The Savage Lure of 1984

‘Beware the savage lure of 1984’

(Lyric from David Bowie’s ‘1984’)

The David Bowie Centre opened to the public, free to access, at the V&A East Storehouse in September 2025. An initial policy of requiring visitors to book in advance has been dropped, so you can just turn up. The museum is on the site of the Olympic Park in East London between Stratford and Hackney Wick.

With more than 80,000 items in the David Bowie Archive, the V&A have a curated collection of 200 artifacts on show. There’s plenty to see there – iconic costumes, video footage, handwritten notes and drawings, including a reference to his unrealised project to make a musical version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is, however, possible to request access, in advance, to a wealth of additional material, both objects and documents. I booked a day out of my diary and made appointments at the Study Centre to see what I could find.

While browsing the online catalogue to decide which items to examine, I came across a record in the ‘Unrealised Projects’ section headed ‘1984 Musical’ and requested it along with the entire box of papers on Bowie’s ‘Diamond Dogs’, the project which ultimately spun out of his initial idea.

A new musical comedy

The slim volume of papers includes a typewritten eight-page treatment headed:

‘1984, A New Musical Comedy, by David Bowie and Anthony J. Ingrassia’.

Since the 1960s, Ingrassia had been writing and producing experimental theatre and film in New York. In a 2023 podcast hosted on the MainMan archive website, Tony Zanetta, who was Bowie’s tour manager, explains that the company sent Ingrassia, who they also managed, to London to work with Bowie on the musical in 1973: “Well, the two men couldn’t be more opposite …that did not work at all.”

Flicking through the flimsy pages, the set description captures the imagination. Under the shadow of Big Brother, Winston exercises amidst the bombing. The lyrics for the song ‘1984’, later to resurface, fast-paced, on the Diamond Dogs album, are interspersed with the eminently mediocre ‘Dodo’. The only shred of dialogue, a single page of Winston, Mrs Parsons and her ghastly children, is thin.

I was disappointed that there were no clues in the Bowie archive to help solve the enigma of how the failed approach to secure the rights to Nineteen Eighty-Four was made to Sonia Orwell, the widow of the author. Was this treatment taken along to the meeting – if indeed there was a meeting? As Martin Tyrell explained in his article, Bowie’s suggestion that he met Sonia personally has been discredited. It is generally assumed that the MainMan management made the approach. Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, published in 2019, discusses the possibilities.

In the same folder is a page written in purple ink outlining the shape of another unrealised project, the Ziggy Stardust stage musical. There is more of this in the public display, most memorable for its vivid, multicoloured designs.

Diamond Dogs

The album Diamond Dogs (released in May 1974) was born from the ashes of Bowie’s unrealised ‘1984’ project.

Among the wealth of material related to the Diamond Dogs album and tours, I was surprised to find a solitary mention of another Bowie Nineteen Eighty-Four ambition. In his conversation with William S. Burroughs, published in Rolling Stone in February 1974, Bowie claims, “Now, I’m doing Orwell’s 1984 on television…”

I have been grateful for the assistance of the George Orwell Archive at UCL in trying to find traces of Bowie’s requests for rights. Sadly, we have come up with nothing. I was intrigued, though, to see a couple of pieces of correspondence between Sonia and Willam S. Burroughs, including a postcard sent from Tangier to Sonia in Paris in 1964. But it’s not much of a lead. If Burroughs even discussed his relationship with Sonia with Bowie, there is nothing in the Rolling Stone interview about it.

Order an Object

For the final part of my visit, I was accompanied to a different specialist viewing area and given a pair of gloves to use when handling 3D items from the museum’s archive.

Although I did not access any Orwell memorabilia, it is worth noting that the museum holds posters advertising the Peter Hall 1985 National Theatre adaptation of Animal Farm, and for a Nineteen Eighty-Four production in The Pit at The Barbican in 1984. You can easily find these – and more –by searching for George Orwell in the online archive catalogue.

After examining a pair of pyjamas worn by David Bowie in the 2013 video for ‘The Next Day’, I was given a security badge and led deep into a private storage area to see the original supersized Guy Peellaert artwork for the Diamond Dogs album. It felt like an extraordinary privilege.