Wondering ’bout sound and vision ends with retrospective

More than 300 objects from the star’s 50 years in showbusiness have been brought together for the first time, including hand-written lyrics, costumes, photographs, film, music videos, set designs and album artwork.

The London museum was given unprecedented access to the David Bowie Archive for the exhibition, which opens this weekend and runs until August 11.

On display will be seminal items such as the Ziggy Stardust bodysuits from 1972 designed by Freddie Burretti, music videos such as Boys Keep Swinging and set designs created for the Diamond Dogs tour in 1974.

While Bowie himself was not directly involved in the exhibition, curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh trawled through the vast archive to produce the first retrospective of the star’s career.

Co-curator Geoffrey Marsh said: “David Bowie is a performer, and it’s his songs and videos which are real artworks. The V&A is all about multi-disciplinary exhibitions, and you can’t get more multi-disciplinary than David Bowie. He’s a musician, he’s a songwriter, but he’s also fascinated with graphic design, costume design, but what is most interesting from my point of view is he is most interested in imagery, and how you manipulate it in a celebrity world.

“At heart he’s a trained actor, and there are very few people who understand the nature of theatre as Bowie does and hopefully that comes across in the exhibition.”

A V&A spokeswoman said: the museum had already sold more than 47,000 tickets , the most ever recorded in advance.

Ms Broackes said “We don’t know of any plans he has to come to the exhibition, but we know he visits lots of museums, and is very interested in museums, so I can’t help but feeling he’s going to be interested in how we have told the story here, so I hope he will come.”