In the 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 since 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 instead 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 Centre at its East Storehouse, drawn from his archive. “And that capacity for self-reflection was just tremendous.”
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, something he had absolutely no intention of doing, T-shirt campaign or not.
By all accounts, he took an impressively hands-on approach. In one of the displays that make up the centre’s small permanent exhibition lurks the Stylophone he played on Space Oddity: Bowie apparently bid for it himself when it came up on eBay. He regularly visited the archive when it was housed in a “museum quality” facility in New Jersey, and, says Haddon, “left notes to provide detailed information about projects, particularly some of the unrealised ones only he would know about. There’s even a chart that tries to plot out all of the stages of his career through the 60s, 70s and 80s, with specific dates, trying to retain that detail.”
The V&A is keen to underline that the David Bowie Centre is nothing like the blockbusting David Bowie Is exhibition of 2013, which remains the most visited exhibit in the museum’s history. The items on permanent display – nine themed cabinets, three rotating every six months, including one curated by guests (initially, the Last Dinner Party and Nile Rodgers) – only represent a fraction of what they have and don’t aim to tell a complete story.
The real meat, though, is the accessibility of the entire 90,000 item archive to the public, which Haddon describes as “absolutely revolutionary”: the booking system to view objects of your own choosing is definitely a more straightforward process than at either of the big pop-related archives in the US, the Bob Dylan Centre in Tulsa and New York Public Library’s Lou Reed collection, both geared towards academic research.
Even so, a lot of what is on display is fascinating – particularly 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 through 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 dialogue – 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 for the project, which his notebooks reveal involved a lavish theatrical premiere in, unexpectedly, Mumbai. You wonder who he thought would pay for it: the Glass Spider tour had been sponsored by Pepsi, but seven years on, after his best album in years, The Buddha of Suburbia, had barely scraped into the Top 100, who was going to stump up to launch a set of profoundly uncommercial songs in India?
A cynic may say there’s something of the holy relics about the business of calling up specific objects to view privately. But it’s hard to remain cynical when you’re in said objects’ presence. I’ve asked, a little vaguely, for something from the Ziggy era and something from the later 70s. The former is covered by a Freddie Burretti-designed costume from the 1980 Floor Show, a TV special recorded at the Marquee that’s effectively Ziggy’s last stand. Bowie nicknamed it the Angel of Death outfit. A red PVC basque adorned with ostrich feathers, it’s held together by some messy, frantic-looking stitching on the inside. You could take it as a reminder of the speed at which Bowie’s career was moving at that point; alternatively, you could just boggle at how skinny someone would have to be to fit into the thing.
From the late 70s, there’s a koto (a Japanese zither) used on the ”Heroes” album, the handwritten credits for Low, and – the real jewel – Bowie’s own sketch for Low’s original cover. An image of a boy sticking pins into a voodoo doll, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the finished sleeve, but its bleakness fits with the album’s contents. The sheer musical brilliance of Low can blind you to what a thoroughly downcast album it is lyrically – something that might have been more obvious had it appeared in this sleeve.
The real test of the David Bowie Centre might be whether it changes perceptions of its subject. But perhaps it already has. Bowie spent his last decades declining to be “intimidated by my own back catalogue”. He never did the thing heritage artists are wont to do: release a new album that deliberately harks back to their most beloved work. Nor did he capitalise on his evident influence on Britpop, instead throwing in his lot with the drum’n’bass scene. He returned after six years of silence with The Next Day, an album housed in a sleeve that literally obliterated his past – an empty white square almost obscuring the cover of Heroes – and bowed out with a jazz-influenced racket that sounded nothing like anything else he’d done.
He insisted on his right to face forwards. “I don’t know where I’m going from here but I promise it won’t be boring,” as the quote you can now buy emblazoned on hoodies, tote bags, mugs, pint glasses, fridge magnets and notebooks went. And all the while, he was quietly looking back, amassing a vast archive, annotating it, plotting out a chart that explained his past career. He’s frequently held up as a rather aloof figure, remote from his audience and their expectations, the epitome of a kind of pop star mystique rendered extinct by the rise of social media – and yet there he was, hoarding fans’ letters, painted pebble sculptures and hand-sewn dolls of himself as Ziggy Stardust, and collecting shonky badges from Bowie conventions. You might have been surprised by the sheer degree and intensity of public mourning that followed his death, and by his subsequent elevation to a kind of secular saint. But in light of his archive, you suspect David Bowie wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
