The link between the two projects explains lyrics that never made sense before.
David Bowie spent his final months researching a public execution from 1724. Archivists cataloguing his 90,000-item personal archive discovered the evidence behind a locked door in his New York study.
Post-it notes and a ring-bound notebook outlined The Spectator, an unrealized musical set in 18th-century London that remained unknown until the V&A East David Bowie Centre opened in September 2025.
Among the research notes was Jack Sheppard, a 21-year-old thief hanged before 200,000 people at Tyburn.
Bowie never explained the connection between Sheppard’s story and his own final album. What follows is what the archive reveals.
Only Women Kneel and Smile
“On the day of execution, only women kneel and smile.” For a decade, this Blackstar lyric floated without a convincing origin story. In a January 2026 analysis, V&A curator Jo Jones offered one.
Historical records describe women dressed in white throwing flowers at Sheppard’s execution procession. The crowd that gathered reportedly numbered a third of London’s population. The kneeling, the smiling, the ceremony of it all matched the lyric with uncomfortable precision.
Death-as-spectacle didn’t begin at Tyburn. Visitors paid four shillings to view Sheppard chained at Newgate Prison. Royal artist James Thornhill sketched him behind bars. Before the execution turned Sheppard into a martyr, imprisonment had already turned him into a commodity.
Even the wordplay fits. For instance, Bowie’s early drafts read “villa of Allmen,” a place where all men could watch.
He later revised it to “Ormen”, which has no settled translation among Blackstar scholars. But Tyburn was precisely a villa of all men, an execution ground built for public witness, where death was performed for the largest possible audience.
The lyric is the strongest textual link between Blackstar and The Spectator. It also raises a harder question. Who was Jack Sheppard, and why did a dying rock star identify with a teenage thief hanged three centuries earlier?
Honest Jack
Four prisons in one year. That was Sheppard’s 1724.
Born in Spitalfields in 1702, he trained as a carpenter before drifting into petty theft. The crimes were forgettable. The escapes built a legend.
Jonathan Wild ended the run. London’s “Thief-Taker General” ran the city’s largest criminal network while posing as law enforcement. He secured Sheppard’s arrest for the third time on July 23, 1724.
Death made Sheppard permanent. Daniel Defoe ghostwrote an “autobiography” sold at the execution itself. Theatrical adaptations ran for over a century until authorities, fearing they’d inspire crime waves, tried to ban the plays.
By the 1850s, chapbooks about Sheppard were still being read aloud in London lodging houses.
Three hundred years later, Bowie scrawled “honest Jack” and “gentleman Jack” on Post-it notes. The same romanticizing language that built a folk hero in 1724 had resurfaced in a dying rock star’s handwriting.
Sheppard wasn’t the only death Bowie was staging, though. In 2015, he was working on three projects at once, and the archive shows they were bleeding into each other.
Three Projects, One Year
An undated sketch in the archive, annotated “Blackstar,” shows a figure wearing the striped costume from the Lazarus music video (DBA/6/3). Two separate projects sharing a single drawing.
The timeline makes the overlap inevitable. Blackstar was recorded in three week-long sessions at The Magic Shop between January and March 2015. Lazarus previewed Off-Broadway that November. The Spectator research ran alongside both.
For Lazarus, Bowie gave playwright Enda Walsh a four-page outline and a folder of pre-selected lyrics. The story followed Thomas Newton, the alien from The Man Who Fell to Earth, finally winning peace through death.
For The Spectator, he scored 300-year-old journal articles on a 0-10 scale and mapped character names, dates, and locations across Post-it notes. This wasn’t casual browsing.
Theater had been the ambition all along. Bowie played the Elephant Man on Broadway in 1980. The Spectator would have been his third stage work.
We Never Talked About Death
But not everyone who worked with Bowie reads the evidence the same way.
Tony Visconti, who produced Blackstar, has a simpler reading. He called the title track “very humorous,” the Gregorian chanting “slightly melodramatic,” the Al Green section “hysterically funny.”
So, the man who sat beside Bowie while he recorded his final album experienced joy, not a funeral.
Saxophonist Donny McCaslin heard something similar.
He shared that Bowie was still making plans. In fact, he and McCaslin discussed performing together at the Village Vanguard in January 2016. There would be more studio sessions. More music.
At the first recording date in early 2015, Bowie removed his hat to show the band what chemotherapy had done. Then he told them to “just go for it, just feel free and let’s have fun.”
A man secretly researching an 18th-century public execution while writing songs about dying. A man booking jazz club gigs and making his bandmates laugh.
In the end, Visconti settled the contradiction on Facebook, days after Bowie died.
“His death was no different from his life: a work of art,” Visconti wrote.