David Bowie’s Final Live Performances: From the Heart Attack Show to Radio City
After his 2004 onstage heart attack, the enigmatic rock icon made a series of small-scale public appearances before vanishing forever from the concert stage

By Andy Greene
January 9, 2026

Ten years ago this month, David Bowie died just three days after the release of one of the most remarkable albums of his career, Blackstar. Rumors had been swirling about the precarious state of his health for a solid decade, but he’d just attended the premiere of his new off-Broadway musical Lazarus and appeared in two Blackstar music videos. Bowie’s death at 69 on January 10 was very difficult news to process, and the start of a truly horrible year in which we also lost Prince, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Frey, George Michael, Sharon Jones, and Leon Russell.

By the time of his death, Bowie hadn’t performed a full concert or granted an interview in a dozen years. After decades of living a very public life where it didn’t seem odd to watch him guest on The Rosie O’Donnell Show or pose for photos in Hello! magazine with wife Iman and their newborn daughter Alexandria, he suddenly took on a new persona as the Man Who Fell Off Earth, seen only in glimpses on red carpets or film premieres, never speaking.

But there was a weird, brief period after the premature end of the 2003/04 Reality tour where he began popping up unexpectedly at special events and his friend’s concerts. Little did we know that they marked the denouement of his performance career. Thankfully, they were all captured on camera, even if some of the fan-shot material that pre-dates the iPhone era lacks quality. Here’s a fantastic voyage back to Bowie’s seven last live appearances.




Prague, T-Mobile Arena, June 23, 2004

Hard as it may be to imagine today, a David Bowie tour wasn’t an enormous event in the early 2000s. He hadn’t had a hit album in 20 years at that point, a great deal of his Seventies mystique had faded, and he came to town about as often as Rod Stewart or James Taylor. When he launched a world tour behind his woefully under-appreciated 2003 LP Reality, the U.S. leg hit a mixture of arenas, theaters, and even several casinos. He was supposed to stay on the road through late July 2004, but everything changed midway through a scorching hot show in Prague when pain overtook his body as he sang the title track to Reality. “He looked over his shoulder at me,” bassist Gail Ann Dorsey recalled to Rolling Stone in 2016, “and he was pale, translucent almost. His shirt was drenched. And he was just standing there, not singing.” The band vamped for a couple of songs without him, before Bowie somehow came back and got through four more numbers before realizing he simply couldn’t continue, calling the show off moments into “Changes.” He had no idea he had literally suffered a heart attack onstage and nearly died.

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