A moving letter written by David Bowie’s father and fan mail from Lady Gaga are among 90,000 items at a new London museum offering intimate insights into the man behind the Ziggy Stardust make up.
The David Bowie Centre, which opens on Saturday, features iconic costumes, instruments and stage props used by the “Space Oddity” singer, who died in 2016, and also elaborate drawings and scribbled notes.
One of the most revealing items is a letter written by Bowie’s father, Haywood Jones, to a company where his son was hoping to work as he made his way as a young musician.
“I don’t think I could have taken all the setbacks he has taken and come up smiling and still be full of confidence and fight,” the letter stated.
“Whenever he takes on an idea of any kind he never lets up and puts everything he has got into it. In fact, I have often suggested he works too hard at times, it is impossible to get him to relax.”
The letter is appropriately displayed next to another, dated July 1968, from Apple Records to Bowie’s management team.
“As we told you on the phone, Apple Records is not interested in signing David Bowie. We don’t feel he is what we are looking for at the moment,” it read.
The display also looks at creative tools Bowie used for inspiration, such as cut-up lyrics and strategy cards.
“It’s extremely powerful reminder that no idea is too small,” said Madeleine Haddon, lead curator for the centre.
“Bowie treated the creative process as something worth documenting at every stage and you get to see behind the scenes into that process,” she added.
– Gaga letter –
The centre is located inside the V&A’s vast new building in east London, a fitting setting for an artist who still looms large over the musical landscape.
Reflecting his contemporary influence, part of the show is curated by indie five-piece “The Last Dinner Party”, while a handwritten letter from Lady Gaga reads: “I feel my entire career has been an artistic plea for you to notice me”.
Another area displays meticulous notes detailing Bowie’s unrealised projects, including a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, which was torpedoed by the author’s widow.
Other notes reveal that Bowie was working on a musical inspired by 18th century London. One post-it note suggests “many sex scenes”.
Around 200 of the items are on display, but visitors can book one-on-one time with any of the archived items, which include the metal key to Bowie and Iggy Pop’s notoriously hedonistic Berlin apartment they shared in the late 1970s.
Other entries include elaborate stage costumes when Bowie toured as his alter-egos “The Thin White Duke” and “Ziggy Stardust”, along with battered guitars and fan art.
The centre lays bare Bowie’s obsessive collecting and detailing of items, however mundane, highlighting his acute sense of legacy building, even in death.
“We were very fortunate that it (the archive) came to us in a really well-organised state,” the V&A’s Sabrina Offord told AFP.
From the 1990s, Bowie “was sending material to his team for inclusion in the archive with notes explaining the context of where that material came from and where he thought it would fit,” she added.
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