He settles back on to the sofa, lighting the third in an endless chain of Marlboro Lights. 'There have been <a href="vonderhain.com/marlboro ">Marlboro Gold</a> periods in my life,' he says, 'when I have been so closeted in my own world that I would no longer relate to anybody. And I do love communication. These days more than ever I feel like a very social animal, which I wasn't at one time. And I love the freedom of it; I love the joy it brings. And I love the conflicts and the debates which go with being much more a fully active member of society.'

He settles back on to the sofa, lighting the third in an <a href="usasmokingsale.com ">Newport 100S</a> endless chain of Marlboro Lights. 'There have been periods in my life,' he says, 'when I have been so closeted in my own world that I would no longer relate to anybody. And I do love communication. These days more than ever I feel like a very social animal, <a href="vonderhain.com/marlboro ">Online Cigarettes</a> which I wasn't at one time. And I love the freedom of it; I love the joy it brings. And I love the conflicts and the debates which go with being much more a fully active member of society.'

There is something disconcerting about this peroration. It is almost as if you are hearing someone talking about rejoining the human race. It is likely that more biographies have been written about Bowie than any other pop star of his generation. Two more have been published to mark his 50th birthday. He has never collaborated on any of them. 'Then if it were really successful, I could sue myself and make a fortune.'

In lieu of this, Bowie helpfully offers a handy, back-of-the-envelope sketch of his own life. This suggests that there have been two occasions when he has lost himself: the first - 'emotionally and spiritually' - in the Seventies, when he became mired in drug-sodden isolation; the second, 'artistically' in the Eighties, ironically, at the time of his greatest commercial success, when he ran out of creative steam.

The supposition underlying this thumbnail thesis is that Bowie has now found himself again, whoever 'himself' might happen to be. Bowie has always had stories to tell about himself - not always truthful. In the Seventies, for example, he was fond of likening his early childhood in Brixton to the rites of passage experienced by young bloods on the mean and picaresque streets of Harlem; the truth was that by the time he was six his family had moved to the tree-lined, net-curtain twitching streets of suburban Bromley, and that his early teenage years were stultifyingly uneventful. The slightly eerie difference between his left and right eyes - the left pupil is so dilated that it resembles a tie-dye T-shirt - was variously attributed to alien origins, schizophrenia or molecular reconstruction through drugs: the prosaic truth is that he was once jabbed in the eye in a school playground argument over a girl.