David Bowie: His Newly Discovered Favorite Records List
In London, the art world and music fans are waking up to something deeply intimate: a newly revealed list of David Bowie’s 15 favorite records, among the 90,000-item archive being opened at the David Bowie Centre in V&A East Storehouse. It’s a handwritten note labelled “Memo for radio show – list of favorite records”, showing just how varied and how personal his influences were.
No one knows when Bowie wrote it. However, the list paints a vivid portrait of a man who lived many musical lives simultaneously: classical, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, avant-garde, and even outsider sounds. Here are the 15 records, as revealed in the note:
- Ralph Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
- Richard Strauss – Four Last Songs
- Alan Freed and His Rock ’N’ Roll Band – Right Now Right Now
- Little Richard – True Fine Mama
- The Hollywood Argyles – Sho Know a Lot About Love
- Miles Davis – Some Day My Prince Will Come
- Charles Mingus – Ecclusiastics
- Jeff Beck – Beck’s Bolero
- Legendary Stardust Cowboy – I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship
- The Beatles – Across the Universe
- Ronnie Spector – Try Some, Buy Some
- Roxy Music – Mother of Pearl
- Edgar Froese – Epsilon in Malaysian Pale
- The Walker Brothers – The Electrician
- Sonic Youth – Tom Violence
What makes this so fascinating isn’t just which tracks he picked, but the range. At one end, you’ve got Vaughan Williams and Strauss, towering figures of classical tradition. On another, there’s the exotic spacey weirdness of Legendary Stardust Cowboy. There are jazz giants like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, rock ’n’ roll icons like Little Richard, avant-pop experiments (Edgar Froese, Sonic Youth), and contemporaries like Roxy Music.
In interviews and past writings, Bowie often cited many of these names, Roxy Music he admired, Beatles he covered, etc., and this list confirms just how foundational some of these influences were. For example, Across the Universe by The Beatles is one he performed in his Young Americans era, showing a direct line between his inspirations and his work.
The opening of the V&A East Storehouse Bowie Centre is already shaping up to be more than just a retrospective; it’s a moment of rediscovery. Curators say the archive includes 70,000 photographs, 400 costumes, 150 musical instruments, notebooks, handwritten lyrics, and more. The “Memo for radio show” is just one gem among many, but it’s a gem that gives fans and scholars alike a clearer sense of how Bowie’s musical identity was built by listening widely, absorbing extremes, and always seeking something unexpected.
He once said (in various interviews) that his process was about reinvention and absorbing what was around him. This list almost feels like a map of that absorption: from early rock to experimental edges, from tradition to radical. And even if we can’t pinpoint when he wrote it, we can see how it echoes loudly through everything he made.
