I did think that this card commemorated David Bowie`s appearance at Live Aid, on the 13th of July, 1985, at Wembley Stadium, but his costume was very slightly different, here he is sporting a dark tie not a light one.
In any event, the Live Aid performance was pretty pivotal for David Bowie, and it brought him many new fans.
The concert was along the same lines as Band Aid, a group of performers getting together to raise awareness of other people`s plight; in this case it was all organised by Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox - and the money raised was for the famine in Ethiopia.
By the way, David Bowie appears twice in this set, numbers 58, our card, and 59, where he is in a suit. There are also two versions of both cards; ours, which has the reverse text in German, and another, much easier to acquire here, which has the reverse text in English.
Smash Hits was actually a magazine, a printed one, which began in 1978 as a monthly, and, die to popular demand, moved to fortnightly. It was a mixture of pin ups and lyrics. Interestingly, you could also get it in continental Europe, especially in Germany, which ties in nicely with our cards. There were also versions in French as well as, later on, for Australia and America, though that was called "Star Hits", rather than "Smash" which was felt to not suggest the contents as well as being thought a bit violent.
However it slowly lost its power, as music went online, and you could get everything you wanted on there, you were not restricted to what the publishers chose. There was also another reason, for certain "censored" lyrics and pictures were also available online.
The last issue of the magazine appeared in 2006.
I have not been able to tie up the cards with the magazine, but I do know that there were Panini Smash Hits cards from 1984 until 1987, at least. Each of these sets had special albums as well
The 1984 one seems to be the first, and it had David Bowie amongst the stars on the cover of the album. The set was published in a variety of languages, Belgian, French, and Swiss, and the French cards also seem to have been circulated in Canada. There were 144 stickers.
Our card comes from the 1985 version.
The 1986 version had more stickers, 180, and included, for the first time, sectional stickers - one group made up a large photo of Madonna and another of the performers involved in Band Aid.
The 1987 set was subtitled "An A to Z of Pop". The sectional pictures returned, of A-Ha, Nick Kamen, Madonna, and the Pet Shop Boys.There were 200 stickers.
The 1988 stickers were again a set of 200, with sectional pictures, this time A-Ha, Rick Astley, Blue Mercedes, Whitney Houston, Madonna, The Pet Shop Boys, plus Pepsi and Shirlie. This seems to have been the final year of issue.