AMG Review of Stage [Virgin]

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

Stage was David Bowie's second live double album, documenting his supporting tour for Heroes. Supported by a band that featured guitarists Adrian Belew and Carlos Alomar, Bowie doesn't recast his earlier work in a new light -- the songs from Ziggy Stardust essentially remain the same, as do the selections from Station to Station -- but they are infused with a new avant-garde spirit that comes to the forefront during the songs from Low and Heroes. Though the newer material isn't arranged in a different manner than the studio versions -- and it lacks some of the studio trickery that made the originals so thrilling -- the live versions do illustrate that much of the innovation of the Bowie-Eno collaborations lies in their subversion of conventional song structure. [Virgin's 2005 reissue is a 24-bit digital remaster and adds a handful of previously unreleased tracks, songs that were not on Rykodisc's 1991 reissue.]