David Bowie: You’re Not Alone experience

Words Verity Butler 

London’s Lightroom offers a spatial oddity layered across a labyrinth of visual content with its latest spectacle

I will never forget how I found out David Bowie had passed away. I woke up and switched on my bedside radio, which happened to be midway through playing Starman. As I listened (still half-asleep!), I felt that pleasant, inspired feeling I always get when I hear that song. As it reached its conclusion, I distinctly remember thinking for likely the hundredth time: “What a great song.”

But then the solemn voice of the presenter drifted over the top of the tune’s final bars: “Rest in peace, David Bowie.” That was the last time I listened to a Bowie song counting my lucky stars to be sharing the same planet as him.

Bowie’s celestial life and career had a profound impact on the world – a world that hasn’t been quite so iridescent since he left it. But how do you sum up and celebrate such an impactful life? It seems like a crime that, in the age of endless cinematic biopics, nothing has cut through that honours this legend of many eras and personalities.

It seems we may be waiting a little while longer (think four individual, feature-length Beatles films as units of measurement) for Hollywood to jump onto the Bowie bandwagon. But, unsurprisingly, the live entertainment sector is already on it. Lightroom, in London, kicked off the David Bowie: You’re Not Alone experience in April,
and it is set to run until this October.

Located just ten minutes’ walk from King’s Cross St Pancras railway station, the Lightroom is an immersive venue that blends sound, motion and light to create a new kind of storytelling.

“A Lightroom show is always a deeply collaborative process when dealing with a world-leading creative,” begins David Sabel, executive producer at Lightroom. “Whether that was David Hockney creating brand-new work for the projection format, Tom Hanks using the space to tell the story of the Apollo programme or, in this case, working with the David Bowie estate, in every event, you’re creating a piece of work that is totally authentic.”

The sole voice heard during David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is that of the artist himself, and the experience is both a multimedia spectacle and an intimate, revealing self-portrait. The 360° experience, which is produced by Lightroom and designed by 59, A Journey Studio, is written and directed by 59’s Mark Grimmer and Tom Wexler.

“The other thing that sets us apart is the deployment of technology within our space – and the space itself,” adds Sabel. “The scale of the room is huge, towering more than 11 metres high with projection on all four walls and the floor.”

Ch-ch-ch-ch-chapters

When entering the venue, we asked the steward: “What time does the next show start?” That’s when we quickly discovered the clever format of the experience. It works in an endlessly looping presentation, meaning visitors can come in, pick up the show from any given moment and watch until they realise they’re back at the start again. This gives them the opportunity to take it in all over again, if they so wish.

“The film in the Bowie archives is from a variety of eras and media, with quality ranging from beautiful 35mm film footage to grainy eighties videotape,” says co-director and design director Tom Wexler. “Finding a way to present this on the canvas of Lightroom was a big challenge and required an inventive approach both to editing and composition.”

“The 27,000-pixel-wide canvas at Lightroom also meant that we had to be very efficient with render times and storage space to allow us to remain responsive as the project developed.”

The film itself is structured in thematic chapters, offering unique insights into Bowie’s perspective on the subjects most important to him: theatricality, spirituality, songwriting and the transformative power of creativity. There are surreal moments, such as 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 his hair. Elsewhere, the reconstructed set of the inimitable Diamond Dogs tour materialises before our eyes, igniting a Bowie performance unlike any other captured on film.

Floating in a concrete can

Sound is integral to the show – and to every other project that comes to the Lightroom. That’s why choosing tech that gives a whole new meaning to sound design was crucial when the space was being constructed.

You’re Not Alone makes full use of Lightroom’s unique sound capabilities and specialised HOLOPLOT spatial audio system. Each track used in the show has been newly configured by Gareth Fry, a multiple Olivier and Tony award-winning sound designer.

“The HOLOPLOT system is quite a unique thing for Lightroom,” continues Wexler. “It’s also used for Sphere in Las Vegas – albeit their system uses far more units than we do!”

The Lightroom has two stacks that are mounted on either end of the room at the front and back walls, and within those stacks there are around 800 individual speakers on each side.

Wexler emphasises the main sound challenges of the space and how they overcame them. “It’s a four-storey concrete box with parallel walls, and obviously a lot of projector noise – so it’s a challenging space acoustically, to say the least,” he says.

The Lightroom’s HOLOPLOT set-up is a ‘beam-forming’ spatial audio system, in which groups of speakers create beams of sound that ‘bounce off the walls in deliberate ways, using the space to its advantage’.

The final effect truly elevates the show from a jazzed-up film screening to a full-blown, multi-sensory experience.

“It really is like nothing else,” Wexler enthuses. “You go from feeling like you’re in the front row of the crowd at a concert, to right next to Bowie in the studio, to inside his head – all at the blink of an eye and totally seamlessly.”

Life on walls

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.

“There’s coverage from 28 Panasonic laser projectors, so the visuals are intense and vibrant,” adds Sabel.

Said visuals were designed and directed by 59, A Journey Studio. A team of editors and animators used a variety of tools that included Adobe Premiere and After Effects, Cinema 4D, Blender, Unreal and Autodesk Maya to build environments that incorporate footage, photographs, interviews and ephemera from the David Bowie archive.

“Rather than trying to faithfully recreate any particular physical environment, we used a mix of 3D geometry and lighting with a collage-like approach to composition that creates an impressionistic and constantly shifting canvas,” says Wexler.

The result is truly dazzling. Instead of magnifying the myth through the lens of his many characters (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, The Thin White Duke), You’re Not Alone successfully places its focus on the man behind the masks – the provocateur, the polymath, the shapeshifting icon – in his enduring, human form.

Wexler responds with enthusiasm when asked about the future of this popular live entertainment format – but he also offers a personal challenge to the sector: “People are hungry for personal, physical experiences that connect them not only to the subject matter, but also to other people sharing that same moment in a shared space.

“The challenge now is to develop the language in this new medium to a point where productions can move beyond spectacle and begin to tell stories that stay with people beyond the instant itself.”

He draws us to another Hollywood comparison: “In many ways, there are parallels with the early days of cinema, which began as a sideshow attraction and evolved into a rich art form of its own. Immersive entertainment is well placed to follow suit, with a demonstrable audience appetite and the beginnings of a global availability of venues capable of distributing work.”

At time of writing, David Bowie: You’re Not Alone is set to run at London’s Lightroom until January 2027.

This article was first published in the Autumn 2026 issue of LIVE.