Five decades after David Bowie’s seminal tour, our
music writers reflect on the concerts that have left a mark, from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish
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Café Society,
New York City, early 1939The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. John Fordham