How do you do justice to the creative legacy of a departed artist beloved across the globe?
That was the task of Mark Grimmer, writer and co-director of David Bowie: You’re Not Alone, the new immersive exhibition which opened this week at Lightroom in Kings Cross. The 360-degree audiovisual experience was crafted from access to decades of interview and gig footage, rare archival material from handwritten scribbles to lyric sheets, and even the original multitracks and stems from Bowie’s recording sessions.
Speaking with Mark in Lightroom’s luxurious foyer at the show’s premiere, he reveals that the project’s been in the works for three years across the teams at Lightroom and his co-founded creative studio, 59. Mark previously directed 2013’s David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A, as well as Lightroom’s David Hockney and Vogue immersive experiences in recent years, and he speaks with a visceral passion about the new exhibition, himself a huge Bowie fan. “Every show feels like a bit of an evolution from the last one… I think that one of the things we really built on was this idea of voiceover, so in this show like in the David Hockney show you really feel like he’s guiding you through it, his voice is pretty much the only voice you hear. We know that works really well in terms of giving people a sense of intimate connection with the artist. As well as these big, large scale iconic moments we also wanted to give people small moments of intimacy.”
There’s certainly no shortage of these show-stopping moments across the looping presentation’s 65-minute runtime, which features Bowie’s spellbounding performance of ‘Heroes’ at Earl’s Court in 1978 and footage of ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’ from the legendary 1973 Hammersmith Odeon show where he killed Ziggy Stardust, but after over an hour of being spoken to by Bowie, it’s impossible to not feel closer to the human behind the many masks. Rather than chronologically, David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is split into seven chapters of sorts, each tackling a different facet of his life and art, from curiosity to outsider art, rock ‘n’ roll theatre, his characters and his spirituality – each a through-line across Bowie’s life. Of course Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke adorn the hulking walls of Lightroom at various points in the show, but we also get to hear Bowie’s reflections on losing himself in these characters, his love of the visual and written arts, and his ruminations on the internet, death and the universe. There’s clips of hysterical fans crying about not catching a glimpse of the singer, and of a bored Bowie trying to amuse himself whilst being (badly) interviewed on British TV.
One of Mark and his team’s largest challenges was how to balance narrative-driven storytelling with the incredibly dense and complicated nature of archival material, which included over 400 hours of audio material, an array of letters, drawings and notes from across Bowie’s life, and of course his entire discography and video archive from interviews to live footage. During the show, a rapidly cutting sequence of performances of ‘Rebel Rebel’ between the 70s and the 2000s from across the world showcased this sheer breadth of material, seamlessly splicing together a cross-section of Bowie’s life on stage. “What we know was that we wanted to cover the whole span of his career,” Mark remarks. “So we set ourselves that as a challenge and then, partly inspired by what great material there was in the archive, what we could get access to, we could go ‘oh, well this track would be a great representation of that particular period, there’s brilliant footage from this that nobody’s seen before so maybe we should make a feature of that. That combination of what the best stuff in the archive was and also what the themes and topics that Bowie kept coming back to guided us as to what the thematic approach should be.”
It was a bit of a process of sculpture
Technically, David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is a marvel in every respect. Lightroom only opened in 2023, and the cavernous space makes masterful from its giant spatial audio system and array of 3D projections, bringing fluttering animations of shapes, stars and other scenery to life. Renowned sound designer Gareth Fry reconfigured each of the 40+ tracks in the show for this format, shaping the sonic identity of Lightroom’s first musician-oriented installation around its material space, and you can feel it in your gut when the rumbling bass of ‘Five years’ kicks in. The team were making technical adjustments right up until the day before release, Mark tells me. “We’ve been showing work in progress to people, but we had a few hundred people in on Sunday and that just changes things as well: a few little tweaks, particularly to sound, when you have that number of bodies in the room… there are things you can only really learn when you start sharing the show with people.”
Perhaps the most vital step in creating the exhibition was the approval and involvement of the David Bowie Estate. “We’ve known RZO [music] and David’s team since 2013, but I don’t think we would’ve done it, or could’ve done it, without them,” Mark admits. “Not only for the access that they were able to give us, but also I think it was very important to do this sensitively, to do it with guidance, to do it with their expertise, and they were incredibly generous… we were very very lucky really to have access to their team, and to be given course corrects, to be given steers and insights from people who knew him personally and worked with him for many years.” Mark, David and their teams assembled a hit squad of Bowie’s collaborators and confidants to help shape the exhibition: “all the big players, people who knew him in different ways,” Mark tells me. “Alan [Edwards] from Outside for example, but also Jonathan Barnbrook, who designed a number of his record sleeves, Nigel Reeve, who worked on some of the music stuff, then of course Eileen D’Arcy who works in the archive, who was right by his side for decades.”
2026 marks a decade since The Starman’s passing, and the explosion of posthumous Bowie media across this year will of course be seen by some as at best unnecessary, and at worst diluting the legacy of a man who would’ve hated this extensive dwelling in the past. Undoubtedly, the tension between creativity and commercialism always has existed at the centre of the arts and music industry, and remains so to this day. Yet the heavy involvement of Bowie’s estate alongside the immense wells of creativity imbued within this audiovisual wonder are sure to be potent tonics for such cynicism.
On his part, Mark doesn’t see David Bowie: You’re Not Alone as either nostalgic or retrospective, especially considering how Bowie himself is speaking to the audience in the present tense throughout.
He never wanted to reflect too much, he was always moving onto the next thing, but I think the fact that we’ve made something that’s a new perspective on his work, I’d like to think that he’d feel like this was a step forwards rather than just a step back.
David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is at Lightroom Kings Cross until October.
lightroom.uk/whats-on/david-bowie-youre-not-alone
lightroom.uk/bowie-nights
Words: Taran Will