Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Press

Unseen footage of David Bowie has been recovered from England’s De Montfort University’s archives.

The 30 minutes of footage was shot by friend and collaborator of Bowie’s, Martin Richardson, a professor at the Leicester educational institution.

The original purpose of the film was to create a hologram of Bowie to accompany 1999 album Hours.

After these plans failed to come to fruition, the video remained in storage at De Montfort University.

(Stills from the sessions were used for Hours’ artwork.)

“[Bowie] started to do this set of amazing, iconic movements that he was famous for and all his fans would recognize“, Richardson recalls.

And true to his words Bowie striking several of his well-known stage moves.

“I think his intention was to pull his audience into the holographic space,” he continues, “this holographic illusion of 3D.”

With several iconic musical figures receiving the hologram treatment, from Roy Orbison to Amy Winehouse, it seems inevitable Bowie too will one day receive holo treatment.

“As always, Bowie’s eccentric sense of melody twists around the ear like a space oddity,” Rolling Stone wrote of Bowie’s Hours in 1999, “getting under the skin, plucking the heartstrings and stirring up feelings of alienation we never knew we had. Bowie’s longtime partner in crime, guitarist Reeves Gabrels, takes a co-writer credit on everything here. Their fertile collaboration yields settings full of atmosphere, spunk, grit and nuance; Hours is an album that improves with each new hearing. Just when all the pretty young things might have thought their world was safe from Jurassic intrusion, here comes Bowie, staking an unshakable claim on rock’s brave next world. Hours is further confirmation of Richard Pryor’s observation that they call them old wise men because all them young wise men are dead.”

the material is part of a slew of archival and uncovered material that has come to light since Bowie passed away on January 10, 2016.

“He will shine on in the sky forever,” former Beatle Paul McCartney said of Bowie following the starman’s passing.