In teh 1990s,David Bowie started assembling an archive of his own career in earnest. There seems something telling about the timing. It happened on the heels of 1990’s Sound+Vision tour, when Bowie grandly announced he was performing his hits live for the final time – a resolution that lasted all of two years. It also followed the bumpy saga of Tin Machine, the short-lived hard rock band that bowie insisted he was simply a member of, rather than the star attraction, and whose work has thus far escaped the extensive campaign of posthumous archival Bowie releases. These include more than 25 albums and box sets in the nine years as his death, with another – the 18-piece collection I Can’t Give Everything away – due this Friday.
Having attempted to escape the weight of his past with decidedly mixed results, Bowie seems to have resolved rather to come to some kind of accommodation with it. “I think you’re absolutely right,” says madeleine Haddon, lead curator at the V&A in London, which is about to open the David Bowie Center at its East Storehouse, drawn from his archive.”And that capacity for self-reflection was just tremendous.”
It contains the Stylophone he played on Space Oddity – Bowie bid for it himself on eBay
Certainly, judging by the sheer quantity of stuff in the centre, he built his archive with an impressive alacrity. It involves everything from boxes and boxes of badges (not just official merchandise, but also crappy bootleg ones sold in the back pages of magazines and by fly-by-night vendors outside gigs) to artworks sent to him by fans. You do wonder what the anonymous Bowie nut who sent him a collection of small pebbles with faces drawn on them, stuck to a bigger pebble and punningly labelled “ROCK CONCERT”, thinks about their handiwork being displayed in a glass case at the world’s largest museum of design and applied and decorative arts. Sometimes Bowie seems to have been quite wry in his additions: the archive contains a fan-made T-shirt campaigning for him to tour again after the release of 2013’s The Next Day.Even so, a lot of what is on display is fascinating – notably the stuff that exists in the shadow of big-ticket items such as the Kansai Yamamoto-designed one-legged knitted jumpsuit Bowie took to the stage in during the Ziggy Stardust era. An exceptionally curt rejection letter from the Beatles’ Apple label tells you something about Bowie’s lowly position in the late 60s, and also something about Apple’s woeful approach to A&R. (They also turned down Crosby, Stills and Nash, Fleetwood Mac, Queen and Led Zeppelin.)
Among the unrealised projects, there’s a synopsis for a film called Young Americans which seems to have nothing to do with the album of the same name, and instead details a story about Major Tom becoming entangled in a plot to fake the moon landings. Whether you see its existence as proof of Bowie’s polymath skills as a multi-disciplinary artist or view its conspiracy theory plot as evidence of the amount of cocaine he was putting away in 1975 is up to you. Either way, it reveals a little pub quiz nugget: Major Tom’s surname was Hough.
The attention given to the 1987 Glass Spider tour feels in keeping with the myth-burnishing that has gone on since Bowie’s passing. It cuts thru the tour’s overblown excesses – a son et lumière extravaganza on an entirely different scale to anything even the Rolling Stones had previously attempted, with preposterous set, choreography, abseiling and scripted dialog – and concentrates instead on the belief its arrival in Berlin was a defining factor in the collapse of communism.
Another unrealised project reveals that Bowie’s penchant for a grand live statement wasn’t knocked by Glass Spider’s frosty critical reception, despite the more stripped-down approach of his subsequent tours. Fans have long known about Leon, an unreleased precursor to his knotty 1995 album Outside whose tracks have been circulating online for more than 20 years – but not the full extent of Bowie’s ambitions.
David Bowie Centre Reveals a Star Obsessed with His Own Legacy
The newly opened David Bowie Centre at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London offers a fascinating look into the meticulously curated archive of one of music’s most transformative figures. Beyond the iconic costumes and instruments,the Centre reveals a surprising depth to Bowie’s engagement with his own history and his audience,challenging perceptions of him as a distant,aloof persona.
The exhibition’s significance may lie in its ability to reshape how we understand Bowie. Throughout his career, Bowie actively resisted the temptation to rely on past successes, a common path for established artists. He consistently defied expectations, refusing to recreate the sounds that initially brought him fame.Rather of revisiting familiar territory, he embraced new genres, notably aligning himself with the drum’n’bass scene rather than capitalizing on the Britpop movement that drew heavily from his influence. His return after a six-year hiatus with The Next Day in 2013 was marked by a cover design – a stark white square partially obscuring the Heroes album artwork – that symbolically distanced itself from his earlier work. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/jan/09/david-bowie-new-album-cover This commitment to forward momentum culminated in Blackstar,his final album released just two days before his death,a challenging and experimental work that bore little resemblance to his previous sound. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/07/david-bowie-blackstar-review-a-spellbinding-break-with-his-past
Bowie famously declared, “I don’t know where I’m going from here but I promise it won’t be boring,” a quote now widely available on merchandise.However, this drive to innovate existed alongside a quiet, dedicated effort to document and preserve his past. The archive, now accessible through the Centre, demonstrates that Bowie was actively collecting and organizing materials related to his career, creating a detailed map of his artistic journey.
Contrary to his image as a remote figure, the archive reveals a surprising connection to his fanbase. He meticulously collected fan letters, handmade tributes like painted pebble sculptures and hand-sewn dolls depicting his Ziggy Stardust persona, and even collected badges from Bowie conventions. This collection suggests a deep awareness of, and appreciation for, the impact he had on his audience. The outpouring of grief and the subsequent elevation of Bowie to a cultural icon after his death in 2016 likely wouldn’t have surprised him, given his careful documentation of his fans’ devotion.