Fans of David Bowie (born January 8, 1947) around the world have already started buying their plane tickets to London because from March 23rd to July 28, 2013 the V&A Museum in London is opening its doors for their David Bowie retrospective entitled David Bowie Is.
The V&A has been given unprecedented access to the David Bowie Archive to curate the first international retrospective of the extraordinary career of David Bowie, and the exhibit will feature more than 300 objects that include handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs and Bowie’s own instruments. Earlier this morning The Economist‘s lifestyle and culture magazine INTELLIGENT LIFE published a piece entitled “Bowie’s Eye” written by Matthew Sweet, author of The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels (Amazon), and host of “Night Waves” and “Free Thinking” on BBC Radio 3 as well as “The Philosopher’s Arms” and “The Film Programme” on BBC Radio 4. Sweet does a fly-by over Bowie’s entire career, providing a terrific overview of Bowie’s fascinating career and a glimpse at some of the many chapters of Bowie’s life that will be explored in the exhibition. The following are some short excerpts:
David (or Davie) Jones c.1965: Bowie’s otherworldly credentials are so established that his early years now play like a sci-fi serial about aliens engaged in the slow infiltration of some suburban nowhere. Beckenham, for instance. Did the teenage Pod Person in this picture really fool anyone? The name, for one. David Jones! Too self-consciously ordinary to be plausible, despite the tweaks to “Davy” and “Davie”.
Aladdin Sane album cover 1973: It looks like another leap into a distant future, or beyond the bounds of the solar system—but the Lad Insane’s lightning streak and alabaster skin are no extraterrestrial phenomena. They are borrowed from music hall, the stars of which were dying as Bowie, a child of the 1940s, was born.
Serious Moonlight tour 1983: This is the form in which most of the world knows David Bowie—not the sequined proponent of “fag rock” or the art-school troublemaker—but a lean golden statue topped with an ice-cream quiff. The Serious Moonlight tour was no joke: it sold 2.6m tickets in 16 countries.
You can read Matthew Sweet’s Bowie featurette by visiting MoreINTELLIGENTLIFE.com. To learn more about the V&A’s David Bowie Is exhibition be sure to visit The Victoria & Albert Museum. And to enter the mother ship of one of the greatest entertainers that has ever lived simply head over to DavidBowie.com. You can also follow David Bowie on Facebook, and pick up your own copy of the 40th Anniversary edition of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars by visiting DavidBowieCatalogue.com.
