David Bowie: You’re Not Alone

In 1973 David Bowie was banned from Brighton Dome when his fans went wild in their excitement on his Ziggy Stardust tour.

That ban has now been well and truly lifted as Brighton Dome gets ready to welcome next year the acclaimed Lightroom production David Bowie: You’re Not Alone.

The hugely popular 360° experience will open for a strictly limited season in the Corn Exchange from July 16-August 30, with tickets on sale at brightondome.org from Friday, October 2 at 12pm.

David Bowie: You’re Not Alone showcases some of Bowie’s landmark performances that redefined popular culture, using a mixture of iconic, rarely seen and never-before-exhibited material, selected from thousands of hours of film in the vaults of the David Bowie Archive in New York, from Space Oddity through Diamond Dogs to Heroes.

Produced by immersive London venue Lightroom and designed by multi-award winning studio 59, part of global design and innovation agency Journey, You’re Not Alone is written and directed by 59’s co-founder and studio director Mark Grimmer, who was creative director for the V&A’s David Bowie Is exhibition, and head of design Tom Wexler.

Given Bowie’s resonant Brighton history, Lucy Davies, director and CEO of Brighton Dome, is delighted to welcome the show to the city.

“It is a euphoric and very emotional experience, you feel the sound in your body and the scale of the environment is so stunning - the proximity to Bowie’s face, the hallucinogenic images. It is a total immersion that embodies the polymath and mind-altering artist that he was.

“David Bowie was actually banned from Brighton Dome in 1973. We are now lifting that ban! It was the Ziggy Stardust tour and people queued around the block, and it was just a very wild audience. They were partying very hard, and damage was done to the venue. My predecessor in this job Douglas Reeve, who ran the venue back in the 60s and 70s, said ‘That's it! You are not coming back!’ and deducted some expenses for the damage from the fees.”

But all that’s well and truly in the past now, with Lucy and the team promising an extraordinary visual experience alongside an extraordinary soundscape.

If you can remember Van Gogh Alive in the venue a few years ago, then you'll be thinking along the right lines, she says: “We are building on the experience of that. It's exactly the experience of that, a genuinely immersive promenade experience. Lightroom are the masters of it, and it's really thrilling that we are collaborating with them.”

The show is currently at Lightroom in London until January 10: “And the reviews have been fantastic. Everyone is describing it as an amazing experience. Should you be a Bowie fanatic, then it will absolutely enrich your experience but it will also be great just to discover Bowie.

“We have been thinking about how we build on that Van Gogh Alive experience and thinking about the Corn Exchange and how we use it. So we went to the top and we spoke to Lightroom. It has been a long, long conversation. There were a few things we wanted to test. We wanted another great immersive experience and we also wanted to test opening the venue all summer. We're very keen to build our audiences during the summer and to attract the tourism crowd as well as the locals. So many things fitted, and it's great to be building this partnership. I really hope that this is the beginning of a long relationship with Lightroom.”

Audiences will have the chance to feel they have travelled through time to experience Bowie in performance – up close and first-hand. Each track in the show has been newly reconfigured to use Lightroom's specialised spatial audio system by multiple Olivier and Tony award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry (Harry Potter & The Cursed Child, David Bowie Is).

“This is David Bowie, the man himself. Instead of magnifying the myth through the lens of his characters – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, The Thin White Duke – You’re Not Alone places its focus on the man behind the masks: the provocateur, the polymath, the shapeshifting icon in his enduring, human form.

“The film is structured in thematic chapters in a looping presentation, giving a unique insight into Bowie's perspective on the subjects most important to him, including: theatricality, spirituality, songwriting and the transformative power of creativity. There are surreal moments, like the transatlantic TV interview with Russell Harty in 1975, in which Bowie artfully takes control of the narrative and the interviewer is reduced to asking him questions about the colour of his hair. Elsewhere, the reconstructed set of the inimitable Diamond Dogs tour materialises before our very eyes, igniting a Bowie performance unlike any other captured on film.

“Bringing together a wealth of visual material from a wide range of sources, the show combines rare performance footage, photography, drawings, lyrics, personal notes and audio recordings. David Bowie: You're Not Alone will celebrate Bowie's boundless curiosity as a force that connected people across continents and generations, as well as his enduring cultural impact today.”

David Bowie: You're Not Alone is being made in close collaboration with and authorised by the David Bowie Estate.

Mark Grimmer, who also wrote and directed Lightroom’s David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away), said: “It says something about our relationship with artistic heroes that we're drawn to mystery, otherness, the alien... In Bowie's case, this is our construct, not his. Throughout his career, Bowie repeatedly resisted being figured as anything but human. Rather than undermining his mystique, we designed a show to celebrate Bowie as a champion of human creativity – focusing on the message he expressed time and again: that art, in all its forms, is our best hope for understanding what it means to be alive.”

Richard Slaney, Lightroom chief executive, said: “The response to David Bowie: You’re Not Alone in London has been phenomenal, and we’re delighted to be able to see it open in Brighton in 2027, alongside more cities across Europe, to mark what would have been his 80th birthday. The show offers the chance to feel the excitement of those groundbreaking performances and get inside the mind of one of the greats.”