David Bowie died on January 10 2016, two days after his 69th birthday, when he released his latest album Blackstar. This interview with Mick Brown was first published in The Telegraph Magazine on December 14 1996, when Bowie was releasing his album Earthling.

Throughout the Seventies, David Bowie did not have fans. He had acolytes, disciples, obsessives; teens and 20s who would buy every record, watch every move, copy his clothes, his haircuts – the upswept flaming bush of Ziggy Stardust, the soul-boy quiff of Young Americans – his attitude.

Tony, a student friend of mine, idolised David Bowie. Back in the late Sixties, before the world at large even knew who Bowie was, Tony had even met him once or twice. Bowie was living in suburban Beckenham at the time – an aspirant pop singer, dabbling in mime, kabuki, the visual arts – running an arts project, and a couple of times Tony was invited back to Bowie’s home to hang out, smoke a joint or two and talk.

David Bowie: the man who loved books

This was before Bowie recorded The Man Who Sold The World, the album that made his reputation. The Man Who Sold The World was notable for two things: its cover, which showed Bowie lounging on a chaise longue in a fetching silk dress, the first signal of the sexual ambiguity that would become his stock-in-trade; and its lyrics, which dealt explicitly with the thin line between sanity and madness, alluding to the history of schizophrenia in Bowie’s family and suggesting, as the song had it, that Bowie, too, ‘would rather stay here with all the madmen/For I’m quite content they’re all as sane as me’.