Gary Oldman narrates a visual history of David Bowie’s 1974 Diamond Dogs Tour in this exclusive clip from the upcoming David Bowie Is mobile app that turns the acclaimed museum exhibit into an augmented reality experience.
The 1974 trek featured an amalgamation of “contemporary music and theatre several years ahead of its time” as Bowie worked with “a stellar lineup of theatrical collaborators quite unlike that of any previous rock tour,” Oldman says in the David Bowie Is app. The app allows users to comb through hand-drawn stage sketches and wardrobe ideas for the Diamond Dogs Tour.
“The tour’s dystopian cityscape aesthetic was inspired by George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Oldman added before noting that midway through the trek, Bowie began to focus on his next LP Young Americans and soon stripped the dystopian elements from the stage show.
The David Bowie Is app arrives on January 8th, which marks what would have been Bowie’s 72nd birthday. The creators of the app revealed on Thursday that Oldman would provide the narration for the museum exhibit’s adaptation into the digital realm.
Bowie and Oldman were both born and raised in South London and first met in the late 1980s and became close friends; they appeared together in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, and Oldman starred as a priest in Bowie’s controversial 2013 video for “The Next Day.”
“This brings the amazing David Bowie Is exhibition to a wider audience. It’s great that his fans get to experience it,” Oldman said in a statement. Additionally, the app features 3D renderings of Bowie artifacts that appeared when David Bowie Is resided in museums in London and Brooklyn.