On August 25th David was in Hilversum, Holland, recording a mimed performance of "Space Oddity" for the Dutch television show Doebidoe. On September 13th he compered another open-air concert, this time a smaller affair at Bromley's Library Gardens, where in addition to his own set he joined local schoolboy band Maya for an unrehearsed performance of the blues classic "I'm So Glad". On October 2nd he recorded his first ever Top Of The Pops appearance and, as "Space Oddity" began catching on, Kenneth Pitt arranged a 20-minute support slot on a tour by Humble Pie, the band led by Steve Marriott and David's old schoolmate Peter Frampton. Their manager Andrew Oldham originally wanted Bowie to perform his mime routines, but acquiesced to his wish to play straight songs instead. The nine-date tour started in Coventry on October 8th, and later in the month David recorded a BBC radio session for The Dave Lee Travis Show.

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Following the end of the Humble Pie tour, Bowie flew to Berlin - his first visit to a city that would later become pivotal to his music - to perform "Space Oddity" on ZDF's 4-3-2-1 Musik Fur Junge Leute. November 2nd saw another inaugural trip, this time to Switzerland for a mimed performance of "Space Oddity" on the following day's edition of Hits A-Go-Go.

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Having played a couple of solo dates in England at the end of October, Bowie began a short tour of Scotland the following month to coincide with the release of Space Oddity. This outing, on which David was backed for the first few dates by Junior's Eyes, can justifiably claim to be Bowie's first bona fide solo tour. The show began with a Junior's Eyes support set, after which David replaced vocalist Graham Kelly to play a selection of numbers from Space Oddity peppered with a few covers. "It was quite a strange affair, a bit of a lash-up really," guitarist Tim Renwick later recalled. Bowie, whose previous gigging experience rested largely in the realm of loudly amplified R&B, was unprepared for the reception awaiting his new acoustic folk style: "I thought haughtily, 'I'll go out and sing my songs!', not knowing what audiences were like in those days. Sure enough, it was a revival of the Mod thing which had since turned into skinheads. They couldn't abide me. No way! The whole spitting, cigarette-flicking abuse thing by audiences started long before the punks of 1977 in my own frame of reference." Angela Bowie later recalled that the Gillingham audience was particularly hostile: "The crowd didn't want to hear David, they wanted to hear Buddy Holly. So I rounded up the support band and asked if any of them knew any Buddy Holly songs. They did, so David went out and played an entire set of Buddy Holly numbers and went down great! Then he came to the end and sang "Space Oddity" and that was that. Everybody started throwing beer bottles and cigarette ends at him."

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The most prestigious of the autumn gig's was David's headliner at the Royal Festival Hall's Purcell Room on November 20th. Kenneth Pitt had booked the concert a year earlier in the hope that David might have had some success by then, and his timing turned out to be immaculate. However, Pitt's dwindling influence and the ascendancy of David's new ally Calvin Mark Lee led to a dispute between the two over responsibility for promoting the gig, and each would later blame the other for what ensued. The Purcell Room concert was a personal triumph for David, but was attended by so few journalists that its purpose - coverage in the national press - was confounded. Bowie was furious, and neither Pitt nor Lee would ever be fully trusted thereafter. "I have never seen him perform so well, either before or since," said Pitt many years later. "David Bowie happened that night. Had the press been there, everything that happened to him in 1972 would have happened in November 1969."

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Among the few who reviewed the show was Tony Palmer of The Observer, who commended the "sizzling concert" and the "spectacularly good" "Space Oddity", but found some of David's "love reveries" - "An Occasional Dream" and the like - "dreary, self-pitying and monotonous". Music Now! reported that "His performance was astounding. He had the audience bewitched with his words, his music, his voice and his professionalism. With simplicity and sincerity he sang his songs. He has his own style, but also great imagination and versatility."

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On November 30th David performed "Space Oddity" at Save Rave '69, an all-star charity show at the London Palladium in aid of the Invalid Children's Aid Association. The concert was attended by Princess Margaret, to whom David was presented. It was his final live show of the year and of the decade. On January 8th 1970, his twenty-third birthday, David performed at London's Speakeasy club after beginning work on the single version of "The Prettiest Star" earlier the same day. This was the first of several one-off bookings organised through the NEMS agency. David played acoustic guitar, accompanied by Tony Visconti on bass and John Cambridge on drums. The gig was attended by Tim Hughes of Jeremy magazine, who recorded that Bowie sat "Perched precariously on two boxes - a luminous elfin face surrounded by an aureole of blond curls - he looks very vulnerable."

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On January 29th David and Angela travelled to Aberdeen to record an appearance on Grampian TV's Cairngorm Ski Night. "London Bye Ta-Ta" was still being mooted as the forthcoming single and this was the song David performed, backed by the show's resident ensemble The Alex Sutherland Band. Cairngorm Ski Night was a hybrid of variety and arts review, and in keeping with its title the musical acts were encouraged to wear ski jumpers: apparently Bowie declined this request and stuck to his own attire. A member of the production team later recalled that David also performed a mime or dance piece with Angela, and that a synthesizer recently purchased by Grampian was pressed into service; sadly the tape is long since wiped. To make the trip financially worthwhile Pitt secured David an engagement at Aberdeen University the following night, at which David was accompanied by drummer Tex Johnson, a session player drafted in at short notice by Tony Visconti, who played bass. When Lindsay Kemp, now based in Edinburgh, heard of David's forthcoming Scottish trip he contacted Pitt to offer David two days' work on a television adaptation of Pierrot In Turquoise.

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At the Marquee on February 3rd Bowie was backed by a trio of Space Oddity veterans: Tony Visconti on bass, John Cambridge on drums and Tim Renwick on guitar. It was while socialising after this gig in La Chasse, a Wardour Street bar popular with the Marquee crowd, that David was first introduced to Mick Ronson, a friend of Cambridge's from Hull who had been wooed down to London to meet Bowie at the drummer's insistence. Within two days of the Marquee concert Bowie had hired Ronson as a full-time guitarist, and one of the cornerstones of his forthcoming success had been cemented into place.