David Bowie’s personal archive and the keepsakes of Scottish fans come together in a new V&A Dundee exhibition, close to the venue where he first performed in Scotland under his adopted stage name in 1966.

David Bowie: On Tour is the first exhibition to showcase material from the archive acquired by the V&A in London in 2023. It brings together 100 objects selected from the 90,000 housed at the purpose-built David Bowie Centre; many have never been displayed publicly.

The selection reaches beyond stage costumes to the tools and ordinary possessions behind an extraordinary career: his first saxophone, bought by his father for Christmas in 1961; a songwriting stopwatch; his 1988 passport; and an advance copy of The Velvet Underground’s 1967 record I’m Waiting for the Man. Handwritten lyrics for his final album, Blackstar, also feature.

One less admiring assessment survives in a December 1973 complaint from London neighbours, addressed to “Mr Bowy”: “We would be very grateful if you would be considerate enough to have the music played much more softly and stop at a reasonable hour.”

Bowie’s collecting served a practical purpose. Having meticulously preserved material from his early career, he later employed professional curators to organise it, allowing him to revisit abandoned projects and fill gaps left by possessions lost or given away. The archive records a working process as well as a public image.

Scotland helped shape that image. Bowie learned theatrical techniques from choreographer Lindsay Kemp in Edinburgh. A January 1968 programme records their appearance in Pierrot in Turquoise, first staged in the city; two years later, it was filmed at Edinburgh’s Gateway Theatre as The Looking Glass Murders for Scottish Television.

His Scottish audiences have their own place in the exhibition. Photographs of Bowie in a Kansai Yamamoto bodysuit sit above Polaroids and memorabilia recalling his Caird Hall concert on 17 May 1973, attended by 2,500 fans.

John Reilly, now 64, gathered much of that material but missed the performance aged 11. “I thought it would be like a football match, and I’d just crawl in under the turnstiles behind my dad,” the former Dundee United footballer recalled.

He subsequently saw Bowie 49 times before the musician’s death in January 2016. Curator Svetlana Panova said fans’ carefully retained keepsakes had made it possible to tell the Dundee concert’s story.

For Reilly, whose collecting began with pictures saved from classmates’ Jackie magazines, the exhibition brings decades of devotion home: “Only this time, instead of travelling around to see him, I can get the bus into Dundee and the bus back home again and see it all on my own doorstep.”