Crosby & Bowie: "Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth"

by John Lucas on December 16th, 2007 at 11:07 PM

This one has become a perennial favourite: David Bowie and Bing Crosby performing together on the latter's final Christmas television special, filmed in 1977. By some accounts, Crosby had never heard of Bowie until they were booked to perform together, but this seems dubious, given that Crosby and Grace Kelly's recording of the Cole Porter song "True Love" was featured in Bowie's film The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was released in 1976. Crosby died a month after this holiday special was shot, and so it did not air until after his death.

While searching for the above Christmas tune, I happened upon the following clip of Bowie lip-synching (I think) to "Heroes", which was filmed for the same Crosby special:

Since that one has pretty dodgy sound, I thought I'd include the original video for the song, also from 1977, which is quite similar visually:

Comments

1 Comments

John Burns

Dec 16, 2007 at 11:48pm

Good finds! It's uncanny how much Bowie looks like Julie Andrews in that second one. Uncanny.

What puzzles me is how he plays the first six notes of "Little Drummer Boy" on the piano and manages to squeeze out a full orchestral accompaniment out of the instrument. Good trick!

Poor Bing, though. The wincing.