Music

Today (Saturday September 13) sees the opening of the new David Bowie Centre at London’s V&A East Storehouse, containing over 90,000 of the icon’s possessions to guide you through his artistic life and impact on culture. Check out our walk-through video below, along with our interview with the curator.

• READ MORE: David Bowie’s earliest years – as told by the people who knew him best

Opening back in spring, the V&A Storehouse is a new working store and visitor attraction in the new cultural quarter in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, and is home over 500,000 works, including the Glastonbury Festival Archives, costumes from PJ Harvey and Elton John, designer couture, vintage shirts, Samurai swords and many more. It will also house over 100 curated mini-displays. Now, David Bowie’s vast collection is part of it and available for public view.

Continuing their collaboration after the V&A’s acclaimed David Bowie Is exhibition in 2013, the new David Bowie Centre is now open – containing the Thin White Duke’s iconic costumes, musical instruments, make-up charts, stage models, Oblique Strategies card decks, personal notes, writings, lyrics and music, sketches, designs, photos and much more. So far it has revealed Bowie’s favourite songs in a note that he left, and work on an unfinished stage musical as part of the many ‘unrealised projects’ unearthed. There are also curated exhibitions of objects by Bowie collaborator Nile Rodgers and super-fans The Last Dinner Party.

NME headed down to an early press viewing, where we saw Bowie’s legendary Alexander McQueen Union Jack ‘Earthling’ jacket, outfits from the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Let’s Dance’ era, storyboards for plays, handwritten lyrics, instruments played by the star, the key to his and Iggy Pop‘s Berlin flat, and were allowed to leaf through notes made in preparation of his final album ‘Blackstar’.

“It’s really a very different experience from the ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition,” curator Dr Madeleine Haddon told NME. “First and foremost is the size – this is a smaller and more intimate experience. It’s not an exhibition, it’s getting behind the scenes to experience a working archive.

“That fits within the broader mission of the V&A Storehouse, where we have 250,000 objects from our collection that you can now have access to. We’re really peeling back the layers of the museum and how and why we do things here.”

From today, fans can now book tickets through the V&A website to visit the centre itself, or you go through the collection online and search for the Bowie material and make an appointment to view said items either in the V&A storehouse study room or within the Bowie study room.

Check out our full interview with Dr Haddon, where she unpacked the many discoveries for Bowie fans that await them.

NME: Hello Dr Haddon. How would you describe the overarching spirit of The David Bowie Centre?

Dr Haddon: “A major part of this was thinking about how can the David Bowie archive not only tell his story, but also be relevant to people today – particularly creatives of all different disciplines, and especially young people. We’re thinking about the next generation of museum visitors and potential Bowie fans.

“An angle that we emphasise is how Bowie was such a pioneer and a creative. He was not only a musician, but he was an artist, a writer, an actor, a designer. We have objects that speak to the breadth of his creative practice. He was endlessly making, exploring and experimenting. That speaks to creatives today that don’t want to be contained within a single genre or box. They want to see themselves as expansively creative. Bowie really paved the way for that.

“We also emphasise the breadth of his impact on popular culture: art, music, fashion. So many of the artists, creatives and designers that we love today wouldn’t be where they are today without David Bowie. There’s Lady Gaga, who we have a fan letter that she herself sent to David Bowie, talking about how important he has been for her career.

“The story of the many David Bowies is contained within this archive. You can think of how Bowie means something different to so many different people, but there’s also the story of his collaborators and influences. There are many people he worked with throughout the different stages of his career. You can also learn about the many previously unnamed collaborators who have not had the chance to be woven in the Bowie story before.”

What can you tell us about access you had to the Bowie archive and estate?

“We were incredibly lucky, first given the V&A’s relationship with Bowie and the family. Through the David Bowie Is exhibition we already had an indication of what was in the collection, but Bowie had an archivist and a cataloging team of his own. There was a database for it and stored within museum level storage in New York and Jersey. He had his own museum in that way.

“A lot of that work was done for us. We’ve cataloged everything so people can search for it online. The project itself of our level of research will be ongoing long after the centre opens.”

And what of these ‘unrealised projects’ from Bowie you uncovered?

“We have a number of them throughout Bowie’s career of different films, musicals, concerts, unrealised songs, TV shows, you name it. They really speak to his endless need to be creating and exploring while working on many different projects at once.

“We have films that are contemporaneous to ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Diamond Dogs’ albums, and you can see how he was thinking up ideas for those albums in the music but also exploring them in a different genre. We have notes and sketches for characters and storylines and really fantastic storyboards. We have a lot of drawings by Bowie. We have many sketches for these unrealised projects that he was thinking through.

“The projects weren’t realised for a variety of reasons: either he didn’t pursue them or they were blocked.”

Are there many more newly uncovered revelations? Most hardcore Bowie fans would thank they’ve seen it all…

“You definitely haven’t seen it all – there’s so much more to see. We discovered certain guitars that we didn’t know that he’d saved from early periods, costumes we didn’t know that he’d saved. So much of the archive is newly uncovered revelations.”

David Bowie Is felt very generous. This is next level…

“Yes. You can explore his notebook pages, we have lots of lists that he created, he has a lot of writing on thinking about the future of the internet and what it’s impact would be on the music industry and society more broadly, we have a display that looks at his fascination with science fiction and futurism and how that was such an important inspiration and catalyst, we have a look at how he became one of the first artists to release his music online and to create his own website with Bowie Net. He was speaking with fans online and in chat rooms long before social media and he was such a pioneer with technology.

“So many of the instruments that he worked with were new technology that he was the first to experiment with too. Another theme we explore is how Bowie was such a pioneer of gender fluidity in terms of the clothes and make up he wore, particularly in the ‘70s. The creative freedom and self expression we have today is in credit to how expressive and pioneering he was.

“We look at how Bowie used his platform for those who didn’t have a voice. For instance, he used the ‘Let’s Dance’ video to platform first nation Australians for the first time on global television.”

And what about random sketches done out of boredom?

“We have a setlist from ‘Station To Station’ that just has random doodles. You see them a lot too when he’s writing lyrics. That’s what’s so intimate and vulnerable about it all: there’s a lot of the banal in here. To do lists of things that he wanted to remember with everything from exercising to getting back to collaborators, it’s all mixed up together.”

Even shopping lists?

“No, but we do have a menu from when he was in Berlin with what he and Iggy Pop wanted to order. He saved even that.”

What can you tell us about the items on display?

“We have everything from the Alexander McQueen and Bowie designed Union Jack coat that Bowie wore on the cover of ‘Earthling’ and during that tour, some incredibly iconic costumes from the Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane period, Bowie’s paint palette and brushes, notebook pages, letters, storyboards, and a lot of photography.”

Will the items on display alternate?

“Yes, 75 per cent of them will stay on view for the next two years and the others will rotate every six months or so. That’s where our guest curators’ display will be. Our first were Nile Rodgers and The Last Dinner Party. We’ll also have displays in line with broader themes that we’re exploring across V&A East. Our first theme looks at the influence of jungle and drum n’ bass on Bowie’s work in the ‘90s, and that’s in dialogue with our first temporary exhibition opening in 2026 in the V&A that’s on the history of Black British Music.”

You have his desk too, right?

“We do, we have his last writing desk. It’s not on view, but you can make an appointment to see it.”

Are there any other pop culture figures that you feel that you could do something like this for with this much depth?

“Bowie is very unique from the perspective of what a polymath he was. There aren’t many pop culture figures that worked so expansively across so many genres. The archive is not only a testament to Bowie’s music, but to all his creative practices. That’s a really important narrative for us, especially in a museum like the V&A. You’d also struggle to find one who saved everything. Not many pop culture figures have 90,000 objects they could donate to a museum. We have objects from the beginning of his career through to the end. He kept everything. It’ll be while before we find someone else like him to do this with.”

The David Bowie Centre at the V&A Storehouse is now open. Visit here for tickets and information.

Meanwhile, Kate Moss recently shared a podcast celebrating the “artistic evolution” of Bowie, while the ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ box set celebrating the music he made in the final years of his life in the 21st Century is out now.