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Joe Taysom@josephtaysom

Wed 10 September 2025 15:36, UK

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David Bowie‘s favourite songs of all time have been revealed on a secret note, which is set to be on show at the David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse.

On September 13th, the David Bowie Centre will open its doors to the general public and exhibit the late music icon’s personal archive, which boasts over 90,000 items, including plans for a musical about 18th-century London that he was working on before his death.

Now, more artefacts have surfaced, including a list of “ins” and “outs” which he wrote down on a note in 1995. Ins included “chaos surfing”, “no tidy endings”, “reasonable cybernetic systems”, “ennui” and “David Bowie”. Whereas the outs were “post-modernism”, “religion”, “irony”, “your 15 minutes” and “David Bowie”.

Another page was titled, “Memo for radio show — list of favourite records”, which listed Bowie’s favourite songs that he would like to play on a potential radio broadcast. According to The Times, these range from songs such as Alan Freed and His Rock ‘N’ Roll Band’s ‘Right Now Right Now’ to Jeff Beck’s ‘Beck’s Bolero’.

He also included ‘Across The Universe’ by The Beatles. Bowie once said of the creation: “‘Across the Universe’ was a flower power sort of thing John Lennon wrote. I always thought it was fabulous, but very watery in the original, and I hammered the hell out of it.”

Bowie continued, “Not many people like it. I like it a lot and I think I sing very well at end of it. People say I used John Lennon on the track… but let me tell you… no one uses John Lennon. John just came and played on it. He was lovely.”

Other notable creations on his list include Little Richard’s ‘Ecclusiastics’, Roxy Music’s ‘Mother of Pearl’, ‘The Electrician’ by The Walker Brothers and ‘Tom Violence’ by Sonic Youth.

Elsewhere in the newly surfaced is a love letter to two of Bowie’s favourite novels, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and John Rechy’s City of Night. Bowie said the latter “presented me with options that I never dreamed of, that I firmly believed could not exist in Bromley, or even Croydon.”

Madeleine Haddon, curator at V&A East, previously said of the David Bowie Centre in July: “This archive offers an extraordinary lens through which to examine broader questions of creativity, cultural change, and the social and historical moments during which Bowie lived and worked. In the Centre, we want you to get closer to Bowie, and his creative process than ever before. For Bowie fans and those coming to him for the first time, we hope the Centre can inspire the next generation of creatives.”

The full list of Bowie’s favourite songs are listed below.

David Bowie’s favourite songs of all time:

• 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’

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