Watch Rare Footage Of David Bowie Performing Live In '76

Here’s a burning space rock reminder of just how special Bowie was.

For the past year or so, there’s been an ongoing appraisal of the incredible life of David Bowie. Even many months after his death, Bowie fanatics and musical and cultural historians are still trawling video archives and audio for further insights into the immense musical personality that graced stages and record covers for just about a half century.

The hard work has paid off in this case, with the absolutely primo footage above featuring David Bowie performing live in France in 1976. The footage was recorded by Philippe Bergeron 40 years ago and tracked and re-edited by YouTube Bowie obsessive, Nacho Video.

Nacho recently told Dangerous Minds that “according to legend, a French TV station shot five songs at the final Paris show [in 1976]. A few minutes of that footage was shown on French TV, and featured fragments of three songs.” This footage was supposedly lost until Bergeron’s footage emerged, shot beautifully and in meticulous detail on Super 8. Then the real “detective work” began: how to match up the audio with the corresponding uncovered video? With painstaking analysis, Nacho managed to map the video corresponding with a 14-minute epic live rendition of “Station to Station”.

The rest of the footage was blended in with fades, dissolves and montages and is, quite honestly, fucking awesome. Not only is “Station to Station” completely transformed live into a grooving rock burner, but Bowie used Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s silent surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou as video accompaniment. Another pertinent reminder of just what a phenomenon Bowie and his band were.

(via Dangerous Minds)