This sense of confusion reached its nadir in the mid-Seventies - what Bowie describes as 'my first period of isolation' - when he was living in Los Angeles, leading a shadowy and largely solitary existence, enveloped in a cocoon of cocaine and messianic self-importance. A confusing period, he reflects. 'I felt like I was involved in this insane one- man voyage that was just pulling me along.'

The occult had made its way to the top of his reading list - the album Station to Station, that he recorded in 1976, was, he now says, a step-by-step interpretation of the Cabbala, 'although absolutely no one else realised that at the time, of course' - which led, in turn, to 'Grail mythology' and then to an unhealthy interest in the role of black magic in the rise of Nazism. 'Being seriously involved in the negative,' as he puts it.

This was the period when he was quoted as saying that 'Britain could benefit from a fascist leader', and apparently declaring himself as a prospective candidate. In the end, the clouds of delusion and the clouds of cocaine were all too much. 'I blew my nose one day in California,' he once, memorably, recalled, 'and half my brains came out.'

He decamped to Berlin, where, on one occasion, he was seen in a cafe with his head in a plate crying 'Please help <a href="vonderhain.com/marlboro ">Marlboro Cigarettes Price</a> me'. 'I was in a serious decline, emotionally and socially,' he now says. 'I think I was very much on course to be just another rock casualty - in fact, I'm quite certain I wouldn't have survived the Seventies if I'd carried on doing what I was doing. But I was lucky enough to know somewhere within me that I really was killing myself, and I had to do something drastic to pull myself out of that. I had to stop, which I did.'

There is nothing particularly novel in this. The idea that the path of excess leads to wisdom was, of course, a required text for the Sixties. Reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road at the age of 15 was, Bowie says, an epiphanous moment. ('The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles?')

There is a time in any teenager's life, I suggest, when, consciously or not, they make the choice between staying on the rails and going off them. 'Oh yes, and I chose the second course, definitely. I think I fundamentally opted out of a controlled environment - the workaday kind of life that I found repellent, that I just couldn't take seriously. I don't think I ever felt that life was very long. It was certainly no surprise to me that I got old. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but I was always terribly aware of its finiteness, and I always believed that if we only have this one life, then let's experiment with it.

'We know what can happen - you can get a job, go to work, you can follow that line of perceived security. But I think there's a different kind of security, which is trusting to and living by a code, of almost drifting where the wind takes you. And I spent well into my 20s doing that - just throwing myself wholeheartedly into life at every avenue and seeing what happened. Taking drugs; being totally and completely and irresponsibly promiscuous?' He pauses, chuckling to himself. 'To the best of my abilities. Just getting into situations, and then trying to extricate myself from them as they occurred.'

Sexual experimentation was a part of that. His public 'coming out' to Melody Maker as a bisexual in 1974 suggested either a bracing honesty, or a shrewd understanding of the shifting sexual barriers of the time - it was probably a bit of both. In any event, it was a cause du scandale which would hardly raise an eyebrow today.

His first wife, Angie - the rock wife from hell - an American model whom he married in 1969 and divorced (acrimoniously) seven years later, wrote her own book which gleefully recounted details of Bowie's orgiastic excesses and as much <a href="usasmokingsale.com ">Newport Cigarettes Price</a> sensationalist claptrap as she could muster. She recently appeared on television accusing him of hypocrisy for having eventually declared himself resolutely heterosexual.

The truth is, Bowie suggests, that his bisexuality was <a href="usasmokingsale.com ">Carton Of Newports</a> merely a phase. 'I was virtually trying anything. I really had a hunger to experience everything that life had to offer, from the opium den to whatever. And I think I have done just about everything that it's possible to do - except really dangerous things, like being an explorer. But anything that Western culture has to offer - I've put myself through most of it.'

The conclusion that he eventually came to, he says, was that he is 'not a particularly hedonistic person - I tried my best. I was up there with the best of them. I pushed myself into areas just for experiment and bravado, to see what would happen. But, in the final analysis, it's not really me.'