Card of the Day - 2025-01-09

Bergmann Show-Top-Stars
Bergmann-Verlag [trade/commercial : cards : O/S - Germany] "Show-Top-Stars" (1970) 270/270

This card is generally regarded as David Bowie`s "Rookie" card, primarily because of the perm that he is sporting, which was first seen in a photo shoot, taken at his house in Beckenham, in 1969.

However our card is from a performance, and the same one (almost the same photo as well) was featured on a second set by Bergmann-Verlag,, issued in 1971 under the name of "Hit-Parade".

Some readers may be thinking it would be easy to find which appearance this was, but have a look at Bowie-World/Concerts and you will see how many there were between 1958 and 1969, and as part of many different groups. But maybe someone knows which one? 

Despite the fact that David Bowie would later live in West Berlin, oddly he did not tour there right until 1976, on the Isolar Tour, by which time he was in the persona of the Thin White Duke. The tour started in Vancouver, Canada, on the 2nd of February, and the German performances were from the 7th of April (in Munich) through to the 14th of April (at Ludwigshafen).

This set was sold in shops in two formats, a clear fronted pack of ten cards, which enabled you to see the card in the front (but not the rest), and a wax pack on which the front calls the set "Star Bilder" (Star Pictures) but did not tell the number of cards which were inside. Some collectors think that the clear fronted pack came later, and contained a mixture of cards, not just ones from this set. 

You can see a checklist at the Trading Card Database/BVS, which shows most of all that many of the stars featured were European, and so would have been very unfamiliar to British music fans. This probably means that cards only started to become available through swapping between friends, and then gained a wider audience with the rise of internet auctions.

Some of the cards also show that the publishers did not know that much about non-European music; and the most famous card from the set is number 190, which is titled "Jim Hendrix" (not Jimi)