Doggett's 'You Never Give Me Your Money" is one of the great books about The Beatles, or more specifically the tangled web of financial affairs the Fabs enmeshed themselves in through bad management and naive idealism. Another great Beatles book (bear with me, I'm getting to Bowie), is Revolution In The Head, by Ian MacDonald, where every Beatles song is analysed in the order of composition.

MacDonald was contracted to write a similar book about Bowie and the 70's, but sadly died before starting the project. So it landed in his friend and colleague's lap, Doggett. And so we have Bowie's 'long seventies' chronicled song by song, from 1969's 'David Bowie' album to 1980's 'Scary Monsters', interspersed with essays on various other aspects of the Dame's artistic pretensions.

To be honest it's not as good as Revolution in The Head. Doggett piles on meaning after meaning to songs that probably can't bear the weight of such analysis. Bowie was making it up as he went along a lot of the time and along the way fashioned some of the great pop/rock/dance music of the 70's. But more by instinct than design I think.

Similarly the essays shoehorn in everything from Nietzsche and Expressionism to Antony Newley in the quest to analyse every last inch of Bowie's intentions. A lot of it ends up as blather.

Doggett's musical analysis is a bit "erm, okay" and it becomes obvious that he rates early 70's Bowie more highly than late 70's Bowie (he positively despises Lodger and has little good to say about Scary Monsters).

All in all a brave effort, but there are probably better books about Bowie out there and Doggett has himself written far better on other subjects. A missed opportunity I feel. ( )

This book is custom made for people like me. I'm a decade too young to have copped David Bowie first time round (still in nappies when Ziggy played his farewell gig at Hammersmith) but discovered the whole back catalog, in one fell swoop, in about 1984 courtesy of K-Tel's The Best Of Bowie cassette, which I still maintain is the best Bowie compilation there is.

Thereafter, painstakingly, I acquired every Long Player that Bowie ever released. I learned every word and every chord. Convention wisdom, and I, will tell you the most fertile period in David Bowie's career was the "RCA" period from Space Oddity in 1969 to Scary Monsters in 1980. And that period is what this new book is mostly about.

Peter Doggett has done us aficionados the service of biographing that period through the lens of every song Bowie wrote and recorded in it. Lyrics and song composition are analysed and contextualised. It's a smart way to ensure Doggett's subject's history is integrated with its creative output: an important job many biographies fail manifestly to do.

That said, it's a fraught one: we all have our own Bowies, and it isn't edifying to encounter a radically different interpretation. Nor is lyrical over-analysis in vogue these days and nor, specifically in Bowie's case, did it ever pay dividends anyway (Not The Nine o'Clock News once lampooned his approach with its "Sing along with David Bowie" feature, whose method was: "rearrange the following words in any order and sing them to any tune in a silly voice and you'll have your very own Bowie classic").

And, lastly, the job was comprehensively done anyway in 1986 in the form of Peter and Leni Gillman's masterly "Alias David Bowie", which gently deconstructed and then rethreaded Bowie's material through the lens of a family history of insanity and alienation.

Doggett's book is less gentle in its deconstruction and (whether he intends it or not) markedly less flattering: the Bowie that emerges from close analysis is a superficial, opportunist whose great talent is that of reinvention. On Doggett's reading there's no great personal insight to be derived from Bowie's material, his value as a social commentator is limited (much is made of a couple of ill-judged remarks hinting at pseudo fascism dating from the Station to Station era) and much of his material is ill-judged or hastily conceived. Young Americans is given a bath, as is conventional, but so to are Hunky Dory, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, and poor old Lodger gets an absolute pasting.

I was mostly persuaded that Bowie's persona had more substance than form, and I suppose that is really the point: in the final analysis Bowie's legacy hasn't been the material itself so much as the doors it opened: the medium - the form, if you like - being the message - and I imagine this book will appeal to diehard fans and even those relative new-comers fancying immersion therapy as a way to get into the World of David Bowie - which is a world like few others out there.

Still, for me Alias David Bowie remains the definitive biography. ( )