Ayla Owen Talks David Bowie, Immersion and The Art of Sonic Storytelling
Image credit: 45RPM
For nearly over a decade now, the posthumous industry of David Bowie has been in constant motion repackaged, reinterpreted, re-released. Box sets, documentaries, exhibitions… an ever-expanding constellation orbiting an artist who, even in absence, continues to shape culture. It raises an interesting question: can there ever be too much Bowie?
And yet, somehow, the answer keeps coming back as NO!
When we sat down with emPOWER Sponsor Ayla Owen, MD of 45RPM Music Supervision, to talk about You’re Not Alone, the latest immersive experience at Lightroom, London it became clear that this isn’t just another addition to the archive. It’s an attempt to do something far more ambitious: to translate Bowie not just as an artist, but as an atmosphere and a feeling.
Directed by Mark Grimmer, the creative force behind the V&A’s landmark ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition, the project leans into the scale and possibility of immersive storytelling. A 360-degree, hour-long film that doesn’t just show Bowie it surrounds you with him. His voice, his personas, his contradictions, his evolution.
And crucially, his sound.
Because while the visual spectacle is undeniable, with towering projections and seamless transitions across eras, the intimacy of archival footage blown up to architectural scale means it’s the audio that does the real emotional work. The kind of sound design that doesn’t just accompany the image, but transforms the body of the audience. It places you not in front of Bowie, but inside the experience of him.
That’s where 45RPM Music Supervision comes in.
Working at the intersection of music, narrative and rights, their role in a project like this is both highly technical and deeply creative. It’s about curation.. yes.. but also about restraint. About understanding what to include, what to leave out, and how to honour an artist whose catalogue is both vast and mythologised without tipping into cliché.
Because that’s the tightrope You’re Not Alone walks throughout.
There are moments that feel almost overwhelmingly powerful the electrifying scale of Starman, the time-collapsing brilliance of Rebel Rebel performed across decades, the visceral, almost spiritual intensity of Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide. In these moments, the technology disappears and something more primal takes over. You’re not analysing Bowie. You’re feeling him.
And then there are the quieter, more contested choices. The use of archive voiceover to guide the narrative. The selective storytelling that smooths over some of the more complex or controversial chapters of his life. The challenge of creating something that speaks both to lifelong fans and to a newer, more digitally native audience encountering Bowie perhaps for the first time. But maybe that’s the point…
Bowie himself was never a fixed entity. He was fragmentation. Reinvention. Performance layered upon performance. So any attempt to “define” him in a single hour is always going to be imperfect. What You’re Not Alone does, at its best, is resist definition altogether.
Instead, it offers something closer to immersion as interpretation - a sensory, emotional, and sonic journey that captures not just what Bowie did, but what he made possible. The idea that identity is fluid. That art is experimentation. That discomfort is often where the most interesting work lives.
And in a world increasingly driven by speed, surface, and scrollable content, there’s something radical about asking an audience to sit, to feel, and to be fully surrounded and immersed in a single artist’s universe for an hour. And that’s exactly why it works.
We wanted to know more about the process 45RPM went through, and HOW they curated such a vast body of work. I mean how do you choose!? What was the journey, and how hard was it to flow with a brief that big. So we asked Ayla.
Q> What was your initial reaction when you were approached to work on You’re Not Alone?
Ayla> Honestly, it was a real mix of joy and anxiety. Joy because I've been a Bowie obsessive since I was a kid, so this was literally my dream project in so many ways. Anxiety because the responsibility of it was tremendous, you're handling the legacy of someone who means so much to so many people, and you want to get it right. What helped enormously was that I'd already worked with the phenomenal core team at Lightroom and 59 Studio on Vogue: Inventing the Runway, so I went in knowing I was in the hands of some of the best in the business.
Q> How do you begin approaching a catalogue as vast and culturally loaded as David Bowie’s?
Ayla> The only way in with a catalogue that size is to stop thinking about it as a catalogue and start thinking about it as a life. The show is helpfully structured into chapters, each one built around a theme that was close to Bowie's heart rather than chronology for its own sake, such as ‘creative curiosity’, ‘changes’, ‘spirituality’ etc. Once you have that framework, the music almost chooses itself, because the job becomes finding the song that says the most about that particular facet of him at that particular moment, rather than trying to cram in every hit or tick a box marked "greatest album." On the contrary - it was extremely important to everyone involved in making the show that it didn’t feel in any way like a jukebox musical.
That structure was actually a gift for the music supervision side of things. It meant every track in the show had to earn its place by illuminating something about who he was, not just what he sounded like. So the question was never "is this a popular Bowie song," it was "does this song tell us something true about this part of him’?
Q> What does 'music supervision' mean in the context of an immersive 360-degree experience like this?
Ayla> In a lot of ways, music supervision for an immersive piece like this isn't so different from film, TV or Advertising. You're still responsible for the creative, commercial, legal and logistical aspects of every piece of music in the production, working out what serves the story, clearing it, and making sure it all comes together on time. Myself and our incredible music coordinator David Simkins were doing exactly that throughout. But structurally it's a different beast to a feature film. Because the show runs in chapters that cycle continuously, there's no fixed beginning, middle or end, so you can walk in at any point and it still makes complete sense. The music has to work in that same way, meaning it needs to help bring each individual chapter to life rather than building meaning in a linear way.
Where it really departs from traditional supervision is the sheer volume of the music. We were working with close to 50 different tracks across the show, which is a huge amount even by feature film standards, and because the edit kept evolving right up until launch, the music list kept shifting with it. You're not locking a song into a scene and moving on, you're constantly re-testing choices against a film that's still breathing and changing all the way up until the show’s launch, which makes the whole process far more fluid than a traditional brief.
Q> With Bowie, there’s always a tension between the iconic and the unexpected, how did you navigate that balance?
Ayla> That tension is real, and it was something both the filmmaking team and the Bowie estate were very conscious of from the start. There was a real commitment to giving superfans something they genuinely couldn't get anywhere else, new archive footage, audio that's never been heard outside Lightroom, and to making sure the show didn't just lean on the familiar eras, but gave proper space for the extraordinary music he made later in his career to be represented too. We were also very mindful of not overlapping with the David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse, which holds so much of the visual archive, photographs, costumes, set designs etc (and which 59 Studio also produced), so it was important that what we put on screen at Lightroom felt distinct rather than duplicating what fans might already have seen before. At the same time, you can't build a show purely for the hardcore fans. You've got audiences walking in who know Bowie from ‘Let's Dance’ and not much else, or who might not know him at all, and the experience has to draw them in too.
What made that balance easier to strike was the chapter structure itself. Because each chapter is thematic rather than chronological, we could move freely between eras within a single moment, so a superfan might get a rare piece of archive sitting right next to a song everyone knows, and neither feels out of place. It meant we weren't choosing between iconic and unexpected, we could put them side by side and let them speak to the same idea.
Q> How did you manage to get the balance so right! To ensure the music feels cohesive when spanning so many eras, styles, and personas?
Ayla> Honestly, a lot of the credit for that goes to Lightroom and 59 Studio for nailing the chapter format. Because each chapter is built around a theme rather than a timeline, you're not forcing Bowie's work into a neat chronological line through the decades, which would have felt completely at odds with who he was anyway. Instead you can have something from Ziggy sitting alongside something from Blackstar and it doesn't jar, because they're both speaking to the same idea within that chapter. The thematic anchor is what makes the tonal leaps feel intentional rather than chaotic.
Another positive factor was the Bowie estate. They were very clear from the start that they wanted the full breadth of his work celebrated, not just the era most people default to when they think of Bowie. That gave the team real permission to go deep and wide, to include songs and stories from every chapter of his life and career, and to resist the pull towards the obvious. When you have that kind of mandate from the people who knew him best and who steward his legacy, it makes the creative decisions a lot easier to make.
Q> Do you think immersive formats fundamentally change the way we experience music emotionally?
Ayla> Absolutely. For the Bowie exhibition, the 360-degree format is a full sensory assault in the best possible way. Because you have four walls to play with, you can pack in an extraordinary amount, archive footage, rarely-seen performances, songs from across his entire career, all happening within the same floor space. For older Bowie fans there's an almost overwhelming hit of nostalgia, but what's brilliant about the format is that you can be pulling at someone's heartstrings on one wall and then completely sucker punch them with something mind blowing or even funny on another. It keeps you on your toes in a way that a linear documentary can’t touch.
The physicality of it also matters. Whether you're lying on the floor, sat on a bench or wandering around the space, you're genuinely in the middle of it all. That sense of being inside the experience rather than watching it from a cinema or from your sofa creates an emotional connection that I think is pretty unique to this format. It's the difference between observing Bowie and actually feeling like you're in his world.
Q> Looking ahead, how do you see immersive experiences shaping the future of music supervision?
Ayla> The potential within the immersive space feels vast to me, and not just for music supervision specifically but for music and its relationship with fans more broadly. People are actively seeking out deeper ways of connecting with artists beyond the traditional formats, and rights holders are increasingly focused on keeping their artists' and songwriters' work front and centre in culture. Immersive experiences are becoming one of the more compelling ways to do both of those things at once.
Where it really gets interesting to me (and a bit mind-bending), is when you start thinking about what happens once VR technology becomes truly ubiquitous. Because once a fan can realistically insert themselves into another world, both visually and sonically, the possibilities become almost limitless. Imagine actually feeling like you're physically standing in the crowd at the Hammersmith Odeon watching Ziggy Stardust sing his final song - hearing it, feeling it, actually being there. Suddenly that’s not a fantasy anymore, it's a real possibility on the horizon. I find that totally fascinating - and more than a little bit terrifying!
This experience for Bowie Fans really is a must, and thank you to 45 RPM Music Supervision Managing Director Ayla Owen for sharing such brilliant insights that make the whole project even more tantalising. What a cultural landmark! What a legacy! What an Artist!
If you want to go experience, it's happening at Lightroom, 12 Lewis Cubitt Square, King’s Cross, London N1C 4DY. The current official booking period runs until 10 January 2027 so you have time to absorb the enormous 11-metre-high projected walls, the perfectly curated spatial audio, performance footage, rarely heard interviews, photographs, drawings, lyrics, notes and previously unseen material from the David Bowie Archive in New York. Bowie himself is the sole voice throughout, built from interviews spanning his career so proximity is not an issue!
There are even exclusive Bowie Nights, including late-night sessions on the last Friday of the month, with DJs, themed cocktails and people encouraged to dress like their idol. And for the more atmospheric fans out there, there’s a Peter Gregson x Bowie Lightroom Live on 3–5th September.
