Remembering Bowie

They return to the Ropetackle on Friday, September 1 at 8pm, having already delivered the show there in February. They have also played Brighton Open Air Theatre a couple of times, plus the Brunswick.

Wherever they go, the response has been great, says Brighton-based Charlotte who devised the evening with her long-time collaborator Stephen Wrigley, of the Brighton Beach Boys.

“We had been playing some of Bowie’s tunes before he died, but not in a public setting, just tunes that we would play for weddings and so on. We hadn’t really done that much Bowie, but then we got asked to do some in London as a response to his death, and I just thought these tunes are fantastic. I hadn’t really thought about doing them with this band before.”

What makes the music so great, Charlotte reckons, is that Bowie’s songs are story songs: “He has created these wonderful characters, but also the music behind it is so diverse. For me also, it is fantastic that there are so many saxophone solos. To be honest, it is a much bigger feature than I expected.

“I devised the show with Steve. We have worked together on a lot of projects. When you are doing something like this, you start off by looking at the tunes that everybody is going to know, and then you decide what suits our ensemble and various people’s voices and you start to get a set list together. The set list needs to be balanced. Everyone has got their own favourite tracks so that it is not just the greatest hits that you get on the standard best-of two-pack CD.

“Bowie had just released Blackstar just before he died, and I really wanted to do something from that, so we do Lazarus from that work, which is really a foretelling of what happened. We play something really from every period of his career. Sometimes we even do The Laughing Gnome! Our taste is very broad. What we have found at gigs is that the response has been absolutely outstanding. Everybody has been going crazy for it, and we get lots of the really huge David Bowie nutcase fans along and they are saying ‘I have never heard this song done live before!’ I think that people are finding that there is something for everybody who comes along.”

The band recreate the hits of Bowie, drawing on material from throughout his illustrious career from Space Oddity to Rebel Rebel, from Heroes to Let’s Dance.

Charlotte is based in Brighton, as is most of the seven-piece band, which comprises vocals, guitar, keyboards, drums and sax.

Tickets available from the Ropetackle box office on 01273 464440 or via the website ropetacklecentre.co.uk,

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