David Bowie, the songwriter who composed his own ending and left the rest as archive

In a converted warehouse in east London, a glass case holds the patterned bodysuit Kansai Yamamoto stitched for the Aladdin Sane tour, the boots scuffed at the heel. Two rooms away, a binder of lyric drafts shows the third verse of Space Oddity being crossed out, alternative versions creeping closer to the song everyone knows. The David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse opens its drop-in season this winter; the cataloguing of all eighty thousand items in the archive will be finished by year’s end. The artist who never stopped moving forward has been pinned to a wall by the museum that finally gathered him in one place.

David Robert Jones grew up between Brixton, where he was born on 8 January 1947, and the dormitory suburb of Bromley, where his family settled when he was six. Bromley Technical High School was an art school in everything but name — drawing, typography, theatre, stage movement — and his art-class teacher Owen Frampton, father of the guitarist, told him to think of himself as an artist in the broadest sense. He took the lesson literally. By the late 1960s he was studying mime and avant-garde theatre under Lindsay Kemp, and the idea that pop was a vehicle for a constructed self had been settled before the first hit single landed.

Space Oddity, released five days before Apollo 11, reached number five in the UK charts; the album of the same name followed, and The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory built the bench. Then The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972 made a sustained argument that a pop record could be a theatrical work with its own dramatis personae. Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs — the run from 1972 to 1974 is a four-album thesis on how to remake a person between releases.

Young Americans pivoted into Philadelphia soul; Station to Station, recorded in a Los Angeles haze he would later barely remember, invented the Thin White Duke and set up the Berlin years. With Tony Visconti producing and Brian Eno co-writing, Low and “Heroes” in 1977 and Lodger in 1979 made synthesisers and ambient instrumentals into pop architecture. The Berlin trilogy reset the future of British and American music: a generation of post-punk, electronic and art-pop bands carved their first language out of those three records.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) closed the experimental phase in 1980. Let’s Dance, made with Nile Rodgers, gave Bowie the biggest commercial year of his life — the title track topped both the UK and US singles charts — and he immediately distrusted what success was teaching him. Tonight and Never Let Me Down, the two records that followed, are the only ones he later disowned. Forming Tin Machine in 1989 was the price he paid to remember what a band sounded like.

The canonised version of Bowie tends to skip the mid-1980s, as though the man who soundtracked Let’s Dance were a different person from the one who would make Outside with Eno or Heathen with Visconti. The Centre’s curators have not skipped them. The teal velvet suit from the Glass Spider Tour is there. So is the binder for a Tin Machine record nobody asked for. The point of an archive is that it includes the contracts you regret signing along with the ones you do not. Bowie’s late career — the willingness to make difficult records, to write a Brechtian Off-Broadway musical, Lazarus, with Ivo van Hove and Michael C. Hall in 2015, to record an album of farewells worked up with the jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s quartet — only reads as inevitable from the end. From the inside, those were bets.

Blackstar arrived on 8 January 2016, his sixty-ninth birthday; he died of liver cancer two days later, having kept the diagnosis private for eighteen months. The No Plan EP appeared in 2017 with the songs left over from the Lazarus sessions. Parlophone built six era box sets over the next nine years — Five Years 1969–1973, Who Can I Be Now? 1974–1976, A New Career in a New Town 1977–1982, Loving the Alien 1983–1988, Brilliant Adventure 1992–2001, and finally I Can’t Give Everything Away 2002–2016, released on 12 September 2025. The day after, the V&A David Bowie Centre opened its doors a few miles east, with Nile Rodgers and The Last Dinner Party guest-curating the first rotating displays.

He married the model Iman Abdulmajid in 1992; their daughter Alexandria Zahra Jones, who records under the name Lexi Jones, released her debut album Xandri in 2025. His son with his first wife Angie Bowie, Duncan Jones, born in 1971, is a filmmaker — Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011) are not father-tribute records but they share Bowie’s habit of giving science fiction the weight of a chamber piece.

On 22 April 2026, the immersive show David Bowie: You’re Not Alone opens at the Lightroom in King’s Cross, built around archive recordings and unseen material; the Bowie Nights performance series, with Anna Calvi, Adam Buxton, Carlos Alomar and Miranda Sawyer programmed, runs through to September. By the end of the year, every one of the eighty thousand items in the V&A Centre will be searchable online. The canon is finished. The argument it left behind — about persona, performance and what a pop record can be — is the one the work keeps making, regardless of whether the maker is in the room.