The coolest place to be on a day like today....

The Prints & Drawings archives stores of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Air conditioned, temperature and humidity controlled. Lovely. I will sit in the gardens of the Brompton Oratory for lunch, so I appreciate it when I get back. Freezing bollacks in winter thought.

 

Has the Bowie finished? Was it good?

 

About a month to run I think mate. I need to have a good look myself, but it is pretty spectacular yes. I did some work on it, condition checking paper objects that came in from David's personal archive and elsewhere. I'll make some time this week to have a good shufty round. I like to look at stuff without the public there, but not much chance due to security on this type of show.

 

wow! what sort of things did you check? Eno's random chance cards? Halloween Jack's snotty tissues?

 

Mainly photographs, press cuttings, fan club material, posters. Some personal letters, copies of contracts/business correspondence, hilarious fan letters. Most interesting stuff probably hand written lyrics and cut ups, studio track sheets. My favourite thing I had hold of, was a hand made birthday card from Marc Bolan. In very poor condition though, I had to recommend we didn't use it unfortunately. Not sure about the items you mentioned, but two of us worked on the conservation survey, to give it it's proper lingo.

It will all have to be checked again and signed off before it goes back, unlikely to be me doing it though.

 

wow, what a cool job! do you remember any of the cut-ups or lyrics you saw, mate? amazing

 

Some jobs have some really great perks.

 

It's form filling and data crunching like anything else, but often the subject can be quite interesting. That was nearly a year ago, I left in November but am back freelancing at the mo. There is a lot of very dull, repetitive stuff to do too.

 

The cut ups I saw were mainly unrecognisable, the ones that were stuck down or had stayed stuck. Some were in 'kit form' - envelopes of cut typed stuff, not really material you could display. There was something from Station to Station, quite early and bits too from Earthling and more recent records, so quite a time span.

We had the hand written Life On Mars with all the re-workings, crossing out etc and reckoned that would have been a good candidate to go in the show, but that was someone else's decision. Literally dozens of known songs, so many you had to become a bit blase with it or the job wouldn't have got done. It's a year ago now but I remember the Bewley Brothers and Rock n Roll Suicide were a couple that stood out for me, because they are personal favourites and were nice objects in their own right too, aesthetically. A lot of it was in lyric books, which are great items to display but are stuck in a case on the same page. A lot went off to be photographed for an interactive exhibit.

 

brilliant, that's pretty incredible

 

Aye but we all have the boring bits but being able to go through the Bowie stuff must have been brilliant.

 

Hows about the fridge?