belew, Eva Cherry , Gerry Leonard ,  Gail Ann Dorsey ,  Earl Slick ,  Mike Garson ,  Sterling Campbell ,  Zachary Alford ,  Catherine Russell ,  Holly Palmer ,  Emm Gryner ,  Mark Plati ,  Carmine Rojas , Tim Lefebvre,  and others.

CELEBRATINGDAVIDBOWIE.COM

An angelo bundini / miles copeland production, fall 2022 dates.

w/TODD RUNDGREN, ADRIAN BELEW, SCROTE, ANGELO MOORE, ROYSTON LANGDON, RON DZIUBLA, ANGELINE SARIS, & TRAVIS MCNABB

Thu, Oct 6th

Balboa Theater, San Diego, CA

Fri, Oct 7th

Saban Theater, Beverly Hills, CA

Sat, Oct 8th

San Jose Civic Center, San Jose, CA

Sun, Oct 9th

City National Grove, Anaheim, CA

Thurs, Oct 13th

Mystic Lake Showroom, Prior Lake, MN

Fri, Oct 14th

Copernicus Center, Chicago, IL

Sat, Oct 15th

Goodyear Theater & Hall, Akron, OH

Mon, Oct 17th

Théâtre Capitole, Quebec City, QC

Tue, Oct 18th

L’Olympia, Montreal, QC

Thur, Oct 20th

Cabot Theater, Beverly, MA

Fri, Oct 21st

College Street Music Hall, New Haven, CT

Sat, Oct 22nd

American Music Theatre, Lancaster, PA

Sun, Oct 23rd

Tarrytown Music Hall, Tarrytown, NY

Mon, Oct 24th

Sony Hall, New York City, NY

Tue, Oct 25th

Thu, Oct 27th

Union County Performing Arts Center, Rahway, NJ

Fri, Oct 28th

Penn’s Peak, Jim Thorpe, PA

Sat, Oct 29th

Concert Venue Harrah’s Resort, Atlantic City, NJ

Sun, Oct 30th

Keswick Theatre, Glenside, PA

Mon, Oct 31st

Rams Head On Stage, Annapolis, MD

Tue, Nov 1st

Thu, Nov 3rd

The Eastern, Atlanta, GA

Fri, Nov 4th

Taft Theatre, Cincinnati, OH

Sat, Nov 5th

Town Ballroom, Buffalo, NY

Mon, Nov 7th

Schermerhorn Symphony Center, Nashville, TN

Wed, Nov 9th

Thu, Nov 10th

Paramount Theatre, Denver, CO

Fri, Nov 11th

Kiva Auditorium, Albuquerque, NM

Sat, Nov 12th

The Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Tucson, AZ (formerly TCC Music Hall)

Sun, Nov 13th

Celebrity Theatre, Phoenix, AZ

Celebrating David Bowie is celebrating music education in partnership with Todd Rundgren’s Spirit of Harmony Foundation which advocates for the moral imperative of music education for children. Volunteers will be at all shows to provide music fans the opportunity to learn of their grassroots work and how they can get involved in their communities.

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100 most beautiful places in Russia – the ultimate list

1. Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg

Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood

The church looks amazing from the outside but it’s even more impressive on the inside. Its interior walls are covered with seven square km of mosaic and the church is built on the spot where Emperor Alexander II was mortally wounded in 1881.

2. Kizhi, Karelia

Kizhi Island in Karelia , 764 km north of Moscow, is home to Russia's oldest surviving wooden churches. For example, the Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus dates back to the late 14th century.

3. Bermamyt Plateau, Karachay-Cherkessia

Bermamyt Plateau

Bemamyt Mountain is 2,592 meters above sea level. It’s the “Russian Trolltunga” and offers the best views of Elbrus.

4. Ai-Petri suspension bridges, Crimea

Ai-Petri suspension bridges

Ai -Petri is one of the best-known mountains in Crimea, while its suspension bridges, at a height of 1,234 meters, are one of the scariest and most thrilling places on the peninsula .

5. Nikola-Lenivets, Kaluga Region

Nikola-Lenivets

This village, located 218 km south of Moscow, has acquired a cult status thanks to its contemporary art consisting of several sculptures dotted around the scenic landscape, which is divided by a river you can swim in during the summer. There’s also 980 square km of fields and meadows.

6. Swallow's Nest Castle, Crimea

Swallow's Nest Castle

The Swallow's Nest , perched on a 40-meter high cliff near Yalta, looks like a medieval castle, though it was in fact built in the early 20th century thanks to a German oil industrialist called Baron von Steingel.

7. Singer House, St. Petersburg

Singer House

This iconic building was built in the early 20th century and is the main landmark on Nevsky Prospekt .

8. Stone pillars, Komi

Stone pillars

These seven gigantic stone pillars were formed by the wind over thousands of years (they are in what’s believed to be an anomalous zone ).

9. Mir diamond mine, Yakutia

Mir diamond mine

This former diamond mine is so huge that helicopters avoid flying over it, otherwise they might get sucked in due to the draft. It’s the second largest man-made hole in the world at 525 meters deep and 1,200 meters in diameter.

10. Dominion Tower, Moscow

Dominion Tower

The first project of Zaha Hadid's bureau in Moscow and Russia. This snow-white futuristic business center is located in an industrial zone. Make sure to check out its interior staircases.

11. Peterhof, St. Petersburg

This summer residence of Russian monarchs is located 47 km from St. Petersburg: golden fountains, palaces, pavilions, and endless gardens on the banks of the Finnish Gulf, which are open to tourists all year round.

12. Chara Sands, Transbaykal Territory

Chara Sands

This is perhaps the strangest (and most beautiful) desert in the world. These Siberian sands are surrounded by rivers, lakes, and glaciers - despite being a real desert. To find out more, click here .

13. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

This museum, which boasts the world's biggest art collection, is itself one of its main exhibits . The museum's main building – the Winter Palace – is a former residence of Russian monarchs.

14. Yew and Boxwood Grove, suburb of Sochi

Yew and Boxwood Grove

This ancient forest is located 20 km from Sochi. You’ll find trees and plants that have been there for nearly 30 million years.

15. Lena Pillars, Yakutia

Lena Pillars

These majestic rock pillars, some of them 100 meters tall, are located along the Lena River in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). They’re also a UNESCO World Heritage site.

16. Flooded belfry in Kalyazin

Flooded belfry

"Russia’s Atlantis" on the Volga River in the Tver Region (200 km north of Moscow) used to be part of Kalyazin Monastery, which was often visited by Russian tsars . Later, the whole area was flooded to create a reservoir. The only thing that remains is the belfry that was used as a lighthouse .

17. Franz Josef Land, Arkhangelsk Region

Franz Josef Land

There are no towns or villages here and the only way to reach this remote part of Russia’s Arctic is with an organized group on a boat - be prepared to fork out several thousand dollars .

18. St. Basil's Cathedral

St. Basil's Cathedral

This is the main postcard view of the Russian capital and its best-known church. It’s actually nine churches in one, and according to a popular legend its architect was blinded on the order of Ivan the Terrible after completing the construction. You can learn more about this fascinating landmark here .

19. Ivolginsky Datsan, Ulan- Ude

Ivolginsky Datsan

This temple is situated 100 km from Lake Baikal in the Republic of Buryatia (in Siberia). This is the center of Russian Buddhism and also the resting place of the incorruptible body of a lama, who is considered to still be alive.

20. The Heart of Chechnya Mosque, Grozny

Heart of Chechnya Mosque

This mosque, dedicated to the memory of the first president of Chechnya, Akhmat Kadyrov, is one of the biggest in Europe . Its minarets are 63 meters high and it’s big enough to accommodate up to 10,000 worshippers.

21. Kaliningrad Cathedral

Kaliningrad Cathedral

This gothic cathedral was once the main church of the Prussian city of Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad, in the west of Russia). Since the 14th century, it has been the burial place for dukes and university professors. The last person to be buried here was the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

22. Tokarevsky Lighthouse, Vladivostok

Tokarevsky Lighthouse

The spit where the lighthouse is located is considered to the symbolic starting point of the Pacific Ocean. The lighthouse is 150-years-old.

The mountains, lakes, and green meadows of Altai are often compared to those of the Alps. Despite its remoteness, this part of Russia gets many foreign visitors. You can find 10 travel tips for the Altai Region here .

24. Salt mines outside Yekaterinburg

Salt mines outside Yekaterinburg

Some 965 km to the east of Moscow, there are salt mines that could easily be the scene of a Van Gogh painting. These  crazy patterns are a natural phenomenon formed by vaporization 280 million years ago. More pictures of these psychedelic mines can be found here .

25. Sanduny, Moscow

This is perhaps the most famous Russian ba nya in Moscow, which looks more like a palace with its gilded marble stairways, vaulted ceilings, and statues. Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov all frequented this place.

26. Shoaninsky temple, Karachay-Cherkessia

Shoaninsky temple

This tiny (just 13 square meters) temple in the middle of a mountain gorge in the Caucasus is one of the oldest buildings in Russia dating back to the 10th century.

27. Putorana Plateau, Siberia

Putorana Plateau

This is an extinct volcano covered with forest, lakes, and waterfalls. The Putorana Plateau is the same size as the whole of the UK.

28. Veliky Novgorod Kremlin

Veliky Novgorod Kremlin

This is the legacy of medieval Rus and the oldest surviving kremlin. It was first mentioned in a chronicle in 1044 and is situated in Veliky Novgorod (Novgorod the Great) 570 km northwest of Moscow.

29. Kamchatka, Far East

This is one of the most incredible tourist destinations in Russia. It boasts around 300 volcanoes in the same spot (including 29 active ones), loads of bears, a valley of geysers, and other mind-blowing things .

30. White Square, Moscow

White Square

An office complex with modern buildings made of glass and concrete is built around a white-stone Old Believer church. The juxtapositions here are amazing ( here’s the proof ).

31. Mamayev Kurgan, Volgograd

Mamayev Kurgan

The southern city of Volgograd was the scene of the bloodiest battle in history , in which some 1.5 million people were killed. To commemorate it, a huge monument called “The Motherland Calls” was built on the top of the hill.

32. Avtovo metro station, St. Petersburg

Avtovo metro station

Official Soviet art was obsessed with mosaics, they can be found everywhere - in lobbies, streets, factories, corridors – anywhere where there was space. For example, at Avtovo metro station (yes, that picture was really taken in a metro station).

33. Amber Room, Tsarskoye Selo

The legendary Amber Room was one of the Romanovs' treasures lost during WWII . Only several of its elements survived the war. The restored Amber Room is located in Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg.

34. Dubrovitsy Estate, Moscow Region

Dubrovitsy Estate

This estate 36 km from Moscow was commissioned by Russian boyar and tutor to Peter the Great, Boris Golitsyn. Over 300-years-old, these days it’s a popular wedding venue. The register office is just a few minutes from the church.

35. Lake Elton, Volgograd Region

There are no ripples on its surface because of the huge amount of salt, which makes the lake look like a giant mirror. Lake Elton is situated close to Kazakhstan border. And another thing: tsars were very fond of it .

36. Moscow City skyscrapers

Moscow City skyscrapers

At one point, this skyscraper development in central Moscow was the city’s most ambitious project. One of the buildings previously held the record for being the tallest in Europe, while it remains among the most expensive real estate in the capital per square meter.

37. Lakhta Center, St. Petersburg

Lakhta Center

The 462-meter high skyscraper, which houses Gazprom’s headquarters, is the highest skyscraper in Europe . Its budget exceeds that of the Burj Khalifa at around $2.5 billion.

38. Gamsutl, Dagestan

This is an abandoned ancient mountain village in the Republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus. Its population was decimated by a cholera outbreak in the 20th century.

39. Valley of Geysers, Kamchatka

Valley of Geysers

Kamchatka is home to 90 geysers, which spurt out boiling water among green rocks.

40. Lake Baikal, Irkutsk

This is the oldest lake on our planet . It is situated between southern Siberia and Mongolia and is 25-35 million-years-old. In winter, Baikal is covered with a meter-thick layer of clear, glass-like, ice, while huge icicles hang from the surrounding caves.

41. White Mosque in Bulgar, Tatarstan

White Mosque in Bulgar

The Tatar Taj Mahal in Bulgar, a mystic Muslim town on the banks of the Volga (83 km from Kazan), is where the world's biggest Koran is kept. It weighs 800 kg.

42. Ruskeala marble quarry, Karelia

Ruskeala marble quarry

Karelia is a unique place where you can find at least 60,000 amazing lakes.

43. Tsarskoye Selo, Pushkin

Tsarskoye Selo

The palace in Pushkin (former Tsarskoye Selo, 30 km south of St. Petersburg) is one of the most striking examples of imperial extravagance (although not the only one ).

44. Moscow Metro

Moscow Metro

The capital’s underground is like a series of underground palaces. The Moscow Metro even has its own audioguide . Here’s our guide covering its most beautiful stations .

45. Vovnushki, Ingushetia

These medieval defense towers built on mountain tops were once connected by suspension bridges. A magical but brutal place.

46. Karasinoye Lake in Artyom, Far East

Karasinoye Lake in Artyom

Every year, the surface of the lake is covered with pink lotus flowers, which create a particularly striking contrast with the austere industrial landscape in the background.

47. Zaryadye, Moscow

This park outside the Kremlin walls has a "floating bridge," a concert hall, an ice cave, and great views of the Kremlin. In 2018, it was listed among the world's greatest places according to Time magazine.

48. Taiga, Siberia and European part of Russia

The taiga is the second largest biome in the world after the ocean and also one of Russia's natural treasures . It’s too big and beautiful not to make it onto our list.

49. Lake Baskunchak, Astrakhan Region

Lake Baskunchak

A lunar landscape on top of a salt mountain. It is in effect a huge natural salt shaker almost 500 square km large, located on the border with Kazakhstan. The lake is just 30 cm deep.

50. Lake Maly Semyachik, Kamchatka

Lake Maly Semyachik

An acid lake in the crater of an active volcano, i.e. it’s very, very high. It can be seen only from a helicopter.

51. Whale Bone Alley, Yttygran Island

Whale Bone Alley

This alley on an island in the Bering Sea made of bones and jaws of Greenland whales is an ancient Eskimo structure. It dates back to the 14th century. But why did the Eskimos build it ?

52. Sayano–Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, Khakassia

Sayano–Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station

The dam on the River Yenisei is unique in terms of its size: it’s the biggest in Russia and the ninth biggest in the world. It towers over the forest like a giant spaceship.

53. Red October rooftop, Moscow

Red October rooftop

The calligraphic creation by street artist Pokras Lampas on the rooftop of the former confectionary factory Red October has become is world's biggest example of calligraphy, standing 22-stories tall. If you do not know who Lampas is, click here .

54. Thirteen Pillars of Serge, Irkutsk Region

This Buryat place of power in the village of Khuzhir ( Olkhon Island on LakeBaikal) is the capital of shamanic power. These pillars cannot be pulled out, burnt, or moved. The only thing that can destroy them is time.

55. Orekhovsky waterfall, Sochi

Orekhovsky waterfall

The water tumbling from Zezumenka Mountain falls from a height of 27.5 meters, but it is only two meters deep in this picture. This spot is easy to reach from Sochi, like many other amazing places .

56. Lake Sasyk-Sivash, Crimea

Lake Sasyk-Sivash

There is just a handful of pink lakes in the world, and Sasyk-Sivash in Crimea is one of them. It turns pink in July and August thanks to microalgae.

57. Avacha Bay, Kamchatka

No , this is not somewhere in Greenland. This is a bay in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Kamchatka. The symbol of the place are the famous Three Brothers rocks – there is a beautiful legend about them.

58. Historical Museum, Moscow

Historical Museum

If you’re in Red Square, there’s no way you can miss this red-brick building in the neo-Russian (or pseudo-Russian) style.

59. Ratmanov Island, Chukotka

Ratmanov Island

This is one of the Diomede Islands which belongs to Russia. The distance to the other island, which belongs to the U.S., is just 3.8 km by boat but the time difference between the two places is 23 hours! This is a tranquil place, but don’t be fooled, life her can be hell .

60. Tsaritsyno Estate, Moscow

Tsaritsyno Estate

This is an estate in the south of Moscow where Catherine the Great spent time with her lovers and her secret husband. It was originally built to demonstrate the greatness of the Russian Empire.

61. Skolkovo Business School, Moscow Region

Skolkovo Business School

This technopark outside Moscow was conceived as the Russian version of Silicon Valley. When designing the campus, British architect David Adjaye was inspired by Kazimir Malevich's suprematism .

62. Sochi Arboretum

Sochi Arboretum

This arboretum on a mountain slope in subtropical Russia was founded in 1892. Many Russian celebrities of the past, like Feodor Chaliapin, Anton Chekhov, and others enjoyed visiting it.

63. Sakhalin Island, Far East

Sakhalin Island

Russia's biggest island is situated at the edge of the earth, where nature remains practically untouched. It’s home to gray whales and lakes with brilliantly turquoise water.

64. Mriya Resort, Crimea

Mriya Resort

The hotel and spa designed by British architect Norman Forster, who conjured London’s Millennium Bridge, is located 25 km from Yalta. In 2016, the hotel in the form of a lotus flower was named the best leisure resort in Europe.

65. Aniva lighthouse, Sakhalin

Aniva lighthouse

This atomic lighthouse (running on a radioisotope generator) was built by a Japanese architect, but in 1990, when economic hardship hit, Russia no longer had the money to maintain it.

66. Bolshoi Theater, Moscow

Bolshoi Theater

Russia's - and perhaps the world’s - best-known theater does not require much introduction. But if you want to find out how to enjoy a play or the ballet there without paying hundreds of dollars for a ticket click here .

67. The Great Vasyugan Mire, Siberia

The Great Vasyugan Mire

The scale is this mire in southwestern Siberia is mind-blowing. It’s the size of Switzerland and continues to expand with every passing year. Not surprisingly it’s on the UNESCO World Heritage List .

68. Golden Bridge, Vladivostok

Golden Bridge

This 323-meter high bridge was built in 2012 and became the second tallest bridge in the world (the tallest is the Millau Viaduct in France). It links Vladivostok to Russky Island. Learn more about Vladivostok by doing our quiz .

69. Curonian Spit, Kaliningrad Region

Curonian Spit

One of the the tallest Europe's  sand dunes are located in its smallest national park, on the Curonian Spit . The Baltic Sea is on the one side, the Curonian Lagoon is on the other. The spit is divided equally between Russia and Lithuania.

70. Christ the Savior Cathedral, Moscow

Christ the Savior Cathedral

This is an exact replica of a cathedral that was blown up by the Soviet authorities in 1931. After the Great Patriotic War right up until the 1990s, its place was taken by.. an outdoor pool.

71. Moscow Kremlin

Moscow Kremlin

This is Russia's main kremlin , where President Vladimir Putin makes all the big calls. The Kremlin has lived through many ordeals: it was nearly burnt down, it was seized, and its cathedrals were turned into stables. And it wasn’t always red. There was a time when the Kremlin was white .

72. Wallagkom gorge, North Ossetia-Alania

Wallagkom gorge

The Vaza-Khokh mountain with its practically vertical slopes can be seen from any spot in the Alania national park. It’s also often compared to a tusk.

73. Samur vine forest, Dagestan

Samur vine forest

This is the northernmost subtropical vine forest in the world. The Dagestani jungle is so dense that you can move through it without touching the ground.

74. Moscow State University building, Moscow

Moscow State University building

This is one of the most famous of the seven Stalin buildings (The Seven Sisters ) as it looks out over Moscow from Sparrow Hills.  

75. Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg

It was one of the Imperial theaters of the 18th century, which attracted the crème de la crème of the country's elite and members of the Romanov family. These days it is one of the leading opera and ballet theaters in the world.

76. Solovki, Arkhangelsk Region

In the 15th century, this archipelago in the White Sea in Russia's northwest was the country's biggest monastery. In the first half of the 20th century it was turned into one of the first and the biggest gulag camps. These days it’s a tourist and spiritual center .

77. VDNKh, Moscow

Once the main exhibition to showcase the USSR’s economic achievements , this is now one of Moscow's main parks, whose restored pavilions, fountains, and alleys make it one of the world's most popular geotags on Instagram.

78. Kola Peninsula, Murmansk Region

Kola Peninsula

This peninsula beyond the Arctic Circle is where people live without sunshine for 40 days straight each year. By way of compensation, they can enjoy one of the most beautiful sights on earth, the northern lights (aurora borealis).

79. Big Bogdo Mountain, Astrakhan Region

Big Bogdo Mountain

Big Bogdo is a holy site among local Kalmyks. The mountain gets its red color from the clay, which is so crumbly that it’s impossible to walk there.

80. Elbrus, Kabardino-Balkaria

This is Europe's highest mountain (5,642 meters), which is in fact a composite volcano. In the foothills of Elbrus lies one of Russia's most exciting skiing resorts , Cheget.

81. Valley of Death, Kamchatka

Valley of Death

It’s name is ominous and its beauty deceptive . The strange otherworldly landscape is filled with poisonous gases that kill animals. Humans are banned from going here, as you can imagine.

82. Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, Moscow

Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

This monument, which has become one of the most recognizable symbols of the Soviet era, was originally created for the International Exhibition in Paris – but it’s associated with many troubles .

83. Kul Sharif Mosque, Kazan

Kul Sharif Mosque

Tatarstan's main mosque , which is also one of its most beautiful, is situated inside the Kazan Kremlin on a site that used to be occupied by an old mosque, which was destroyed in 1552 by Ivan the Terrible's troops when they stormed the city.

84. Naryn-Kala, Dagestan

The most ancient fortress on the territory of modern Russia was built in Derbent in the sixth century , long before the Russians arrived there. It became Russian only in 1796, when the Persians lost it.

85. Teriberka, Murmansk Region

The world became aware of this village with its melancholy arctic scenery only after the international success of Andrey Zvyagintsev's film Leviathan . Now, whale bones and broken boats are part of its iconic image.

86. Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi

Krasnaya Polyana

This mountain village is packed with restaurants , hotels, and spa resorts. But the main attraction here is of course the views.

87. Chuy Steppe, Altay

Chuy Steppe

With its lunar scenery and huge expanses, southern Altay looks almost like Arizona. During the hot summer months, this empty yellow ground turns into a living and breathing Impressionist painting.

88. Metropol Hotel, Moscow

Metropol Hotel

This Moscow landmark has stunning views of the Bolshoi Theater and a long history. Its list of guests included Queen Sofia of Spain, Kim Jong-il, Sharon Stone, David Bowie, and Michael Jackson. There are tours of the hotel on Sundays.

89. Suzdal, Vladimir Region

This old Russian town (founded in the 11th century) embodies everything that can be expected from "an ideal of provincial Russia": centuries-old kremlin and churches, a Russian village, rivers, and meadows. It’s as if Suzdal is forever stuck in the past.

90. Kutkhiny Baty, Kamchatka

Kutkhiny Baty

Kutkhiny Baty is a weird-looking valley of pumice stone (rock glass) 4 km from Kurile Lake. These rock formations are about 110 meters high.

91. Orda Cave, Perm Territory

The longest underwater cave in Russia and the whole of Eurasia, situated under the western Urals, is a popular cave diving destination. It stretches 4,600 meters underwater.

92. Glass Beach, Vladivostok

Glass Beach

There was once a landfill nearby and this stretch of the coast was not particularly popular with the locals. Years later, the tides have polished glass bottles to such a degree that they look like this .

93. Tyatya Volcano, Kuril Islands

Tyatya Volcano

This is an active "volcano inside a volcano" (it has two cones, an old and a young one) located on Kunashir Island. It last erupted in 1973. The crater sometimes emits poisonous vapors and bears can often be spotted at the foot of the volcano.  

94. City of the Dead, North Ossetia- Alania

City of the Dead

This is the oldest crypt in the North Ossetian mountains. The necropolis has approximately 10,000 remains and attracts hundreds of tourists every year.

95. Church of the Sicilian Icon of the Mother of God, Voronezh Region

Church of the Sicilian Icon of the Mother of God

It’s not known for sure whose idea it was to carve out a chapel from a chalk mountain: perhaps hermit monks or Christians who fled from persecution in the Byzantium time? Nowadays this unusual church is a protected building.

96. Zhivopisny Most, Moscow

Zhivopisny Most

This bright red bridge spanning over the Serebryany Bor forest park in northwest Moscow has a suspended capsule at the top, which has still not found a use.

97. Football pitch in Moscow Region

Football pitch in Moscow Region

This football pitch in the midst of a forest - in Meshchersky Park outside Moscow - will appeal even to those who have no intention of playing football there.

98. Aq Qaya White Rock, Crimea

Aq Qaya White Rock

This 325-meter tall cliff in the Belogorsky District is a popular filming location, which is not surprising given that this place could be somewhere in Puerto Rico.

99. Tauric Chersonese, Sevastopol

Tauric Chersonese

This ancient polis on the southwestern coast of Crimea was founded by the Greeks. Some 2,000 years on, its ruins are still a beautiful sight.

100. Trans-Siberian Railway, anywhere

Trans-Siberian Railway

Eight time zones, 87 cities, 5,700 miles across two continents – this route is often described as "the adventure of a lifetime." The price is spending a week on a train. But it appears that it’s worth it.

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Security Questions Emerge as First Charges Are Filed in Russia Attack

Russian officials formally charged four men in the attack, which killed at least 137 people at a Moscow-area concert hall on Friday. American officials blamed a branch of the Islamic State.

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• A memorial outside the Crocus City Hall concert venue. Reuters
• People waiting to visit a memorial at Crocus City Hall. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
• Leaving flowers outside the site of the attack. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
• Mourners at a memorial in St. Petersburg, Russia. Anton Vaganov/Reuters
• Firefighters and rescuers clearing debris after the deadly attack. Reuters
• Police officers outside the Basmanny District Court in Moscow. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
• People waited to donate blood near Crocus City Hall on Saturday. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
• A flag flying at half-staff as policemen guard the closed entrance to Red Square in Moscow. Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via Shutterstock
• A billboard on Saturday noted the date of the concert hall attack in Moscow. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
• The Crocus City Hall concert venue in suburban Moscow after it was attacked Friday night. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

Paul Sonne and Neil MacFarquhar

Here’s what to know about the attack.

Russian officials have brought charges against four men they said were responsible for a fiery terrorist attack on a suburban Moscow concert venue that killed at least 137 people last week.

Four men were arraigned late Sunday night on terrorism charges in the attack at Crocus City Hall, just outside the Russian capital. A court spokesman identified them as Dalerjon Mirzoyev, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, Shamsidin Fariduni and Muhammadsobir Fayzov, a 19-year-old who appeared in court in a wheelchair, according to Russian media outlets.

Mr. Mirzoyev, Mr. Rachabalizoda and Mr. Fariduni told the court they were from Tajikistan, and Russian media outlets reported that Mr. Fayzov was also from the Central Asian nation. All four had visible injuries; Mr. Rachabalizoda’s head was heavily bandaged and Mr. Fayzov had to be wheeled in and out of the courtroom.

Earlier Sunday — which had been declared a national day of mourning — people visited the scene of the attack to lay flowers and light candles at a memorial. Scores of people waited in a long line under a gray sky, many clutching red bouquets, as efforts were underway inside to dismantle the remains of the stage. Flags were lowered to half-staff at buildings across the country, and state media released a video of President Vladimir V. Putin lighting a memorial candle in a church.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a top law-enforcement body, said on Sunday that 137 bodies had been recovered from the charred premises, including those of three children. It said that 62 victims had been identified so far and that genetic testing was underway to identify the rest.

There are two primary narratives about the violence on Friday night, Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years . American officials say it was the work of Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, an Islamic State offshoot that has been active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran . But on Saturday, Mr. Putin did not mention ISIS in his first public remarks on the tragedy , and hinted at the possible involvement of Ukraine, which has issued a strong denial .

Here’s what to know:

The search for survivors ended on Saturday, as details about the victims began to emerge . Many of the more than 100 people wounded in the attack were in critical condition. The search for bodies continues.

As Russia mourned, the war in Ukraine continued. Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 43 out of 57 Russian missiles and drones launched overnight against different parts of the country. And Ukraine’s military said it had struck two large landing ships that were part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. There was no immediate comment from Russia’s Defense Ministry.

Piknik, the Russian rock band that was to play a sold-out concert at the suburban venue on the night it was attacked and burned to rubble, now finds itself at the center of the tragedy .

The attack dealt a political blow to Mr. Putin , a leader for whom national security is paramount.

Neil MacFarquhar

Russia charges four people with terrorism after attack on concert hall.

The four men suspected of carrying out a bloody attack on a concert hall near Moscow, killing at least 137 people, were arraigned in a district court late Sunday and charged with committing a terrorist act.

The four, who were from Tajikistan but worked as migrant laborers in Russia, were remanded in custody until May 22, according to state and independent media outlets reporting from the proceedings, at Basmanny District Court. They face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The press service of the court only announced that the first two defendants, Dalerjon B. Mirzoyev and Saidakrami M. Rachalbalizoda, pleaded guilty to the charges. It did not specify any plea from the other two, Mediazona, an independent news outlet, reported.

The men looked severely battered and injured as each of them was brought into the courtroom separately. Videos of them being tortured and beaten while under interrogation circulated widely on Russian social media.

Muhammadsobir Z. Fayzov, a 19-year-old barber and the youngest of the men charged, was rolled into the courtroom from a hospital emergency room on a tall, orange wheelchair, attended by a doctor, the reports said. He sat propped up in the wheelchair inside the glass cage for defendants, wearing a catheter and an open hospital gown with his chest partially exposed. Often speaking in Tajik through a translator, he answered questions about his biography quietly and stammered, according to Mediazona.

Mr. Rachabalizoda, 30, had a large bandage hanging off the right side of his head where interrogators had sliced off a part of his ear and forced it into his mouth, the reports said, with the cutting captured in a video that spread online.

The judge allowed the press to witness only parts of the hearings, citing concerns that sensitive details about the investigation might be revealed or the lives of court workers put at risk. It is not an unusual ruling in Russia.

Russia’s Federal Security Services announced on Saturday that 11 people had been detained, including the four charged men, who were arrested after the car they were fleeing in was intercepted by the authorities 230 miles southwest of Moscow.

In the attack, on Friday night, four gunmen opened fire inside the hall just as a rock concert by the group Piknik was due to start. They also set off explosive devices that ignited the building and eventually caused its roof to collapse. Aside from the dead, there were 182 injured, and more than 100 remain hospitalized, according to the regional health ministry.

President Vladimir V. Putin used the fact that the highway where the men were detained leads to Ukraine to suggest that the attack was somehow linked to Ukraine’s war effort. But the United States has said repeatedly that the attack was the work of an extremist jihadi organization, the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility.

The first charged, Mr. Mirzoyev, who had a black eye and cuts and bruises all over his face, leaned for support against the glass wall of the court cage as the charge against him was read. Mr. Mirzoyev, 32, has four children and had a temporary residence permit in the southern Siberian city of Novosibirsk, but it had expired, the reports said.

Mr. Rachabalizoda, married with a child, said he was legally registered in Russia but did not remember where.

The fourth man charged, Shamsidin Fariduni, 25, married with an 8-month-old baby, worked in a factory producing parquet in the Russian city of Podolsk, just southwest of Moscow. He had also worked as a handyman in Krasnogorsk, the Moscow suburb where the attack took place at Crocus City Hall, at a concert venue within a sprawling shopping complex just outside the Moscow city limits.

The Islamic State has been able to recruit hundreds of adherents among migrant laborers from Central Asia in Russia who are often angry about the discrimination they frequently face.

Alina Lobzina , Paul Sonne and Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.

Maps and Diagrams of the Moscow Concert Hall Attack

The mass shooting and arson at a suburban Moscow concert venue, which killed more than 130, were attributed by U.S. officials to members of a branch of the Islamic State.

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The other two men charged in the attack are Shamsidin Fariduni, 26, and 19-year-old Muhammadsobir Fayzov, who appeared in court in a wheelchair. All four men who've been charged have been identified by a court spokesman on Telegram. They appeared separately before a judge on charges of committing a terrorist act and were remanded in custody until May 22.

Russian authorities have begun naming the suspects in the attack. The first two suspects have been identified as Dalerjon Mirzoyev and Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, according to state news agency RIA Novosti, which is reporting from the court. Both have been charged with committing a terrorist act and face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

RIA reported that Mirzoyev is a 32-year-old from Tajikistan who had an expired three-month permit to be in the southern Russian city of Novosibirsk. Less information was immediately released about Rachabalizoda, but state media reports said he was born in 1994.

Valerie Hopkins and Alina Lobzina

Concertgoers describe screams, smoke and stares of shock in a night of horror.

Once they heard the shots ring out on Friday night at Crocus City Hall, Efim Fidrya and his wife ran down to the building’s basement and hid with three others in a bathroom.

They listened as the gunfire began and thousands of people who had come to a sold-out rock concert on Moscow’s outskirts began screaming and trying to flee.

Horrified and scared, Mr. Fidrya did the only thing he could think to do: He held on tight to the bathroom door, which didn’t lock, trying to protect the group in case the assailants came to find them.

“While we could hear shooting and screaming, I stood the whole time holding the bathroom door shut,” Mr. Fidrya, an academic, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “The others were standing in the corner so that if someone started shooting through the door, they wouldn’t be in the line of fire.”

They didn’t know it then, but they were sheltering from what became Russia’s deadliest terror attack in two decades, after four gunmen had entered the popular concert venue and began shooting rapid-fire weapons.

Their story is one of many harrowing accounts that have emerged in the days since the attack, which killed at least 137 people. More than 100 injured people are hospitalized, some in critical condition, health officials said.

Mr. Fidrya’s small group waited and waited, but the attackers had started a fire in the complex and it was spreading. Mr. Fidrya’s wife, Olga, showed everyone how to wet their T-shirts and hold them to their faces so they could breathe without inhaling toxic smoke.

And then a second round of shots rang out.

After about half an hour, it was so smoky that Mr. Fidrya, 42, thought even the assailants must have left. As he ventured out, he saw the body of a dead woman lying by the escalator. Later he saw the body of another woman who had been killed in the carnage, her distraught husband standing over her.

His group went down into the parking garage and eventually emerged on the street as the emergency service workers were carrying victims from the building.

The Islamic State, through its news agency, claimed responsibility for the attack. U.S. officials said the assailants were believed to be part of ISIS-K, an Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan. On Saturday, Russia’s Federal Security Services announced that 11 people had been detained, including four who were arrested after the car they were fleeing in was intercepted by authorities 230 miles southwest of Moscow.

In interviews, survivors described how what started as a typical Friday night out devolved into a scene of panic and terror. The venue, which seated 6,200 people, had been sold out for a show by a veteran Russian band called Piknik.

Video footage from the scene shows the assailants shooting at the entrance to the concert venue, part of a sprawling, upscale complex of buildings that also includes a shopping mall and multiple exhibition halls. They then moved into the concert hall, where they sprayed gunfire as well, videos show.

The attackers also set the building on fire using a combination of explosives and flammable liquid, Russian authorities said.

Like the Fidryas, Tatyana Farafontova initially thought the sound of the shooting was part of the show.

“Five minutes before the show was supposed to start, we heard these dull claps,” she wrote on her VK social media page. Ms. Farafontova, 38, said in a direct message on Saturday that she was still in shock and was slurring her speech after the attack.

Then the claps got closer and someone shouted that there were attackers shooting. She scrambled onto the stage with the assistance of her husband.

“At the moment when we climbed onto the stage, three people entered the hall with machine guns,” she wrote in her VK account. “They shot at everything that moved. My husband from the stage saw bluish smoke filling the hall.”

Ms. Farafontova said that being on the center of the stage made her feel exposed and targeted.

“It felt as if they were poking me in the back with the muzzle of a machine gun,” she wrote, adding, “I could feel the breath of death right behind my shoulders.”

She crawled under the curtain and eventually followed the musicians, who had already started to flee, and ran as far as she could from the building.

Up on the balcony, Aleksandr Pyankov and his wife, Anna, heard the gunshots and lay on the floor for some time before joining others who jumped up and began running to the exit.

As they fled, they encountered a woman who had slumped down on an escalator and was blocking their route. She was alive but staring blankly ahead, Mr. Pyankov, a publishing executive, said. He told her to keep running, but then turned his head and saw what she was staring at.

“I started to look,” Mr. Pyankov, 51, said in a telephone interview. “And first I saw a murdered woman sitting on the sofa, and there was a young man lying next to her. I looked around and there were groups of bodies.”

It all happened in a matter of seconds, he said, and he tried to keep fleeing.

“The worst thing is that in this situation you’re not running away from the shooting, but toward it,” he said. “Because it was already clear that there would be a fire there, we know how it would burn. And you’re just running to figure out where else to run.”

Anastasiya Volkova lost both her parents in the attack. She told 5 TV, a state channel, that she had missed a call from her mother on Friday night at around the time of the assault. When she called back, there was no response, Ms. Volkova said.

“I couldn’t answer the phone. I didn’t hear the call,” Ms. Volkova told the broadcaster, adding that her mother had been “really looking forward to this concert.”

Accounts emerging about others who died in the assault also told tales of eager concertgoers who had made special efforts to get to the show.

Irina Okisheva and her husband, Pavel Okishev, traveled hundreds of miles — making their way from Kirov, northeast of Moscow. Mr. Okishev had received the tickets as an early birthday present, the newspaper Komsomolsaya Pravda reported. He did not live to celebrate his 35th birthday, which is this week. Both he and his wife died in the attack.

And Alexander Baklemyshev, 51, had long dreamed about seeing Piknik , a heritage rock band that was playing the first of two sold-out concerts accompanied by a symphony orchestra.

Mr. Baklemyshev’s son told local media that his father had traveled solo from his hometown of Satka, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, for the concert.

His son, Maksim, told the Russian news outlet MSK1 that his father had sent him a video of the concert hall before the attack. That was the last he had heard from him.

“There was no last conversation,” his son said. “All that was left is the video, and nothing more.”

Mr. Fidrya said he felt grateful to be alive, and that four of the assailants had been captured.

“Now there is confidence that the crime will be solved and those non-humans who organized and carried it out will be punished,” he said. “This really helps a lot.”

But images of the victims remain seared in his memory, in particular that of the husband, his back burned from the fire, standing over his dead wife outside the building as medics attended to the wounded.

The man was talking to Mr. Fidrya’s wife, Olga, saying they were from the city of Tver northwest of Moscow, had been together for 12 years and had three children.

“For us it’s all over, by and large,” Mr. Fidrya wrote in a message after the phone interview. “But for that guy who stood over the body of his wife, and for their three children, the worst is yet to come. And there are so many people like him there.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a top law enforcement agency, released video of suspects being led, blindfolded, into its headquarters on Sunday. The agency said the investigation at the scene of the attack was continuing.

Ivan Nechepurenko

As questions about security failures swirl, Russian state media focus on a different narrative.

As Russia mourned the victims of the worst terrorist attack in the Moscow area in more than two decades on Sunday, differing narratives about the attack were spreading and taking hold in the country.

The attack late Friday on a concert hall near Moscow left at least 137 people dead and represented a significant security failure for the Kremlin. While the Russian authorities said they had arrested the four attackers, speculation over their identities and motivations was widespread. There also were open questions about whether Russia had adequately followed up on a warning from the United States about the threat of such an attack, and about how specific that warning was.

But most Russian commentators and state media devoted little time to those issues, instead pointing fingers elsewhere. The reaction reflected in part the state of anxiety that Russia has been living in since the start of the war in Ukraine, with propaganda outlets competing to advance one narrative, conspiracy theory or bit of speculation after another.

Many nationalist commentators and ultraconservative hawks on Sunday continued to push the idea that Ukraine was the obvious culprit, despite a claim of responsibility and mounting evidence that a branch of the Islamic State was responsible.

Hard-line anti-Kremlin activists speaking from abroad, meanwhile, speculated that the Russian state could have orchestrated the attack so that it could blame Ukraine or further tighten the screws inside the country.

Some lawmakers in Parliament argued that the government needed to get tough on migrants, after the authorities said that the four assailants were foreign citizens. Lawmakers also pledged to discuss whether capital punishment should be introduced in Russia.

“Different political forces are starting to use” the attack, said Aleksei Venediktov, a Russian journalist and commentator and the former editor of the influential Ekho Moskvy radio station. “The Kremlin, most of all,” he said in an interview broadcast on YouTube. “But others too, who say that it was all organized by the Kremlin.”

Some nationalist activists said that such a sense of disorientation could have been the attackers’ ultimate goal.

Yegor S. Kholmogorov, a Russian nationalist commentator, wrote in his blog on the Telegram messaging app that Russian society was “strongly united by the war and President Vladimir V. Putin’s victory in the election” before the attack.

But after the tragedy, he lamented on Sunday, Russia had turned into a “society that is split.”

Mr. Putin has done little to clear things up. On Saturday, he vowed to inflict “fair and inevitable” punishment on both the terrorists and the unknown forces behind them. Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was tied to the tragedy but stopped short of directly laying blame.

But many of Mr. Putin’s subordinates and public supporters appeared to have made up their minds about who was responsible.

Sergei A. Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst who often appears on Russian state television, wrote in a post on Telegram that Russia must work at isolating the Ukrainian leadership by “connecting the terrorist act not with ISIS, but with the Ukrainian government as much as possible.”

Russian state news outlets barely mentioned the claim of responsibility made by ISIS. United States officials have said the atrocity was the work of Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, an offshoot of the group that has been active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

Maria V. Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said on Sunday that the West was pointing at ISIS in order to shift the blame away from Ukraine.

Russia has not presented any evidence of Ukraine’s involvement in the attack. Ukrainian officials have ridiculed the Russian accusations, and U.S. officials also have said there is no indication Kyiv played any role.

“There is no, whatsoever, any evidence — and, in fact, what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually by all accounts responsible for what happened,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Sunday when asked on ABC’s “This Week” whether the United States had evidence that Ukraine was connected to the concert hall attack.

Some commentators did criticize Russian security services for failing to prevent the tragedy. On Saturday, the state news agency Tass reported , citing a source in the Russian special services, that they had received a warning from the United States but that it was “broad, without any concrete information.”

Maggie Astor

Vice President Kamala Harris was asked on ABC’s “This Week” whether the United States had any evidence to back up Vladimir Putin’s hints that Ukraine was connected to the concert hall attack. “No,” she said. “There is no, whatsoever, any evidence — and, in fact, what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually by all accounts responsible for what happened.”

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a top law enforcement agency, said 137 bodies have been recovered from the site of the attack, including those of three children. It said 62 victims had been identified and that genetic testing was being carried out on the remaining bodies to establish identities.

Jason Horowitz

Pope Francis offered prayers today “to the victims of the vile terrorist attack carried out the other night in Moscow,” telling the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome for Palm Sunday Mass that he hoped God would comfort and bring peace to their families and “convert the hearts of those who plan, organize and implement these unhuman acts.’”

He also prayed for all those suffering because of war: “Especially I think of martyred Ukraine, where many people find themselves without electricity because of the intense attacks against infrastructure, which, beyond causing death and suffering, bring about the risk of a human catastrophe of even greater dimensions."

Search and rescue workers are dismantling the remains of the stage at Crocus City Hall so that a giant crane can be brought in to clear debris from the collapse of the roof, the regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said on Telegram. Late last night, he said 133 bodies had been recovered from the scene of the attack, of which 50 have been identified. Another 107 injured people were in area hospitals, he said.

Matthew Mpoke Bigg

As the investigation into the Moscow attack continues, the war in Ukraine carries on. Ukraine's air force said it had shot down 43 out of 57 Russian missiles and drones launched overnight against different parts of the country. And Ukraine’s military said it had struck two large landing ships that were part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. There was no immediate comment from Russia's defense ministry.

Crocus International, the company that owns the concert hall, vowed in a statement to restore everything that was destroyed during the terrorist attack. The cost of restoring the concert hall, one of the biggest and best-equipped in Moscow, will likely exceed $100 million, real estate experts told RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency.

The complex was developed by the Azerbaijan-born billionaire Aras Agalarov, whose son, Emin, is a famous pop star. Former President Donald Trump held the Miss Universe pageant at the same complex in 2013, and world-famous performers like Eric Clapton, Dua Lipa and Sia have also performed there.

Sunday is a national day of mourning in Russia. The state media is airing footage of flags flying at half-staff on government buildings and foreign embassies, and of people bringing flowers, candles and toys to spontaneous memorials across the country.

Alex Marshall

Piknik, a longtime Russian rock band, is now at the center of a tragedy.

Early Saturday, Piknik, one of Russia’s most popular heritage rock bands, published a message to its page on Vkontakte , one of the country’s largest social media sites: “We are deeply shocked by this terrible tragedy and mourn with you.”

The night before, the band was scheduled to play the first of two sold-out concerts, accompanied by a symphony orchestra, at Crocus City Hall in suburban Moscow. But before Piknik took the stage, four gunmen entered the vast venue, opened fire and murdered at least 133 people .

The victims appear to have included some of Piknik’s own team. On Saturday evening, another note appeared on the band’s Vkontakte page to say that the woman who ran the band’s merchandise stalls was missing.

“We are not ready to believe the worst,” the message said .

The attack at Crocus City Hall has brought renewed attention to Piknik, a band that has provided the soundtrack to the lives of many Russian rock fans for over four decades.

Ilya Kukulin, a cultural historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said in an interview that Piknik was one of the Soviet Union’s “monsters of rock,” with songs inspired by classic Western rock acts including David Bowie and a range of Russian styles.

Since releasing its debut album, 1982’s “Smoke,” Piknik — led by Edmund Shklyarsky, the band’s singer and guitarist — has grown in popularity despite its music being often gloomy with gothic lyrics. Kukulin attributed this partly to the group’s inventive stage shows.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kukulin said, the band began performing with exciting light displays, special effects and other innovative touches. At one point in the 1990s, the band’s concerts included a “living cello” — a woman with an amplified string stretched across her. Shklyarsky would play a solo on the string.

This month, the band debuted a new song online — “ Nothing, Fear Nothing ” — with a video that showed the band performing live before huge screens featuring ever-changing animations.

Unlike some of their peers, Piknik was “never a political band,” Kukulin said, although that did not stop it from becoming entwined in politics. In the 1980s, Soviet authorities banned the group — along with many others — from using recording studios, while Soviet newspapers complained of the group’s lyrics, including a song called “Opium Smoke” that authorities saw as encouraging drug use.

In recent years, some of Russia’s most prominent rock stars have left their country, fed up with President Vladimir V. Putin’s curbs on freedom of expression, including regular crackdowns on concerts. Piknik had benefited from that exodus, Kukulin said, because the band had fewer competitors on Russia’s heritage rock circuit.

Unlike some musicians, Shklyarsky had not acted as a booster for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kukulin said. Still, Ukrainian authorities have long banned Piknik from performing in the country because the group has played concerts in occupied Crimea. In a 2016 interview , Shklyarsky said he was not concerned about the ban.

“Politics comes and goes, but life remains,” he said.

Kukulin said that among Piknik’s songs was “ To the Memory of Innocent Victims ” — a track that could be interpreted as being about those who were politically oppressed under communism. Now, Kukulin said, many fans were hearing the song in a new way, as a tribute to those who lost their lives in Friday’s attack.

Anton Troianovski

news analysis

A deadly attack shatters Putin’s promise of security to the Russian people.

Less than a week ago, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth term with his highest-ever share of the vote, using a stage-managed election to show the nation and the world that he was firmly in control.

Just days later came a searing counterpoint: His vaunted security apparatus failed to prevent Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years.

The assault on Friday, which killed at least 133 people at a concert hall in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a leader for whom national security is paramount. That is especially true after two years of a war in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he cast as his top priority after the election last Sunday.

“The election demonstrated a seemingly confident victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “And suddenly, against the backdrop of a confident victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”

Mr. Putin seemed blindsided by the assault. It took him more than 19 hours to address the nation about the attack, the deadliest in Russia since the 2004 school siege in Beslan, in the country’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian leader said nothing about the mounting evidence that a branch of the Islamic State committed the attack.

Instead, Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and said the assailants had acted “just like the Nazis,” who “once carried out massacres in the occupied territories” — evoking his frequent, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.

“Our common duty now — our comrades at the front, all citizens of the country — is to be together in one formation,” Mr. Putin said at the end of a five-minute speech, trying to conflate the fight against terrorism with his invasion of Ukraine.

The question is how much of the Russian public will buy into his argument. They might ask whether Mr. Putin, with the invasion and his conflict with the West, truly has the country’s security interests at heart — or whether he is woefully forsaking them, as many of his opponents say he is.

The fact that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States about a potential terrorist attack is likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of acting on the warnings and tightening security, he dismissed them as “provocative statements.”

“All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin said on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, referring to the Western warnings. After the attack on Friday, some of his exiled critics have cited his response as evidence of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true security concerns.

Rather than keeping society safe from actual, violent terrorists, those critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling security services to pursue dissidents, journalists and anyone deemed a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.”

A case in point: Just hours before the attack, state media reported that the Russian authorities had added “the L.G.B.T. movement” to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the gay rights movement last year. Terrorism was also among the many charges prosecutors leveled against Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who died last month .

“In a country in which counterterrorism special forces chase after online commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian military analyst, wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.”

Even as the Islamic State repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers pushed into overdrive to try to persuade the Russian public that this was merely a ruse.

Olga Skabeyeva, a state television host, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian military intelligence had found assailants “who would look like ISIS. But this is no ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT television network, wrote that reports of Islamic State responsibility amounted to a “basic sleight of hand” by the American news media.

On a prime-time television talk show on the state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, declared that Ukraine’s leadership and “their puppet masters in the Western intelligence services” had surely organized the attack.

It was an effort to “undermine trust in the president,” Mr. Dugin said, and it showed regular Russians that they had no choice but to unite behind Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a car bombing near Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officials said was indeed authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government , but without American involvement.

U.S. officials have said there is no evidence of Ukrainian involvement in the concert hall attack, and Ukrainian officials ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said Mr. Putin’s claim that the attackers had fled toward Ukraine and intended to cross into it, with the help of the Ukrainian authorities, made no sense.

In recent months, Mr. Putin has appeared more confident than at any other point since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have retaken the initiative on the front line, while Ukraine is struggling amid flagging Western support and a shortage of troops.

Inside Russia, the election — and its predetermined outcome — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.

Mr. Kynev, the political scientist, said he believed many Russians were now in “shock,” because “restoring order has always been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”

Mr. Putin’s early years in power were marked by terrorist attacks, culminating in the Beslan school siege in 2004; he used those violent episodes to justify his rollback of political freedoms. Before Friday, the most recent mass-casualty terrorist attack in the capital region was a suicide bombing at an airport in Moscow in 2011 that killed 37 people.

Still, given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and the news media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political consequences of the concert hall attack would be limited, as long as the violence was not repeated.

“To be honest,” he said, “our society has gotten used to keeping quiet about inconvenient topics.”

Constant Méheut contributed reporting.

There have been other deadly attacks at concerts and music festivals in recent years.

The attack before a sold-out rock concert near Moscow on Friday was the latest in a series of mass killings at concerts and music festivals around the world in recent years.

During the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel last year, Hamas targeted Tribe of Nova’s Supernova Sukkot Gathering , a dance music festival in Re’im, leaving at least 360 dead , according to the Israeli authorities. Gunmen surrounded the music festival at daybreak, killing and kidnapping attendees as others fled in their cars, only to find roads blocked and the event surrounded. “It was like a shooting range,” said Hila Fakliro, who was bartending around sunrise. Around 3,000 people had come to the event, timed to the end of the harvest holiday Sukkot.

In May 2017, a suicide bombing killed 22 people and injured hundreds more at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in England. The assailant, a British citizen of Libyan descent, detonated explosives packed with nails, bolts and ball bearings moments after the performance ended, sending the crowd — filled with children and adolescent fans of the pop singer, who was then 23 — into a panic. Intelligence officials found that the bomber had previously traveled to Libya to meet with members of an Islamic State unit linked to terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, which included an assault on a concert venue.

In November 2015, 90 people were killed at the Bataclan , a Paris music venue that holds 1,500, when three men armed with assault rifles and suicide vests stormed a concert by the California rock band Eagles of Death Metal. The musicians fled the stage as gunfire broke out, and attendees tried to hide from the assailants. A standoff with the police lasted more than two hours, with concertgoers held as hostages, ending when the police entered the club. One attacker was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. “Carnage,” one attendee posted on Facebook from inside the club. “Bodies everywhere.”

The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history took place at a music festival in October 2017, when a gunman fatally shot 60 people and injured hundreds more attending the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas . The assailant had stockpiled 23 firearms in a 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, opening fire from his window as Jason Aldean was onstage singing “When She Says Baby.” “It was just total chaos,” Melissa Ayala, who attended the festival with four friends, said. “People falling down and laying everywhere. We were trying to take cover and we had no idea where to go.” The F.B.I. concluded that the motive for the killings was unclear, but released files last year suggesting that the gunman, a gambler, was angry over casinos scaling back on perks. He had searched “biggest open air concert venues in USA” and reserved a hotel room overlooking the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago before settling on the Las Vegas event as his target.

The people killed at recent concerts and music festivals were commemorated earlier this year at the Grammy Awards . “Music must always be our safe space,” Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, which gives out the awards, said during the telecast. “When that’s violated, it strikes at the very core of who we are.”

Christina Goldbaum

The ISIS branch the U.S. blames for the attack has targeted the Taliban’s links with allies, including Russia.

The ISIS affiliate that American officials say was behind the deadly attack in Moscow is one of the last significant antagonists that the Taliban government faces in Afghanistan, and it has carried out repeated attacks there, including on the Russian Embassy, in recent years.

That branch of ISIS — known as the Islamic State Khorasan or ISIS-K — has portrayed itself as the primary rival to the Taliban, who it says have not implemented true Shariah law since seizing power in 2021. It has sought to undermine the Taliban’s relationships with regional allies and portray the government as unable to provide security in the country, experts say.

In 2022, ISIS-K carried out attacks on the Russian and Pakistani embassies in Kabul and a hotel that was home to many Chinese nationals. More recently, it has also threatened attacks against the Chinese, Indian and Iranian embassies in Afghanistan and has released a flood of anti-Russian propaganda.

It has also struck outside Afghanistan. In January, ISIS-K carried out twin bombings in Iran that killed scores and wounded hundreds of others at a memorial service for Iran’s former top general, Qassim Suleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike four years before.

In recent months, the Taliban’s relationship with Russia, as well as China and Iran, has warmed up. While no country has officially recognized the Taliban government, earlier this month Russia accepted a military attaché from the Taliban in Moscow, while China officially accepted a Taliban ambassador to the country. Both moves were seen as confidence-building measures with Taliban authorities.

ISIS-K has both denounced the Kremlin for its interventions in Syria and condemned the Taliban for engaging with Russian authorities decades after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Its propaganda has painted the Taliban as “betraying the history of Afghanistan and betraying their religion by making friends with their former enemies,” said Ricardo Valle, the director of research of the Khorasan Diary, a research platform based in Islamabad.

In the more than two years since they took over in Afghanistan, Taliban security forces have conducted a ruthless campaign to try to eliminate ISIS-K and have successfully prevented the group from seizing territory within Afghanistan. Last year, Taliban security forces killed at least eight ISIS-K leaders, according to American officials, and pushed many other fighters into neighboring Pakistan .

Still, ISIS-K has proved resilient and remained active across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Within Afghanistan, it has targeted Taliban security forces in hit-and-run attacks and — as it came under increasing pressure from Taliban counterterrorism operations — staged headline-grabbing attacks across the country. Just a day before the attack at the concert hall in Moscow, the group carried out a suicide bombing in Kandahar — the birthplace of the Taliban movement — sending a powerful message that even Taliban soldiers in the group’s heartland were not safe.

After the attack in Moscow, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s foreign ministry, said in a statement on social media that the country “condemns in the strongest terms the recent terrorist attack in Moscow” and “considers it a blatant violation of all human standards.”

“Regional countries must take a coordinated, clear and resolute position against such incidents directed at regional de-stabilization,” he added.

Oleg Matsnev

Names of the victims are beginning to emerge.

As emergency services combed the scene of the attack on a concert hall in Moscow, details on some of the victims began to emerge from officials and local news media.

Most of those identified so far appeared to be in their 40s, and many had traveled from other parts of the country to attend the concert where Piknik, a Russian rock band formed in the late 1970s, was slated to perform on Friday night.

Alexander Baklemyshev, 51, had long dreamed about seeing the band, his son told local media , and had traveled solo from his home city of Satka, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, for the concert.

His son, Maksim, told the Russian news outlet MSK1 that his father had sent him a video of the concert hall before the attack. That was the last he heard from his father.

Irina Okisheva and her husband, Pavel Okishev, also traveled hundreds of miles to attend the concert — making their way from Kirov, northeast of Moscow. Mr. Okishev had received the tickets as an early birthday present. He was set to turn 35 next week, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported. Both he and his wife died in the attack, the paper reported.

“Very painful and scary,” Ms. Okisheva’s colleagues wrote on a social media page for a photo studio where she worked. “The whole studio team is horrified by what happened.”

Anastasiya Volkova lost both of her parents in the attack. She told 5 TV that she had missed a call from her mother on Friday night at around the time of the attack. When she called back, there was no response, Ms. Volkova said.

As the death toll climbed to 133 people, the Moscow region’s health care ministry published a preliminary list of victims . It had 41 names; Andrey Rudnitsky was one of them.

A forward in an amateur hockey league, he turned 39 years old last week, according to his page on the league’s website. Mr. Rudnitsky’s teammates told Pro Gorod , a local news website, that he had moved to Moscow last year from Yaroslavl but planned to return home to play there. Mr. Rudnitsky had two children.

Ekaterina Novoselova, 42, was also on the list. Ms. Novoselova won a beauty pageant in 2001 in her home city of Tver, 110 miles northwest of Moscow, one of the pageant organizer’s told the local news outlet TIA . It reported that she had moved to Moscow to work as a lawyer and is survived by her husband and two children.

Some people appeared to have been named by mistake. Yevgeniya Ryumina, 38, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that she had fled the concert hall to safety. But she had lost her ID, Ms. Ryumina said, suggesting that might have led to the confusion.

This is what we know about the attack.

An attack Friday at a popular concert venue near Moscow killed 137 people, the deadliest act of terrorism the Russian capital region has seen in more than a decade.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack; American officials have attributed it to ISIS-K, a branch of the group.

Russian officials and state media have largely ignored ISIS’s claim of responsibility and instead suggested that Ukraine was behind the violence. Ukraine has denied any involvement, and American officials say there is no evidence connecting Kyiv to the attack.

Russian authorities have detained at least 11 people, including four migrant laborers described as Tajik citizens who have been charged with committing a terrorist act, but they have not identified most of the accused assailants or their motives.

Here’s a closer look at the attack.

What happened?

The gunmen entered the Crocus City Hall building, one of the biggest entertainment complexes in the Moscow area, with capacity of more than 6,000, shortly before a sold-out rock concert was scheduled to start. Armed with automatic rifles, they began shooting.

Using explosives and flammable liquids, Russian investigators said, they set the building ablaze, causing chaos as people began to run. The fire quickly engulfed more than a third of the building, spreading smoke and causing parts of the roof to collapse. Russia’s emergency service posted a video and pictures from after the fire showing charred seating and firefighters working to remove debris.

Russian law enforcement said that people had died from gunshot wounds and poisoning from the smoke.

At least three helicopters were dispatched to extinguish the fire or to try to rescue people from the roof. The firefighters were only able to contain the fire early on Saturday; the emergency service said it was mostly extinguished by 5 a.m.

The search for survivors ended on Saturday, as details about the victims began to emerge. Many of the more than 100 people injured in the attack were in critical condition.

Where are the assailants?

Attackers were able to flee the scene. Early on Saturday, the head of Russia’s top security agency, the F.S.B., said that 11 people had been detained in the connection to the attack, including “all four terrorists directly involved.” The four men were arraigned late Sunday and charged with committing a terrorist act, according to state and independent media outlets, and they face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The press service of the Basmanny District Court said that the first two defendants, Dalerjon B. Mirzoyev and Saidakrami M. Rachalbalizoda, had pleaded guilty to the charges.

It did not specify any plea from the other two — Muhammadsobir Z. Fayzov, a 19-year-old barber and the youngest of the men charged, and Shamsidin Fariduni, 25, a married factory worker with an 8-month-old baby — according to Mediazona, an independent news outlet.

The men looked severely battered and injured as they appeared in court, and videos of them being tortured and beaten while under interrogation circulated widely on Russian social media.

There were signs that Russia would try to pin blame on Ukraine, despite the claim of responsibility by the Islamic State. The F.S.B. said in a statement that the attack had been carefully planned and that the terrorists had tried to flee toward Ukraine.

How are Russians responding?

President Vladimir V. Putin, who claimed victory in a presidential election last weekend, did not publicly address the tragedy until Saturday afternoon. In a five-minute address to the nation, he appeared to be laying the groundwork to blame Ukraine for the attack, claiming that “the Ukrainian side” had “prepared a window” for the attackers to cross the border from Russia into Ukraine.

But he did not definitively assign blame, saying that those responsible would be punished, “whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them.”

The attack has punctured the sense of relative safety for Muscovites over the past decade, bringing back memories of attacks that shadowed life in the Russian capital in the 2000s.

Russia observed a national day of mourning on Sunday as questions lingered about the identities and motives of the perpetrators. Flags were lowered to half-staff at buildings across the country.

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.