‘How on earth is this man not sweating?’ Director Brett Morgen’s painstaking 10-year remaser Bowie’s ‘greatest filmed performance’

In 2017, when Brett Morgen began work on his acclaimed 2022 David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, he was given complete access to the late star’s entire, cavernous archive. “My eyes were immediately drawn to a stack of gleaming 35mm cans with the word ‘Stage’ written on them,” he remembers.

At first, the director – whose work also includes Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and the Rolling Stones documentary Crossfire Hurricane – assumed the cans might contain some sort of footage shot around Bowie’s 1978 live album, Stage, recorded in mostly in Philadelphia. However, he soon realised they actually contained the holy grail of Bowie artefacts: footage of the legendary Earl’s Court shows later that year, which had remained unseen for almost 50 years. “Making Moonage Daydream, I had access to every filmed performance in existence of David Bowie,” he says, “but when I saw this one I knew this was without question the greatest filmed performance of his career.”

In 1978, Bowie had commissioned Just a Gigolo director David Hemmings to film two of the three sold-out summer shows at the venue – where the star was touring Low and “Heroes” – with a view to showing the film in theatres in lieu of a physical tour (he wouldn’t take the road again until 1983). However, the singer subsequently started making the Lodger album, moved to Switzerland, was reportedly unhappy with the film’s editing and the entire project was subsequently left behind. “He was moving on to other things at the speed of light,” Morgen explains. “So at that point I think the idea of looking backwards was distasteful to him.”

Before his death in 2016, though, Bowie had floated the idea of finally putting it out. In the new year it will debut in arenas – not cinemas – almost half a century after it was made. Morgen and team spent nearly 10 years readying it for 2027 as a multimedia experience. “It became something of an obsession,” he admits. “We spent over 1,000 hours colour-grading the footage, which I believe is some sort of record, but we really wanted it to look and feel like something you would experience today.”

It helped that the footage had been beautifully shot and perfectly preserved in Bowie’s storage unit, with excellent sound recorded by Bowie’s producer, Tony Visconti. Missing from Morgen’s film will be the extraneous stuff Hemmings added to the concerts. “I found a lot of footage of a young boy playing David that I was a bit confused by,” the director grins. “That’s not in the film.” Instead, it focuses on Bowie – in wonderfully billowing trousers and makeup – at the peak of his performance powers. “He looks amazing,” Morgen smiles. “I’ve looked at close-ups and I think: how on earth is this man not sweating?”

By the time the Isolar II tour reached Earl’s Court, Bowie and band were at the pinnacle of their game, signposting the future. “To have an electric violin, a piano and a synth player in a rock show in 1978 was extraordinary,” says Morgen, whose film combines songs from both nights because “It was very improvisational. Different arrangements two nights running. You can feel the danger and excitement that it could have gone off the rails at any moment and David was very charged by that.

“The audacity of starting the show with Warszawa, perhaps the lowest-energy first song of any rock concert ever – but that’s Bowie. By the end of the first set he’s reeled them in and by the end of the second set the place is just insane. The performance of Station to Station is incredible.”

Bowie in a still from Brett Morgen’s remastered Stage. Photograph: PR

During the second show, on 1 July, Bowie quips, “OK, this will be interesting”, and performs Sound and Vision for the first time ever. “And he’s cracking up throughout the song because I think the electric violin was trying to do the horn section, which David thought was kind of amusing. It’s a great moment. Then the camera stays with David when he goes off to the sides, having a glass of beer or smoking a cigarette, and he’s so engaged, dancing and smiling. It’s very joyous. I think this was the first time he’d performed without a mask, or ‘character’, so to speak.”

Morgen isn’t giving everything away but promises “surprises” as well as “a new medium of entertainment”.

“It’s not a movie that’s being shown in arenas,” he insists. “There’s multiple screens, a fully integrated lighting package, a 7.1 [surround sound] sound mix. The performance is 1978 but the presentation is 2027. The audience is invited to gaze where they want to gaze: choose your own adventure. Eleven years after his passing, it makes perfect sense that Bowie will be trailblazing again.”