David Bowie’s Final Live Performances: From the Heart Attack Show to Radio City

Hard as it may be to imagine today, a David Bowie tour wasn’t an enormous event in the early 2000s. He hadn’t had a hit album in 20 years at that point, a great deal of his Seventies mystique had faded, and he came to town about as often as Rod Stewart or James Taylor. When he launched a world tour behind his woefully under-appreciated 2003 LP Reality, the U.S. leg hit a mixture of arenas, theaters, and even several casinos. He was supposed to stay on the road through late July 2004, but everything changed midway through a scorching hot show in Prague when pain overtook his body as he sang the title track to Reality. “He looked over his shoulder at me,” bassist Gail Ann Dorsey recalled to Rolling Stone in 2016, “and he was pale, translucent almost. His shirt was drenched. And he was just standing there, not singing.” The band vamped for a couple of songs without him, before Bowie somehow came back and got through four more numbers before realizing he simply couldn’t continue, calling the show off moments into “Changes.” He had no idea he had literally suffered a heart attack onstage and nearly died.

If Bowie had been properly diagnosed as having a heart attack, there’s no way the tour would have continued. But thinking he merely had a pinched nerve, Bowie and the band headed to the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany, two days later. Through an incredible force of will, Bowie got through the entire set, wearing a sweatshirt as opposed to his usual tour attire. “I remember walking down the stairs behind him after we finished,” Dorsey said. “When he got to the bottom, he actually collapsed. He was so tired and so sick. They rushed him to the hospital.” It was only then that he learned he needed emergency heart surgery. It marked the end of the tour, the end of his career as a touring artist, and a significant turning point in his life. 

Bowie completely vanished from public view after the Hurricane Festival, so it was pretty surprising when Fashion Rocks announced he was going to take part in their September 2005 Radio City Music Hall event, sharing the bill with Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Destiny’s Child, and Arcade Fire. He first came out with longtime pianist Mick Garson for a sparse rendition of “Life on Mars,” wearing a cast on his right arm and makeup on his eye that made it look like he’d been punched in the face. (We still don’t quite know what that was about.) Later in the night, he joined Arcade Fire for thrilling renditions of “Wake Up” and “Five Years.” For a brief moment, it felt like Bowie was truly back and the health scare was just a bump in the road.

Right around the time of Fashion Rocks, Bowie became a regular presence on the downtown New York rock scene. He was a regular sight at the Bowery Ballroom checking out shows by new acts like TV on the Radio and Arcade Fire. He was clearly enamored with the latter band and appeared at their Central Park concert, just one week after their Fashion Rocks jam, for “Queen Bitch” and another run through “Wake Up.” The footage is blurred and distorted, but you can still tell that the crowd is losing its damn mind.

Thirty-three years after covering “See Emily Play” on his cover LP Pin Ups, Bowie stunned fans at a David Gilmour show at the Royal Albert Hall by showing up to sing another Sid Barrett-era classic, “Arnold Layne.” He then stuck around to deliver the Roger Waters vocal parts on “Comfortably Numb,” which had been done by Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright every other night of the tour.

“What was incredible is when he got up to do ‘Arnold Layne,’ he knew that song inside, outside, upside down,” Gilmour bassist Guy Pratt told Rolling Stone in 2020. “It was like he had been singing it every night for his whole life. He just knew it so well. Then you kind of got the impression that he didn’t really know ‘Comfortably Numb.’ What was funny was that Rick, who had to be bullied into singing the verses at the start of the tour, was now kind of loath to give them up. [Laughs] We were like, ‘For fuck’s sake, Rick, it’s Bowie!’”

There’s a very fair argument that Bowie’s three-song set at Hammerstein Ballroom in 2006 for the Save a Child Foundation was his final live performance. He played “Wild Is the Wind,” and “Fantastic Voyage” with Mike Garson, before Alicia Keys joined him on “Changes.” (The footage is as awful as you’d expect for a 2006 concert clip that’s been on YouTube for 19 years, but we should be grateful it exists at all.) This is the last time he played his own songs in public or was even accompanied by musicians onstage. But there was one more moment that sorta, kinda counts…

Bowie curated the 2007 High Line Festival in New York, and was originally supposed to close out the festivities with a giant concert in Riverside Park. Those plans were ultimately scuttled, but he did book Ricky Gervais at Radio City, and he came onstage to introduce him by recreating an Extras routine in which he mocked him with an impromptu song called “Little Fat Man.” It’s easy to argue this is a mere comedy bit, and there’s no band or instrumentation of any kind, but there is an audience and Bowie is singing rather than speaking. Setlist.FM counts it, but we’re on the fence. (Watch the video and judge for yourself.) What we can say with great certainty is that Bowie released two more albums, shot several music videos, and created the musical Lazarus after this. But he never sang another note in public, even “Little Fat Man.”