Bowie at The Lightroom

I have written about David Bowie many times on Hive. You could say that my other half and myself are big fans as we saw him live a few times and have been to other events since he died. This week we were at yet another. You're Not Alone at The Lightroom in London is a surround audio and video experience that covers his long career.

The Lightroom is located near St Pancras Station in an area that has been extensively renovated in recent years. You enter via the bar area where you can get a drink to take into the auditorium.

From there you go downstairs where there is a shop selling various merchandise including T-shirts and books. You go further down along a corridor to the actual space that is a cube of around 10 metres. There are some benches and cushions scattered around, but you can sit anywhere in there. The visuals are projected onto all four walls as well as the floor.

The show lasts about an hour and seems to be on a loop so you can see it more than once if you like. You get a slot to go in when you buy the tickets. What you see includes lots of concert footage, often showing different views and even different versions of a song across the years. In some ways it feels like a more intimate concert.

Between the songs you hear David talking about various topics with collages of images. The way this is all edited together is amazing as it all just flows.

Bowie was a very visual person with his many different looks plus he painted and posed for many photographs. They make use of a lot of this material. The time passes too quickly before you get back to where you came in. It covers his life from childhood up to the Reality album. I am not sure why it did not include the two albums that came in his last few years, but then he did not play those live.

We did not buy much in the shop. Upstairs there is a gallery of portraits. We previously met one of the photographers at an exhibition.

Afterwards we wandered through the Coal Drops Yard area where there are various shops and restaurants. There is a big vintage clothing place where I bought a shirt. I did check if there were any Bowie shirts, but did not see any. There is a market area where you can get street food. I had a nice wrap and sat on the grass by the canal to eat it.

There are a few houseboats along the canal and one is a bookshop. It is a little odd browsing the books as they bob up and down.

We finished with an ice cream whilst watching some tennis from Wimbledon on a big screen. There were plenty of people around. Google and Universal Music have offices nearby.

Rock on!

The man behind:

Hive account@tenkminnows: Helping good Hivers level up Hive account@proofofbrian: A bot that checks for tag typos #BritList: A monthly list of Hivers in the UK