One of the best Bowie bootleg videos that’s been floating around for at least 30 years is the professional recording of six numbers from his 1978 “Isolar II” tour, shot on film at the Dallas Convention Center performance of April 10th, 1978. No matter the short running time, this is one of the finest live Bowie documents we’ve got and it hails from one of his most creative and fertile periods as an artist. It’s incredible to me that neither this nor the “1980 Floor Show” (Bowie’s Midnight Special special from 1973) has ever been made available for the home DVD market. According to the YouTube uploader (and Wikipedia) this was broadcast as “David Bowie On Stage” on US TV, but I can’t recall that. When this first started making its way around the VHS tape-trading underground, it was described as something that RCA did actually produce with the notion of releasing it to the consumer market, but in 1978 this would have been too early for anyone but the earliest adopters.
 

 
And then there is this show from the final night of the “Isolar II” (AKA Low/Heroes) tour at the NHK Hall in Tokyo, Japan on December 12, 1978. What Bowie fanatic wouldn’t want these on Blu-ray? You’d think EMI would want to squeeze every dollar out of the Bowie catalog that they can. I’d buy it without hesitation.
 

 
This relaxed set was taped for Germany’s Musikladen television series. The band here includes Bowie’s mainstay musicians of the era, Dennis Davis on drums, Carlos Alomar on guitar and bassist George Murray. There’s a particularly hot “Stay” featuring Adrian Belew’s screamingly funky guitar leads that starts at the 13:37 mark and it’s worth pointing out that the violinist is Simon House, who’d played with the Third Ear Band and Hawkwind and on synthesizer that’s Todd Rundgren’s longtime Utopia sideman Roger Powell.