Director hails Lightroom venue showing David Bowie: You’re Not Alone

The director of a new 360-degree film about the life and career of David Bowie has said the late artist may have used the Lightroom venue showing it himself had he still been alive.

David Bowie: You’re Not Alone will open at the King’s Cross immersive venue next Wednesday, with director Mark Grimmer, who was the lead designer for 2013’s David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A in South Kensington, saying the artist’s love of technology could have seen him embrace the film style himself.

Grimmer told the Press Association: “I like to think that if he was still around, he might have been working in this medium himself.

“He was somebody who was always ahead of the curve, he was somebody who really believed in borrowing from different art forms, he talked about himself as a kind of synthesiser, somebody who liked to take from the visual arts, from opera, from theatre, from live performance.

“It feels to me, in this day and age, the immersive format is the place to do that, and as someone who’s always pushing the envelope, I think he would have embraced the technology and how advances allow us to tell stories in different ways.”

Lightroom executive producer David Sabel said he felt the show reflected the fact Bowie was “constantly innovating, constantly experimenting”, and said he hoped the Heroes singer would have been “proud of what we’ve done here”.

The film will take visitors through key songs and performances in the singer’s career, such as his performance of Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide at Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973, which featured in the DA Pennebaker film Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture (1983), which saw Bowie kill off the Ziggy persona.

David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is narrated by the singer himself using interviews from throughout his career, aiming to show his human side rather than the characters he played.

Grimmer said: “I think one of the things that we’re quite keen to do is to shine a bit of a light on Bowie the human being, as well as Bowie the legend.

“So people who come to see the show will get a sense of his creative process, of his philosophy, of his interest in spirituality, as well as seeing some of these epic performances from across his career.

“So hopefully, I think people will get a sense of Bowie as somebody who was very funny, very kind of self-deprecating, he didn’t take himself too seriously, really committed to his art, but really quite vulnerable and human like everybody else.”

Widely considered as one of the greatest artists of all time, Bowie has had five UK number one singles and 11 UK number one albums, and is best known for songs such as Starman, 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 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), and was 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).

Tickets for David Bowie: You’re Not Alone are on sale now from the Lightroom website, along with a number of special events named Bowie Nights, featuring stars such as guitarist Carlos Alomar, who played on a number of Bowie albums.

The film is currently booking until October 10.