David Bowie’s favourite songs revealed in note unearthed in V&A archive

David Bowie‘s favourite songs have been revealed in a note unearthed for the V&A archive. Find out more below.

• READ MORE: David Bowie’s earliest years – as told by the people who knew him best

The David Bowie Centre opens at the V&A East Storehouse in Hackney Wick on September 13, with The Last Dinner Party and Nile Rodgers curating special exhibitions.

Along with 90,000 items related to the iconic artist, the collection will trace Bowie’s “creative processes as a musical innovator, cultural icon, and advocate for self-expression and reinvention”, and have been acquired by the V&A through the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group.

Now, more artefacts have surfaced as part of the archive, including a note that lists the late artist’s favourite songs. It reads: “Memo for radio show — list of favourite records”, and includes tracks such as Alan Freed and His Rock ‘N’ Roll Band’s ‘Right Now Right Now’ and Jeff Beck’s ‘Beck’s Bolero’.

Bowie also included ‘Across The Universe’ by The Beatles, which he covered on his 1975 album ‘Young Americans’. Elsewhere, he also listed Little Richard’s ‘Ecclusiastics’, Roxy Music’s ‘Mother of Pearl’, ‘The Electrician’ by The Walker Brothers and ‘Tom Violence’ by Sonic Youth. Find the full list below.

Ralph Vaughan Williams – ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’
Richard Strauss – ‘Four Last Songs’
Alan Freed and His Rock ’N’ Roll Band – ‘Right Now Right Now’
Little Richard – ‘True Fine Mama’
The Hollywood Argyles – ‘Sho Know a Lot About Love’
Miles Davis – ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’
Charles Mingus – ‘Ecclusiastics’
Jeff Beck – ‘Beck’s Bolero’
Legendary Stardust Cowboy – ‘I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship’
The Beatles – ‘Across the Universe’
Ronnie Spector – ‘Try Some, Buy Some’
Roxy Music – ‘Mother of Pearl’
Edgar Froese – ‘Epsilon in Malaysian Pale’
The Walker Brothers – ‘The Electrician’
Sonic Youth – ‘Tom Violence’

Other papers discovered in the archive include a list of “ins” and “outs” which was written in 1995. Among the “ins” were “chaos surfing”, “no tidy endings”, “reasonable cybernetic systems”, “ennui” and “David Bowie”. In the “outs” section were “post-modernism”, “religion”, “irony”, “your 15 minutes” and “David Bowie”.

The list of his favourite records follows him sharing his 25 favourite albums and his 100 favourite books, which included literary classics like George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote.

While uncovering the archive, it’s also been revealed that Bowie’s final months were spent working on a separate project. Described in his notes as an “18th century musical” titled The Spectator, details of the project were kept under wraps, and its existence remained unknown even to his closest collaborators until the notes were discovered locked in his study in 2016.

The room was always locked, accessible only to Bowie and his personal assistant, so all of his handwritten notes were left undisturbed until archivists began cataloguing his belongings. They have now been donated to the V&A Museum, with the rest of Bowie’s archive.

In 2016, Bowie shared his final creative offering in the ‘Blackstar‘ album, which was released only days before his passing and saw him confront his own mortality amid an 18-month battle with cancer.

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