David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hypnotic Performance on SNL (1979)

1979 was a strange year in music. A year of end­ings, in a way. Sid Vicious died, Ozzy Osbourne left Black Sab­bath… an old guard fad­ed away. On the oth­er hand, U2 went into the stu­dio for their debut, Kate Bush went on her first tour, and new wave emerged from punk’s end. It was also the year, notably or not, that Berlin/New York cabaret per­former Klaus Nomi broke, sort of. Nomi had been per­form­ing Wag­n­er and Vaude­ville in New York, and David Bowie, always on the make for unusu­al trav­el­ing com­pan­ions, invit­ed him to appear as a back­up singer on Sat­ur­day Night Live. Bowie him­self was in tran­si­tion, leav­ing behind his high con­cept work with Bri­an Eno on his Berlin Tril­o­gy (Low, ”Heroes,” and Lodger) and enter­ing anoth­er high pop phase. It was an abrupt, but nat­ur­al, shift for Bowie; tap­ping into Nomi’s art-pop affec­ta­tions may have seemed a per­fect way to bridge the two.

Bowie, Nomi, and flam­boy­ant New York per­for­mance artist Joey Arias do three songs, reach­ing back to Bowie’s folki­er times for “The Man Who Sold the World.” Bowie launch­es next into Sta­tion to Sta­tion’s “TVC 15” in a skirt and heels, while Nomi and Arias drag around a pink plas­tic poo­dle. For the last num­ber, Lodger’s “When You’re a Boy,” Bowie per­haps invents the look of 80s new wave videos to come—from Peter Gabriel to the Pet Shop Boys—while wear­ing a life-size mar­i­onette cos­tume. Some amaz­ing mech­a­nism, pup­peteers off­stage or Bowie him­self, oper­ates the over­sized arms, and the whole thing takes SNL musi­cal per­for­mances to a place they’d nev­er been. Nomi was so impressed with the cos­tum­ing that he adopt­ed the huge plas­tic tuxe­do Bowie wears dur­ing the first song as his own, wear­ing one on the cov­er of his first album and per­form­ing in it until his death from AIDS in 1983. The broad­cast above took place on Decem­ber 15, 1979.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Klaus Nomi: The Bril­liant Per­for­mance of a Dying Man

Klaus Nomi’s Ad for Jäger­meis­ter (Cir­ca 1980)

David Bowie and Cher Sing Duet of “Young Amer­i­cans” and Oth­er Songs on 1975 Vari­ety Show

David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Com­fort­ably Numb” Live (2006)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness