For more than forty years David Bowie has been hailed as a superstar and cultural icon. In whatever personality he has assumed – Aladdin Sane, Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Rainbow Man, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke – Bowie has astounded fans, critics, fellow musicians, and audiences around the world. He has been a One-Man Revolution in design, costume, stage presentation, album conception and production. His work in theatre (which included The Elephant Man on Broadway) and in film – good enough to earn him a Best Actor Award for his performance of the eponymous hero in The Man Who Fell To Earth – appears as almost a side-line when placed alongside the musical achievement of selling over 140 million albums.

He was born David Jones, in Brixton, south London in 1947. His father was a promotions officer for the children’s charity Barnardo’s, his mother was a cinema usherette. When Bowie was six years old, the family moved a few miles to the more salubrious suburb of Bromley. At school here, David’s voice was considered ‘adequate’ by the choirmaster, and his recorder playing ‘better than average’. His musical soul was born the day his father arrived home with an armful of 45s, and for the first time David heard Fats Domino, Elvis and Little Richard. David was so thunderstruck by Little Richards’ “Tutti Frutti” that he described it as ‘hearing God’. Inspired by Rock ‘n Roll, he mesmerized his Cub group with his own presentations of Chuck Berry and Elvis in action, clear signs of the flamboyance and stage presence that were to come.

In the early 1960s, while a student at Bromley Technical High School, David turned to jazz: “I idolised John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and learned to play the clarinet and tenor saxophone when I was twelve. When I first came to the business it was as a jazz musician”. Bromley Tech played a big part in the creation of David Bowie. He made important friends there, among them George Underwood (who socked David in the eye during a fight over a girl, causing permanent damage but no ill will), and Peter Frampton (whose father, a teacher at Bromley Tech, encouraged his son to pursue a musical career with David that survived into the 1980s).

Bowie’s first band was The Konrads (1962), who metamorphosed into The King Bees a couple of years later. Ambition leapt within Bowie. He wrote a letter to John Bloom, the maverick entrepreneur who briefly made a fortune from marketing Rolls washing machines. In the letter, the teenage Bowie invited Bloom to do for The King Bees “what Brian Epstein has done for The Beatles, and make another million”. Coupled with ambition was an appetite and talent for publicity. Somehow, young David persuaded BBC-TV’s flagship Tonight programme to interview him in his capacity as President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men. Three bands later, the essential Bowie was born when David Jones danced and sang his own songs while touring with Lindsay Kemp’s Pierrot in Turquoise.

The breakthrough came with “Space Oddity” in 1969. The rest is history, covered in detail in Jeff Hudson’s intriguing book, which brilliantly reveals the personality of a man who said he always had “a repulsive need to be something more than human”. Hudson’s analysis covers Bowie’s loves and friendships, his two marriages, his sexual orientation, and the many and extraordinary rumours that have circulated about him. Hudson peppers his text with revealing quotes from Bowie himself: about the mistakes he made, the surprise he experienced at his success, his clothes, the importance of his on-stage appearance, his attitude to the characters he created, and his complex personality – “my sexual nature is irrelevant… I’m an actor, a chameleon… I play roles, fragments of myself”.. And Hudson isn’t afraid to include the dark side of success, though Bowie seems to have dealt with his cocaine habit in a way that many fellow sufferers would envy.

Any writer involved in the production of a lavishly illustrated book has to admit that what attracts would-be customers to the product are the pictures themselves, and Hudson’s David Bowie contains over two hundred brilliant images of Bowie at work and play. This is the glory of the book, a magnificent biography in photographs covering Bowie’s life from earnest schoolboy, through Glam-Rock, Plastic Soul, Hard Rock and all the other Rocks, to artistic guru. Bowie’s life is spread out before us in all its glory: the gigs, studio sessions, album covers, guest appearances, arena triumphs, and awards ceremonies.

Much of the book is a catalogue of the of the costumes and personae that Bowie flaunted – the flaming semi-body stocking and every other outfit in Ziggy’s wardrobe, the androgynous outfits, the sumo trunks, bare-chested as Aladdin Sane for the cover of the Pin Ups album, the neo-Zoot suit for “Hunger City”. The clothes come and go, the audacious glamour always remains. Bowie is one of a very select group of male performers who have successfully worn frocks and gowns for other than comedic effect.

The passing years have done little to harm Bowie. In his senior years, a time when arduous tours give way to tribute concerts, guest appearances and charity gigs, Bowie remains as glamorous as ever. The final image in Hudson’s book is mellow. Both dressed in stylish black, Bowie and his second wife have their arms around each other at the Child Alive charity’s Annual Black Ball. There is a little stubble on Bowie’s chin. The smile is wide. The eyes are bright. But in the wardrobes back home, who knows what phantom cloaks are still hanging there, awaiting another outing…

In collaboration with Endeavour London: www.endeavourlondon.com