New archive in London celebrates David Bowie’s dazzling career and legacy

Lisa Desjardins:

The chameleon of rock, David Bowie left behind a profound and colorful legacy. To round out our show tonight, we zoom to London virtually to visit the new home for the British Stars Archive that just opened this weekend.

Guitars he strummed, notes with handwritten lyrics, a rejection letter from a recording studio, all alongside some of David Bowie's iconic outfits. Like the ice blue suit Bowie wore in the video for Life on Mars in 1973, and of course, the famous lightning bolt jacket from his Ziggy Stardust days.

Madeleine Haddon is the lead curator of the David Bowie Center at the V and A East storehouse. There are more than 90,000 items in the archive and of that, 200 are on display.

Madeline Haddon, Curator, V and A East: Whittling down that selection was one of the biggest intellectual and curatorial challenges of my life, certainly because there's just such a massive amount to choose from. Not only a volume of material, but periods of work, genres, you know, creative Personas, even projects that we didn't know that he was working on until we got our hands on the archive.

Lisa Desjardins:

Curator Harriet Reid also helped sift through Bowie's belongings.

Harreit Reed, Curator of Contemporary Performance, V and A: Every day we're finding really interesting new stories, new discoveries, things that never been on display before. But for me, I'm always really interested by sort of ephemera around Bowie's process, the sort of notes he made, the to do list, things where he's making a record of the exhibitions he wants to see, the films he wants to see, books he wants to read. That kind of devouring of culture is really fascinating to know why he was so restlessly creative.

Lisa Desjardins:

Bowie died in 2016 of liver cancer at the age of 69. In his lifetime, he was a prolific musician, but also a writer, actor and designer. Toward the end of his life, Post it notes left in his New York office show, he was working on a musical set in 18th century London.

Harreit Reed:

The notes reveal his keen sort of research and interest in that period. He'd obviously done a lot of reading up about the artists of the time, like Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. London in the 18th century, the coffee houses, the politics.

And he was trying to kind of put together a structure it seemed that how this would work, what would make it a success.

Lisa Desjardins:

And if you want to see any of the thousands of items that aren't on display, you can go online and make an appointment to view them up close and personal.