Reviewed onThursday May 19 (photo by Robert Catto)
David Robert Jones died on January 10, 2016. David Jones did. Not David Bowie. David Bowie has never died. He never will, so there’s no need to mourn him. We don’t have to say goodbye to him or his songs – not till this thing we call music evaporates or the world winks out.
Fittingly then, Nothing Has Changed wasn’t a memorial. What would there be to memorialise? Which idiot would get up on the Sydney Opera House stage, backed by one of the world’s finest symphony orchestras – the Sydney Symphony Orchestra – and pretend that anything about David Bowie exists in the past tense?
Early obstacles were dismantled with stunning ease. Though iOTA’s vocals were drowned out during his version of ‘Space Oddity’, the show’s opener, by the third song such problems belonged to a different gig. Pleasure piled upon pleasure, as spooled-wire guitar solos nestled up against string arrangements that hardened Bowie’s songs, turning oak through coal to diamond.
Jack Ladder played it cool, swaying in the background, plucking choruses out of the air. Deborah Conway concentrated on her voice. iOTA was all shimmering plastic and beautifully nuanced tones. Adalita was the rock’n’roll soul, all sashay and swagger. Steve Kilbey ran up and down the stage as though it were a marathon’s path. And Tim Rogers tried and failed to turn the proceedings into the Tim Rogers show, mugging for cameras that weren’t there.
But even Rogers’ showboating had its place. Each musician became a kaleidoscoped version of Bowie writ large. Each took something totally different from the man and threw their whole selves at those complicated targets. Rogers plonking his foot on the piano and then mock-miming an apology for scuffing its surface was an exuberant flourish that recalled every inch of the Glass Spider Tour. Ladder’s stylised remove was the Thin White Duke in slow motion. Adalita didn’t sing ‘Modern Love’, she was ‘Modern Love’, and Kilbey was pop’s distorted pastiche – the chorus of ‘Station To Station’ dressed up in a suit and sent out to strut.
That’s what people talk about when they talk about David Bowie. They’re not talking about a man, or an attitude, or a point in time. They are talking about the things that exist outside language’s scope. They’re talking about music, and magic, and the way the two intertwine. They’re not talking about a star – they’re talking about the stars.
