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Carinda Hotel in 2007, interior (Freestate's trip)
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Carinda Hotel interior as it is May 2007. Notice that although the wall tiles have been replaced by wood panelling, the ceiling has been repainted and the pool table is gone the floor is still the same!
Picture by Freestate
Interesting Anecdotes:
At the Carinda Hotel I met a few of the locals. One was a woman (the pub's cook who's name I didn't get) who had been there when Bowie spent the day filming in early 1983. She recognised a lot of the people who appeared in the bar scenes of the promo, though she herself didn't appear in it. She was familiar with the promo as Bowie had organised for the Let's Dance Video EP to be sent to the Carinda Hotel. It was autographed and I offered to buy it, offering up to $200 for it, but she just smiled and said "no". These are the stories she told me when I asked her about that day.
- It's incorrect to call the country around Carinda sheep-country - it's too far West. It's cattle country.
- The horse you can see in the very first scene, as the cattle truck goes by, was tied up there nearly all day. The locals eventually intervened telling Bowie's people that it was cruel to leave it in the sun that long. After that it was put in the shade behind the pub and only brought out when filming was actually taking place. The appearance of the horse was, of course, staged. Nobody, then or now, rides a horse into town.
- Back in 1983 the streets of Carinda were still dirt roads. They had a problem with the amount of dust the cattle truck driving by raised so they had to sweep the road outside the pub to reduce the dust.
- The locals that appear in the bar scenes were not paid. However, Bowie did pay for an 'open bar', the word spread quickly around town and lots of people turned up. By the time the bar scenes were filmed after rehearsals everyone was quite drunk! The bar scenes were filmed over and over and the ones that appear in the promo were close to the last filmed.
- The Aboriginal kids that appear in the promo, in the bar scenes, the 'red shoes' scenes and the
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