Lightroom is a three-year-old venue near King’s Cross which was first built with the intention of housing a 600 seat theatre. Four storeys high, it is pretty big. And visitors descend narrow stairs, pass through an infernal, glowing red tunnel and emerge into a vast auditorium as the opening riff from Rebel Rebel booms right through the darkened space.
It is a sight. We are in a cube as big as a warehouse. This exhibition is designed for crowds of 280 at a time and audience are tinted blue thanks by the stage lights, as I enter. Lights from one of the many excerpts of footage from tour shows which have been edited into this 64 minute production.
People are however sitting down. Which is not a surprise given that so many original fans got into Bowie during the 1970s. Grey hair, conservative dress, sensible shoes; these are the uniform of a majority of visitors. There are relative youngsters too. Even one or two teenagers. And a toddler is dancing, if no one else is, as the show’s first chorus drops.
That’s not to say this experience is characterised by passivity, despite the audio visual overwhelm. The narrative is a collage of interviews and so there are smatterings of laughter, small outbursts of applause, occasional uses of phone in order to capture the scene. But not as much phone use as many a present day rock concert. Most of the time is spent in reverent contemplation.
What the show does especially well is create distinct environments that represent episodes in the singer’s life. It art directs and animates these: Bowie’s childhood in post-war suburbia, his coming of age amidst Soho sleaze, his sojourn in Berlin where, above an endless wall, the GDR Television Tower blinks against the night sky.
Bowie’s formative fascination for books and art is evoked by busy Pythonesque scenes in both a vaulted library and a classical museum. His self-conscious stardom is then introduced by archive vox pops with emotional fans and a car crash interview with Russell Harty on London Weekend Television. A sequence of film posters represent his acting career and his pioneering embrace of the internet is illustrated by a proliferation of screens. Just be glad he didn’t live to see what that medium has become in the last five years.
And I haven’t even mentioned the music, the lyrics, the performances. These are just awesome and the acoustics are just dandy. The production artfully mixes together different concerts in which the same song appears in a variety of locations, costumes, and musical arrangements. “Heroes” sung live at this volume, with a passion largely held back on the recording, is spine tingling.
Dutiful attention was paid to the 1990s, the 2000s, and the final years. But in David Bowie: You’re Not Alone, the swansong is not Blackstar, the album he released two days before he died, but the track Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide from the Ziggy period in which ‘You’re not alone’ is a prominent lyric.
Listening to Bowie in my teenage bedroom, I was literally alone. When I saw him in Milton Keynes Bowl in 1990 during the Sounds+VIsion tour, I was with 65,000 other souls, with no reason to take one’s eyes off the stage. At Lightroom, however, there were no diehards at the front, no groupies in the wings and Bowie remained equally distant or close to us all.