Bowie in the Outback: Inside Making of Groundbreaking ‘Let’s Dance’ Video
In 1983, David Bowie, video director David Mallet and a skeleton crew traveled from London to the town of Carinda, Australia – population: 194 – to make the video for “Let’s Dance,” the title track from the singer’s best-selling album. It was an unusual clip even for Bowie, as the video blended scenes of care-free carousing with a highly politicized statement on the plight of Australia’s Aboriginal people. That dichotomy is explored in the fascinating short film Let’s Dance: Bowie Down Under, set to premiere next week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
Directed by Rubika Shah, the film interviews crew members, local residents featured in the video and talking heads like music journalist Kurt Loder to explore the clip’s diverse themes. “It was very much David’s idea and concept,” Mallet tells Rolling Stone about the video. “It was his idea to shoot in Australia, which in those days was a bold thing to do for a music video. I don’t think any of us had any idea how important it was to do and what the reaction would be.”
The roots of Let’s Dance: Bowie Down Under date back to 2008, when Shah visited Australia on an unrelated trip and noticed the divide between whites and Aboriginals. “Me being non-white myself, I started to understand some of those things he was saying,” Shah says. “You don’t really see Aboriginal people in the towns or when you go out to bars. I couldn’t believe that this story hadn’t been told.”
When Bowie landed in Carinda, it was, to quote journalist Matt Coyte in the film, “like an alien was walking down the street.” “Imagine David Bowie arriving in this sheep-shearing hamlet with few crew and no huge entourage of bodyguards,” Shah adds. “It was quite risqué.”
“It was like the Wild West in those days,” Mallet says. “You didn’t ask; you just did it. Nowadays, there would’ve been a health and safety executive who would’ve been asking the representative of the film company. In those days, you would literally go, ‘Oh, let’s go in the street and do this and then someone else holds the traffic up and you do it.’ It was guerrilla filmmaking.”
At the time, it was rare to see Aboriginal people portrayed in a positive light in Australia, much less the rest of the world. Bowie, shifting his position from a reclusive superstar to a responsibility-laden artist, wanted to change that, bringing in Aboriginal people he found at dancing and theatre schools and having them dance at the, to quote Mallet, “redneck bar” seen in the video. Bowie refused to use actors, opting for the real people that were in the bar at the time of shooting. “You couldn’t pay actors to act the way they looked with these Aborginals dancing in their bar,” Ross Cameron, the video’s producer, says in the film.