In the 1990s, David Bowie started assembling an archive of his own career in earnest. There seems something telling about the timing. It happened on the heels of 1990’s Sound+Vision tour, when Bowie grandly announced he was performing his hits live for the final time – a resolution that lasted all of two years. It also followed the bumpy saga of Tin Machine, the short-lived hard rock band that Bowie insisted he was simply a member of, rather than the star attraction, and whose work has thus far escaped the extensive campaign of posthumous archival Bowie releases. These include more than 25 albums and box sets in the nine years since his death, with another – the 18-piece collection I Can’t Give Everything Away – due this Friday.
Having attempted to escape the weight of his past with decidedly mixed results, Bowie seems to have resolved instead to come to some kind of accommodation with it. “I think you’re absolutely right,” says Madeleine Haddon, lead curator at the V&A in London, which is about to open the David Bowie Centre at its East Storehouse, drawn from his archive. “And that capacity for self-reflection was just tremendous.”
