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.
–
Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi