David Bowie’s unrealised projects among items at new dedicated centre at London’s V&A
Items from David Bowie’s long career, including handwritten notes, scripts, costumes and instruments, are on show at the permanent display
When David Bowie died in 2016, he left a vast musical legacy – and a trove of unrealised projects.
Tantalising details of those abandoned and unfinished ideas are revealed in Bowie’s archive, which opens to the public this week.
The 90,000 items acquired from Bowie’s estate by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum include handwritten notes for a film in which Major Tom – the fictional astronaut “sitting in a tin can far above the world” in Bowie’s song “Space Oddity,” and who returned in “Ashes to Ashes” – is sent to “a disgruntled America”.
Curator Madeleine Haddon said the unmade film – titled Young Americans, like Bowie’s 1975 album of the same name – is “reflective on what it’s like to be a Brit in the US, and thinking about international politics and their place in the world”.
Other might-have-beens include The Spectator, a stage musical about an 18th-century London outlaw that Bowie was working on shortly before his death from cancer in January 2016 at the age of 69.
It is about “the relationship between art and politics in London at the cusp of modernity”, Haddon said at a preview of V&A’s David Bowie Centre. “I would love to see where he was going with that.”