\n<\/p>\n
\n\tDavid Bowie<\/a> secretly began working on a musical set in 18th-century London in the months leading up to his death in 2016<\/a>, according to new notes discovered locked in his New York City office.<\/p>\n \n\tAs the BBC<\/a> reports, the project was tentatively titled The Spectator<\/em> and not even Bowie\u2019s closest collaborators knew about it until the notes were discovered. The documents have been donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which acquired the rest of Bowie\u2019s massive archive<\/a> in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBowie had begun to sketch out a story and think of possible characters for The Spectator<\/em>, which appeared to be a blend of fact and fiction. He considered making the folk-hero thief and jailbreaker \u201cHonest Jack\u201d Sheppard a main character, along with Jonathan Wild, the prominent figure in London\u2019s criminal underworld, who got Shepard arrested and executed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOne of Bowie\u2019s biggest inspirations seems to have been a periodical also called The Spectator<\/em>, which was published between 1711 and 1712. Bowie kept a whole notebook dedicated to the publication, in which he jotted down notes about key stories and even ranked them on a scale of 1 to 10. Some he considered for possible subplots, like a morality tale about a beautiful but \u201cvain and severe\u201d woman, whose suitor ditches her for her plain but agreeable sister.<\/p>\n \n\tOther notes reference the Gordon Riots \u2014 an uprising in 1780 spurred by anti-Catholic sentiment \u2014 and the Mohocks, a violent gang of upper-class young men who got drunk and attacked people. For one wild scene, he envisioned a public hanging, followed by \u201csurgeons fighting over corpses.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe notes suggest Bowie was drawn to 18th-century London as it would\u2019ve allowed him to explore such topics as crime and punishment, the development of art and satire, and the always fascinating intersection between high and low culture.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cLondon threw up so many different juxtapositions. Juxtapositions between high and low, between the virtuous and the criminal, and these things existed cheek by jowl,\u201d said Professor Bob Harris, an 18th-century specialist at the University of Oxford. \u201cI think it presented so much that was beguiling to contemporaries, but also clearly that Bowie himself found fascinating.\u201d<\/p>\n