David Bowie museum opens

A new museum dedicated to David Bowie is due to open today in east London, showcasing 90-thousand items from the star's archive.

Among them are handwritten lyrics, instruments and costumes - plus a special section for the singer's "unrealised" projects, including never-seen-before notes for a stage musical.

Fans will be able to order objects not on display, with Ziggy Stardust-era items already proving the most requested.

Dr Madeleine Haddon, curator at V&A East, told PA:

"We want visitors to make connections between Bowie's story and his life and work and their lives, their own contemporary practices and contemporary discussions.

"And this is a working environment for developing new research and knowledge, and investigation into the archive, and the periods during which Bowie lived and worked.

"There have been many new discoveries, and we have an entire section specifically about unrealised projects of Bowie's, many of which have never been seen before.

"So the displays within the centre here - we have about 200 objects on view, and we trace the story of Bowie's creativity and really emphasising how he was such a multi-dimensional creative, so many people know him as a musician, but he was an actor, a writer, designer, an artist."

She added: "We hope that people who have their own creative practices can come to the centre and be inspired by ways to think about how to expand your own creativity and be quite experimental."

The centre represents the first time that Bowie's archive has been available for public view in its entirety, with nine rotating displays along with a dedicated space for those who have booked a ticket to explore topic boxes housing curated selections of reproductions of archival material.

Its unrealised projects section will include the musician's notepad, index cards, and a series of sticky notes, used to prepare the The Spectator, a musical set in 18th century London, which was discovered in Bowie's office after his death in 2016.

Items in the archive include Bowie's first ever instrument, a saxophone brought for him by his father in the early 1960s, Jim Henson-designed life-size puppets of Bowie's many personas for a music video that was never released, and one of his final Ziggy Stardust ensembles, never seen before in the UK.

An interactive installation, called The Library of Connections, will also trace the star's impact on popular culture from the sitcom Friends to late fashion designer Issey Miyake fashion, and including Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, Janelle Monae, and Kendrick Lamar.

Free tickets can be obtained on the V&A website, where fans are also able to order objects of their choice to view.

Widely considered as one of the greatest artists of all time, David Bowie achieved five UK number one singles and 11 UK number one albums during his lifetime, and is best known for songs such as Space Oddity, Ashes To Ashes and Sound And Vision.

Bowie was known for his drastic changes in sound and appearance during his career, beginning as a pop singer in the 1960s, before rising to major fame in the 1970s with the glam rock albums The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973).

He embraced soul on the albums Young Americans (1975) and Station To Station (1976), which saw him among the first white artists to appear on US TV show Soul Train, before plunging into krautrock influences on Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977) and Lodger (1979).

He also ventured into genres such as dance and jazz during his career, and collaborated with artists including Queen, Mick Jagger and Trent Reznor. Bowie released his final album, Blackstar, on his 69th birthday, just two days before his death in 2016.

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