David Bowie was a remarkable chanteur, even in his earliest days—the period critics now tend to ignore or deride. For a small coterie of Bowie fans in the early Sixties, his records were fresh, amusing and often moving, and in sharp contrast to the more brutal aspects of the evolving heavy-metal movement. His first album for Decca, "Rubber Band," was a prized possession to be mulled over with a mixture of amusement and fascination.

David was already writing and performing songs that cut across the current conventions. Today some of them may sound twee, with rather heavy-handed orchestral backings, and child-like lyrics.

Setting aside the Bowie legend that now looms so large, one is impressed by his burgeoning skill as a writer, his insistence on experiment….

[One] can hear he put a tremendous amount of effort into crafting songs and arrangements. The wry sense of humour, the jokes about "Uncle Arthur," the man who marries late in life and returns to Mum for the home cooking, or the butch army girl who stars in the brilliant "She's Got Medals," went right over the heads of the mid-Sixties audience, or so it seemed.

But there was a growing band of fans who appreciated the doomy flavour and images of pieces like "There Is A Happy Land," which had some of the prescience of disaster which later emerged in David's more celebrated "1984" period.

But until David was to undergo the enormous excitement and pressures in the Seventies, he remained a child of the Sixties, crying in his beer, perhaps, on such items as "Sell Me A Coat" and indulging in songs like "Little Bombardier" that would have suited a children's pantomime, as would the singularly charming "Come And Buy My Toys," a million miles from Ziggy Stardust.

The child-like motifs cropped up many times: references to sweets and toys, complete with boyish sobs, and careful enunciation of 'difficult' words.

But even at his most tearful, he'd throw away a line that remains hilariously funny, like the sudden drop in pitch for "or were they just a game" in "Little Bombardier."

Despite the melancholia and concern for loneliness that occurs in such vignettes as "Sell Me A Coat", "Silly Boy Blue" or the remarkable "The London Boys", there is a tremendous sense of the absurd.

"She's Got Medals" is almost Lewis Carroll, especially in the diversionary trick which leads one to suppose the heroine has been wiped out in the third chorus by an "enemy bomb."

"The London Boys" is pretty much a documentary of a 16-year old leaving home to explore the perils of life….

[The period of "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars"] was a prolific period, and one of his most simple and yet compelling themes was "Starman", which was almost Judy Garland meets Major Tom.

It's one of my favourite Bowie melody lines, along with the despairing, chanting "Lady Stardust." And for those who thought Bowie, the confessional diarist, couldn't get it on with straight rock and roll came the incredibly driving "Hang On To Yourself", as fast and raunchy as any beat fan could wish….

[Bowie] has been called a sponge, soaking up other people's music and ideas; people point to his influences from Newley to Lou Reed.

Yet through a ten-year career Bowie has been a writer of perception and passion, performer of hypnotic appeal, and a singer who has one of the few truly interpretative qualities in rock, allied to a technique that many of his so-called influences would doubtless envy.