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What Was Behind David Bowie’s Genius? His Archive Holds the Answers (NYT)
| Mainlining the $ecret Truth of the Univer$e | 09/20/25 |
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Date: September 20th, 2025 11:55 AM Author: Mainlining the $ecret Truth of the Univer$e (You = Privy to The Great Becumming™ = Welcum to The Goodie Room™) What Was Behind David Bowie’s Genius? His Archive Holds the Answers.
By Alex Marshall Sept. 16, 2025
It’s a rock music chamber of secrets.
When David Bowie died in 2016, he left an archive of about 90,000 items, carefully cataloged and boxed like a museum collection.
Some are instantly recognizable, like the androgynous costumes the star wore onstage.
And cherished childhood belongings, including a framed portrait of Little Richard, one of Bowie’s heroes.
Together, the items get to the heart of who Bowie was: an artist whose creativity came as much from hard work, relentless experimentation and collaboration as raw talent.
Victoria Broackes, who has researched the archive, said the collection showed a Bowie who “never took the easy way.” He always pushed himself, she said, and always in new ways.
Now, the public can access the archive to learn about Bowie’s character and methods. Last week, the V&A East Storehouse, an outpost of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, opened the David Bowie Center, which will display about 200 items from the collection at a time. Fans and scholars can also place advance orders to view, and potentially handle, any of the 90,000 items.
From David Jones to David Bowie Some Bowie fans regard him as a musician who appeared in the 1960s fully formed, almost if he were beamed to Earth like Ziggy Stardust, the alien rock star character he would later assume. Yet the archive’s oldest items show that Bowie — who was born David Robert Jones in London in 1947 — worked tirelessly to make it big. In the mid-1960s, for instance, his father, Haywood Jones, wrote to a London law firm asking them to give his then teenage son a job so that he could earn a living while trying to become a pop star.
I do not think I could have taken all the setbacks he has taken and come up smiling and still full of confidence,” Jones wrote.
“It is impossible to get him to relax and once having made up his mind to do something nothing will stop him in his effort to make a good job of it.”
Bowie kept that typed tribute for the rest of his life, as well as a 1968 rejection letter from Apple, the Beatles’ record company.
“We don’t feel he is what we’re looking for,” it says.
A year later, Bowie had his first hit, with “Space Oddity.”
Creating Worlds Madeleine Haddon, the David Bowie Center’s lead curator, described Bowie as a “world builder.” He didn’t just write songs for his albums, she said. He conjured story lines for them and sketched ideas for stage outfits, tour sets and album sleeves, like this for his “Space Oddity” record. He also made storyboards for music videos.
He wanted to get involved in every aspect of the creative process, Haddon said, adding that this was especially clear from archive items about his unrealized projects. Before his death, Bowie was working on an “18th-century musical” set in London …
… and had covered his study’s walls in sticky notes outlining potential plot points.
The archive also includes a movie script, character studies, paintings and drawings for a movie called “Hunger City.”
Bowie planned to base the film on his 1974 “Diamond Dogs” album, Haddon said.
It would have featured a gang of roller-skating hoodlums.
Carlos Alomar, a Puerto Rican guitarist who played on many Bowie albums, said that Bowie never got disheartened when projects failed; he simply used the material to pivot.
“Bowie didn’t jump, he morphed,” Alomar said.
Shared Visions The items in the archive highlight how Bowie worked with collaborators to realize his visions. Bowie didn’t force those musicians in a specific direction, Alomar said: He would give them the barest sketch of a song, and then let them loose.
“David allowed us to guide him,” Alomar said. “At the same time, he had an uncanny ability to absorb everything, filter it through his own imagination and then turn it into something unmistakably Bowie.”
For “Young Americans,” the 1975 funk and soul album that includes “Fame,” his first U.S. No. 1 single, Bowie worked with Alomar as well as Luther Vandross, the soul singer, and John Lennon.
The archive also contains items related to collaborations with fashion designers, computer engineers and the mime artist Lindsay Kemp.
Among those artifacts is a costume designed by Mark Ravitz that Bowie wore on “Saturday Night Live” while performing “The Man Who Sold the World.”
Ravitz, who also designed some sets for Bowie, said the singer gave few demands. For one tour, he said, Bowie asked for “a spider and ship’s rigging.”
Ravitz’s design featured a huge arachnid whose body Bowie emerged from onstage. “He let our imaginations run so we could help create his fantasies,” Ravitz said.
Lyric Generator Bowie said in interviews that his desire to continually reinvent himself and change musical direction was the result of a short attention span and a tendency to get bored. His archive shows how he used several techniques to help propel him down new paths.
When writing lyrics, for instance, Bowie sometimes used a cutup technique, jotting phrases down on paper, snipping them into fragments and then rearranging them.
The archive includes Bowie’s cuttings for “Blackout” from his 1977 album “Heroes.” Those clippings include snatches like “Me Black Out,” “cage you are”
and “cut hands,” which are mirrored in the lyrics “To the cage, to the cage/ She was a beauty in a cage” and “I just cut and blackout.”
By the mid-1990s, Bowie was using a more contemporary form of lyric prompter: a computer program called the Verbasizer, designed by Ty Roberts, a computer engineer Bowie tracked down to collaborate with.
Bowie once relayed in an interview that he would type sentences into the program and it would scramble them and spit out pages of text, a “kaleidoscope of meanings and topics and nouns and verbs, all sort of slamming into each other.”
An evocative phrase in one of those printouts could “set me off writing a song,” Bowie added.
Sound Strategies Bowie incorporated randomness into his music writing, too.
The archive includes his set of Oblique Strategies advice cards. Created in 1975 by the musician Brian Eno and the artist Peter Schmidt, the cards have instructions printed on them to inspire creative experimentation.
“Use an old idea,” reads one of the cards from Bowie’s deck.
Other cards were provocative. Some were funny.
Bowie clearly loved his set: The box is scuffed from handling, and his set also has a name plate.
He also experimented with new instruments. The archive includes a 1970s synthesizer that was used on the albums “Low,” “Heroes” and “Lodger.”
There’s also a synthesizer user manual with Bowie’s handwritten notes. Alomar, who worked on all those albums, recalled Bowie being “mesmerized” by tech, toying with instruments in the studio until they made sounds that he loved.
Visions of the Future By the 1990s, Bowie’s tech obsession had grown far beyond music.
Notes in the archive record his musings on how the internet might change music making and record buying.
One contains the phrase “content will win.”
Bowie was among the first pop musicians to create a website, and he set up his own internet service provider, BowieNet. He chatted with fans on message boards.
“Artists who develop a profile will always have an edge,” another note says.
Haddon, the curator, said the archive showed that Bowie’s creativity extended far beyond art and music. In fact, the archive’s contents could be used to make a whole exhibition on his business acumen or tech obsessions, she added — just as it could also be used to make shows about “Bowie the writer, Bowie the actor, Bowie the visual artist.”
Visitors to the archive can find a Bowie for them.
Produced by Sean Catangui, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick.
Images by The David Bowie Archive/The David Bowie Estate, via the Victoria and Albert Museum. Additional images by Mick Rock (Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust, applying makeup, recording); Duffy Archive and The David Bowie Archive (Aladdin Sane contact sheet); Corinne Schwab (“Young Americans” polaroid); Jimmy King and The David Bowie Archive (Bowie with red guitar).
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