Or how a twenty five year-old one-hit wonder reinvented himself as an extraterrestrial pop star and became the most influential pop star of the 1970s here on planet Earth. The Ziggy thing was certainly a high-stakes enterprise; Bowie coming on like a star and surrounding himself with the trappings of success, bodyguards and chauffeur-driven limos, at a time when he had no real fanbase and almost a decade of failure behind him. After that buildup, if the album had flopped, we would certainly never have heard of David Bowie again. Luckily, he had the talent to back up the ballyhoo.

The subtitle, ‘David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World’, refers to Bowie’s appearance on the BBC TV programme Top of the Pops on 6 July 1972 to promote his new single ‘Starman’. Top of the Pops was watched by a family audience of up to fifteen million people each week. His androgynous and homoerotic performance had a profoundly liberating effect on many of the millions of young people who saw it, and it made Bowie a star. Jones rightly regards it as one of those era-defining and transformative pop moments, like Elvis on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show or the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show. Bowie was a startling flash of colour and strangeness in a monochrome and straight-laced Britain; even if many of us were watching in black and white. As Jones observes, it was one of those extraordinary shared national TV moments which no longer really happen with the decline of appointment television.

There are times when this book feels like a magazine article that has been teased out, not entirely successfully, to book length. There is a lot of rather perfunctory historical context setting and perhaps rather too many autobiographical reminiscences of the author’s adolescence. Still, I don’t want to sound overly negative. Jones writes highly readable prose, and although he doesn’t say anything startlingly original, he makes all the important points about Bowie’s breakthrough moment. ( )