David Bowie is one of the most protean figures in rock music, one of the ten highest-selling acts in British pop history, and a subject of perennial fascination even when artistically lying low. It is a decade since the last major biography, and now Marc Spitz considers afresh Bowie's remarkable life and music. From south London beginnings immediately after the war, Bowie embarked on a life of endless self re-invention: first he took the surname of an American frontiersman and joined the nascent sixties R&B scene in London among bands like Manfred Mann and the Stones. By the early seventies he had become the androgynous, white-faced waifs of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. Then there was the lounge-lizard classiness of the Thin White Duke, followed by his pensive, austere Berlin period, and subsequently the raucous racket-making aberration of his Tin Machine phase. Along the way he became a distinguished film actor in The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. But ...