Tin Machine's first live performance was a secret warm-up gig in the spring of 1989 at a club in Nassau, while the album sessions were still in progress. "We weren't announced," said Reeves Gabrels. "We just walked up on stage and you could hear all these voices whispering, That's David Bowie! No, it can't be David Bowie, he's got a beard!" Following this low-key baptism and an appearance performing "Heaven's In Here" at the International Music Awards in New York on May 31st (after which Tina Turner's mother told a reporter that "I liked it better when David was singing songs!"), rehearsals continued in Manhattan for a small-scale inaugural tour. There were to be only twelve shows in all - three in America, four on mainland Europe and five in Britain - and all in venues with a capacity of no more than 2000. It was an intense reaction against the expansiveness of the Glass Spider circus. "Non-theatrical, definitely," Bowie declared. "Just a six-piece horn section and a trapeze artist!"

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Joined on stage by their often overlooked fifth member Kevin Armstrong, the 1989 incarnation of Tin Machine cut a straightforward, monochrome dash in black trousers, white shirts and - at the beginning of the evening at least - jackets and ties. Otherwise the visuals were restricted to a few stark lighting effects. It was a studiously stripped-down garage aesthetic, but it was inevitably rendered theatrical by the very fact that the bearded, perspiring, chain-smoking vocalist within a fingertip's reach of the audience was a global superstar who had seldom played venues this small since 1973 - indeed one of them, St George's Hall in Bradford, was a veteran of the Ziggy Stardust tour.

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The set-list, too, was entirely uncompromising. Bowie had made it clear that his current enthusiasms began and ended with Tin Machine, but nobody had seriously imagined he wouldn't throw in the occasional oldie - a hard-boiled "Scary Monsters" perhaps, or a guitar-heavy "Suffragette City". But it was not to be. Tin Machine stuck to their own songbook: the whole of the first album save "Video Crime", bolstered by a trio of new compositions and a couple of hoary 1960s covers. The absence of Bowie's back catalogue was a source of disappointment to some, but without a doubt it was the decisive factor in cementing Tin Machine's genuine band identity. In a move that was to develop further on the second tour, Bowie even surrendered centre stage to Hunt Sales for one number, a prototype of the Tin Machine II track "Sorry". This and other try-outs were indicative of the wholesale rejection of the scripted shows that had peaked with Glass Spider. "Thirty per cent of every night was improvisation," Gabrels told David Buckley, "and the Sales brothers were rooted in that."