An unreleased David Bowie concert film from 1978 will return as an immersive, multi-screen live production. Titled Stage, the show is set to premiere at the Uber Arena in Berlin on February 14, 2027, with further dates promised in the months ahead. Brett Morgen, who directed the 2022 documentary Moonage Daydream, has adapted the original footage for the project, and Rob Hallett's Wonderworld and the David Bowie Estate are listed as collaborators.
The source material was shot by the actor and director David Hemmings during Bowie's three Earl's Court shows in London in June 1978, on the tour supporting Low and "Heroes" that Bowie called the Isolar II World Tour. Morgen first conceived the project in 2018 while working through the Bowie archives for Moonage Daydream, and has spent years remastering Hemmings' 35mm film: color grading, relighting, hand painting and configuring the footage for multiple screens. The live event adds a lighting design by Patrick Woodroffe, immersive audio mixed by Paul Massey and LED displays built to carry the scale of a full rock concert.
Bowie released Stage as a live album in September 1978 and did not tour again until 1983. The Berlin setting carries its own resonance: Hansa Studios, where "Heroes" and parts of Low were recorded, sits a short trip across town from the arena.
That period remains the clearest measure of Bowie's appetite for reinvention, a subject ROMBO traced in our account of his 1990s return to experimental form and in our reassessment of his later career. More of our Bowie coverage sits on the archive page.
What gives this announcement weight is the material itself. Hemmings shot one of the most exacting bands of the decade at a moment when Bowie was treating performance as architecture, and the footage has sat largely unseen for nearly fifty years. Morgen's record with the archives lends the restoration credibility, and the choice to rebuild the film as a room-scale event honors an old intention: Bowie wanted this footage shown in venues, as a substitute for the touring he had stopped. Berlin in February 2027 will test whether that idea still holds.
