Jehnny Beth and Tony Visconti are among the guests that will celebrate the 10th anniversary of David Bowie’s death at the British Library next month.
The music icon passed away on 10 January 2016 at the age of 69, and on 17 January, the national library in North London will present a series of events that will run throughout the day, titled ‘David Bowie In Time’.
The day will be headlined by ‘Just A Cabaret’, an evening of music in the Entrance Hall of the library. It will see Blixa Bargeld, a legend of the Berlin music scene, a founding member of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and the frontman of veteran industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, playing songs from his recent EP ‘Blixa Sings David Bowie’.
Alongside him will be composer and bandleader Nikko Weidermann, pianist Daniel Brandt and Jehnny Beth, soloist and former frontwoman of Savages, who will also play a selection of Bowie songs in what she has described as her “most intimate performance of 2026”.
Elsewhere during the day, Tony Visconti, the producer that worked on countless classic Bowie records including the entire Berlin trilogy and his final album ‘Blackstar’, will also be in conversation with Nicholas Pegg, the author of The Complete David Bowie.
Jehnny Beth will also be involved in a discussion about ‘Blackstar’ with the jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin, who led the band on the record, as well as the album art designer Jonathan Barnbrook, who will all be talking to BBC Radio 6 Music’s Mary Anne Hobbs.
There will be other talks involving music journalist Paul Morley and David Bowie Archive curator Harriet Reed, and a screening of the documentary David Bowie: Five Years.
Tickets for ‘David Bowie In Time’ are available now and you can find yours here.
In 2020, Beth told NME about how her debut solo album ‘To Love Is To Live’ was heavily influenced by Bowie and the shock of his death. “That night I was in L.A., I opened my phone at 3am, saw that [Bowie] was dead and couldn’t sleep so I listened to his music all night,” she said. “I was obviously really sad, but also very conscious of the fact that death is part of life. One day I’m gonna be gone, so in my core I felt that there was something that I hadn’t done yet – and that was this record.
“It took me a while to come to that, but the night that Bowie died was certainly the start of the path to this record.”
Elsewhere, Bowie’s last years are set to be explored in a new Channel 4 documentary, provisionally titled The Final Act, while the BBC have also announced a Bowie doc for 2026 in the form of Bowie In Berlin.
