"When I was much younger I had a really confused and embarrassed relationship to art. I liked something of everything. "Now I admire the German expressionists. They still form the basis for my figurative work. At the other end of the spectrum I've always been in awe of artists such as Duchamp, Picabia and Nauman and the way they widened the language with their systems of triggers and doors."

    Bowie has great ambitions for his art Web site. "We will create an E-zine with interviews with artists and reviews of exhibitions," he says. Newsletters, downloadable freebies, time-eaters like the interactive art game I mentioned and members-only events.

    "In April we will make available work by both little-known and famous artists. It is definitely an outlet for those that work in prints or multi-exampled pieces of sculpture.

    Bowie sees the power and potential of the net as unlimited. "It is something I could quite easily lose myself in," he has said, "That's the trouble - it's so bloody addictive."

The Bowie Web sites are, for art, www.bowieart.com and for general information, www.davidbowie.com.

SURFING WITH BOWIE

"I BOUGHT my first computer in 1993. Now I have heavy artillery in my office for doing the artwork update or hour-eating jobs. On the road, we only have Powerbook 540c machines, and for scrolling and viewing I just use a 17in monitor with 33.6k connection so that I'm seeing what most of the world sees.

    "I don't spend much time on the relaxation side of the Internet. I'll cruise through the chatlines for fun, but mostly I stick with sites that relate to what the band and I are doing. I still have a major input as to what goes on my homepage and on bowieart.com

    "On tour, we keep updated daily on what our audience think of the show, new songs, different running orders or whatever. We get a good understanding of what people are expecting from us. I really like fray.com which is a nice, quite out-there online e-zine. Artresources.com is light on artwork but good on information, and Artnetweb.com/abstraction/index.html has hosted the Guggenheim's Abstraction in the 20th Century exhibit from early in 1997. And there's entropy8.com, an award-winner for design and originality. "I'm not big on games but Ultima Onsite is good.

    Mostly, though, I still use programs that allow me to be an artist."

    The artist whom many feared was becoming one of his own characters - a hard-up but noble dosser - has just finished a portrait of rock superstar David Bowie and will soon paint another rock legend - Madonna - who will pose for him after his next Los Angeles show in the summer.

    Bowie agreed to a sitting after buying the controversial rape painting Croatian and Muslim, inspired by Howson's nightmare experiences as the Imperial War Museum's official war artist in Bosnia in 1993.

    He returned to Britain suffering from exhaustion and dysentery, haunted by his personal involvement in the horrors of war around Vitez, to produce what many consider to be some of his best work but to the detriment of his own psychological health.

    His marriage suffered and for the past four and a half years he has lived in self-imposed exile in London.

    Howson admits he does not like thinking about money, although his paintings routinely sell for thousands. He confesses that he was recently in dire financial straits having run up an overdraft of around 150,000 pounds.

    With major canvases selling at more than £30,000, like his oil painting The Glorious Game unveiled last week in the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Glasgow, Howson can always depend on being able to paint his way out of trouble.

    He is also in the frame for a £100,000 commission from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery to paint Donald Dewar and other members of the cabinet.

    Howson has agreed with David Bowie that there will be no pre-publicity of the portrait before its unveiling. But Howson's Scottish agent Roger Billcliffe recently sold a pastel and ink study of the portrait to an Edinburgh man, who wishes to keep the price and his identity anonymous.

    "Bowie being Bowie, he wanted it all to be completely hush-hush," said Howson.

    "We have had about six sittings together and each of them was a bit cloak and dagger. One time he turned up early in the morning at the studio but was recognised by some schoolkids who saw him getting out of a car. Before long there were hundreds of kids surrounding the place.

    "I am trying to organise the Madonna thing at present. I hear she is wanting painting lessons so that could be part of the package. She said recently I was her favourite artist and that gave me a big buzz."

    Bowie will be invited back into the studio for one last sitting to finish the portrait.

    The multi-millionaire, famous for painting his own face during his Aladdin Sane period in the early Seventies, may add the work to his own collection which has veered recently from the figurative to more surreal works by another big contemporary name, Damien Hirst.

    Oi, Bowie! No! That was one's first reaction to the rumour sweeping the Hanover Grand on Monday that David Bowie would follow his show with a drum & bass set. Though he conducted some brave experiments with the genre on his current album, Earthling, there was something undignified about the idea of him trying to recreate adrenalised beats in front of a bemused crowd of people his own age.

    But unlike other rocksters of his era, at least he's still interested in the world outside his Swiss chalet. His recent back-catalogue deal with EMI, and flotation of himself on the stock market may potentially make him one of rock's richest stars, but the creative fire is still burning, virtually undimmed by age.

    Reaching his half-century in January triggered a flurry of work that resulted in Earthling and, now, a mini-tour of places like the 720-capacity Hanover Grand. He has even adopted Prince's custom of surprise after-show sets - though, fortunately, not his habit of jamming till dawn.

    That Dame David deigned to set foot in a small club at all was something. Your average superstar often bemoans the hangarous arenas he's forced to perform in, but Bowie put his money where his mouth is. He was literally within spitting distance - not that anyone would have dared sully his red polo-neck and tracksuit bottoms. He was so close you could see the perspiration bedewing his still spectacular bone structure. To get a proper look, though, you had to elbow your way past forty-and fifty-something men more ample-bellied than the maestro would have had time for in his androgynous youth.

    So was it worth the £100 touts were extorting? (Most of the tickets had gone to fan club members via the Internet, leaving few for the public). Yes, mostly. Once you'd recovered from the disappointment of realising that the set was to be predominantly based on Earthling, it became quite a little party.

    On the Sound & Vision tour a few years ago, the Davester vowed never to play his old hits again, which meant no Suffragette City or Young Americans.

    Why the denial of his past? But he hurled himself into the new songs with such vehemence that just his convulsed features were worth the price of admission. And, as a sop to fans like the youngish woman whose flailing limbs continually banged into her tightly-packed neighbours, he threw in one or two oldies.

    In fact, he started with one - Quicksand, from Hunky Dory. But he hurried through it, anxious to get to Earthling tracks like Battle For Britain and Little Wonder. As enjoyable as many new ones were, though, few of them cut much ice with the crowd. Bowie couldn't resist toying with them, announcing 'Here's one from way, way back' then silencing the ecstatic whoops with the opening chords of Little Wonder.

    Sir, you are a caution.

    His performance was never less than heartfelt - but so, regrettably, was that of guitarist Reeves Gabrels. This survivor of the Dame's benighted heavy metal band, Tin Machine, saw every number as a chance to wring power-drill noises from his instrument. Mind, he could have been under orders from the boss to prove Dave is 'down' with young folks (though any present were probably impatiently awaiting drum & bass celebs, like Goldie, rumoured to be turning up for the second set).

    Bowie's energy saved the day, turning Earthling's tune deficits and reliance on souped-up drum loops into something highly enjoyable. The man has the charisma of a hogshead of Liams and Jarvises, and once ensnared you simply watched, hooked.

    But there is a limit. At the end he confirmed that his 'little drum & bass set' would follow the interval - and the audience voted with its feet. Apparently, the notion of Bowie tackling crackhead breakbeats was just too painful.

    When the dust cleared the place was substantially emptier, but at least now he knows who his true fans are. Those who left missed something fearfully loud, sweaty and hypnotic. Bowie, honking away on his saxophone, looked more like one of his new jungle buddies than like David Bowie Plc. Which is the way it should be.

    MOUNTAIN VIEW - Pairing Nine Inch Nails with David Bowie certainly makes commercial, conceptual sense. The two acts that filled the Shoreline Amphitheatre Saturday night with theatrical angst, two generations of pop fans and a whole lot of smoke represent separate, but increasingly overlapping schools of merging the noise of rock with the mind of art.

    Trent Reznor - the singer and multi-instrumentalist behind Nine Inch Nails - puts the rage first and then considers the overall package. Mixing the guitar attack of punk and heavy metal and the synthesizer experimentation of left-field dance music, Reznor throws a musical tantrum that approaches greatness when his melodies are as strong as his bluster. Just as Kurt Cobain made something personal out of Grunge, Reznor individualizes the inhuman drone of industrial rock with multiplatinum results.

    After a quarter century of hit-making, Bowie remains committed to an approach to rock that favors intellect over passion. He's an ideas' man who has expanded the possibilities of how popular music could present itself. His latest album, "Outside," is his first serious - perhaps too serious - bid to recapture the attention of pop tastemakers. By connecting with former collaborator Brian Eno, Bowie affirms his avant-garde credentials as he courts the alternative crowd.

    The major difference between the two is that Reznor attracts an almost exclusively young audience while Bowie's following is an ever-dwindling mass of adults who discovered him ages ago. Reznor needs to score with Bowie's era of fans to expand his cultural impact, while Bowie faces an even greater pressure to connect with Nine Inch Nails fans. His current single, "The Heart's Filthy Lesson," has actually been remixed by Reznor and it's that version you're most likely to hear on the radio.

    The evening was designed to make the most out of the pairing and blur the differences between the two entertainers. After a brief delayed set by the ho-hum NIN wannabes in Prick, Nine Inch Nails played for about an hour, then joined up with Bowie for several songs. Bowie's musicians gradually filled the stage as the NIN crew left without ceremony. The singer picked up where Reznor left off until nearly 11 p.m., when he suddenly exited without warning. There was no encore by any act.

    On their own, both Bowie and Reznor alternated between flashes of brilliance and predictable excess.

    Reznor - whom most of the crowd apparently came to see - was very much his usual bratty self. He stalked the stage, threw around his mike stand, tackled his musicians, knocked over the equipment and pounded on his instruments. Because he's done this routine since the late '80s, it's gotten kind of old. Rather that appearing passionate and spontaneous, Reznor now goes through the destructive motions with detachment, calculation. His roadies scurry to clean up his mess and the antics detract from the very real frustration embodied by his music.

    Bowie devoted much of his set to "Outside," a pretentious and nearly tuneless concept album devoted to the semi-futuristic theme of "art-murders." He was joined by many of the musicians on that album (minus Eno of course), who breathed some fire into the cold studio arrangements. But the unfamiliarity of the material mixed with its melodic limitations worked against him. Only when Bowie reached back to reinvent some of his less obvious older songs - particularly "Look Back in Anger," "Andy Warhol" and "Under Pressure" - did his solo set click.

    The real excitement came midway when NIN, Bowie and his band all teamed up. Reznor and Bowie traded lines on each others songs while the professionalism of Bowie's seasoned musicians complimented the intensity of Reznor's band. The choice of Bowie's "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)" was pure genius: The veteran crooner warbled away at the finish while Reznor screamed "No! No! No!" and punched his keyboard. Their joint rendition of NIN's major MTV hit "Hurt" was just as intense. It was oddly moving to see these icons of alienation uniting together, riding each other's stylistic coat-tails. Their inspired union justified the indulgence of the rest.

    On the morning of the big day one local newspaper had run a speculative story - and well before four o'clock in the afternoon, when the service was to begin, hundreds of Florentines lined the streets of the historic city.

    But even if the news had not been leaked, the commotion caused by police sirens and flashing lights would have alerted the population to the fact that something important was up. With the typical Italian flair for creating drama and excitement, a helicopter had been circling the Saint James Episcopal Church in the morning. And when the bride and groom travelled, separately, to the church, they were escorted by police cars and motorcycles speeding through red lights and causing traffic jams in the city.

    Florence, which he visits at every opportunity just to admire its art works and architecture, is one of David's very favourite places. And the couple, intent on keeping the occasion simple and private, decided a few months ago that this would be the perfect spot for their special day. But they gave no clues, and families and guests were sworn to secrecy.

    Iman had been in Florence for a while, but David didn't arrive in Italy until mid-day Friday - the day before the wedding. He had spent the previous weekend in Mustique with his son Joe - from his earlier marriage to Angie Bowie - who was celebrating his 21st birthday.

    Upholding tradition the couple spent Friday night in separate bedrooms. As well as most of their guests, they were staying at the luxurious Villa Massa hotel. Originally the 17th-century mansion of a noble family, the hotel is situated in the Tuscan hills overlooking the Arno river and is about ten miles from the Saint James church where the ceremony took place.

    Upholding tradition, the couple spent Friday night in separate bedrooms. As well as most of their guests, they were staying at the luxurious Villa Massa hotel. Originally the 17th-century mansion of a noble family, the hotel is situated in the Tuscan hills overlooking the Arno river and is about ten miles from the Saint James church where the ceremony took place.

    Saturday was the day David and Iman had been dreaming of ever since he proposed to her with a song during a boat ride on the Seine last October. It was grey and rainy, but in true storybook fashion, the sky began to clear as the magic hour approached - and when they emerged from the church after their wedding, the sun was shining brightly.

    David arrived at the church an hour early to supervise the candle and flower arrangements with the six ushers - while Iman, punctually appeared five minutes before the ceremony was due to start.

    What was happening inside the Saint James church and what was happening outside was a different as night and day.

    Up to 1,000 fans had congregated at the front of the building to see the arrival of the bride and groom and many of them pushed against the gates trying to get in.

    Their close friend Yoko Ono, one of the 68 guests, got a taste of Italian enthusiasm when she was nearly swept away by the crowds as she got off the bus that was used as transport between the hotel and the church.

    With the mass of people outside jostling for a better view and the carabinieri (Italian policemen) and security guards pushing to keep them at bay, the commotion threatened to disrupt the tranquility that Iman and David so strongly desired. At one point a group did manage to open the gate, but they were successfully held back by the guards.

    But although at some moments - particularly as the newlyweds were about to sign the register - the racket outside could be clearly heard indoors, the scene inside was peaceful - and immensely moving.

    Only the couple's closest friends and family had been invited. David's mother, Margaret Jones, was there, as well as the singer's son Joe who acted as best man. Both of Iman's parents - Marion, who wore a magnificent traditional African costume, and Mohamed Abdulmajid - were present, together with her brothers Elias and Feisal, although, sadly, her sister Nadia was not able to make it because her visa was not ready in time.

    As well as Yoko Ono, guests included Brian Eno and his wife Anthea, Thierry Mugler who designed David's suit, Eric Idle of Monty Python and his wife Tanya. Bono, of U2, missed his flight from Dublin and therefore the service, although he arrived in time for the photo line-up that preceded the reception.

    This was not a celebrity event - these were the only famous faces in the pews. Several of the guests were childhood friends, such as Geoff McCormack, who has known David since they were seven years old, and who read Psalm 121 during the service. David's cousin Kristina Amadeus read from Corinthians.

    Iman's maid of honour was her best friend Bethann Hardison, also a model like the exquisite Somalian-born bride. The chief usher was David's publicist Alan Edwards.

    The intimate tone that pervaded the occasion, once removed from the excitement of the fans outside, was set by a small group of Italian musicians who played classical music as the guests filed in.

    The first breathtaking moment came when Iman was led down the aisle by her father, former Ambassador Mohamed Abdulmajid. She looked spectacular in an oyster dress with a long train designed by Herve Leger and with her hair arranged by Teddy Antolin. Teddy was a very special guest - in a way responsible for what was happening that day, because it was he who introduced David and Iman at a dinner party two years ago.

    It was with a song that David proposed to Iman - a rendition of Doris Day's April In Paris. And he again made a musical tribute to his great love on this very special day - in an even more personal manner: David himself composed the music for the event - an atmospheric composition, soothingly beautiful. The strains of a saxophone alternated with exquisite solos and keyboards creating a mesmerising effect on all.

    Everyone who has known David and Iman has remarked on how deeply they are in love. And although the couple had already celebrated a registry wedding in Lausanne on April 24, they were so emotionally overwhelmed during this tender, traditional service in Florence that at one point David was on the verge of tears and Iman looked as if she might faint.

    After the 50-minute service the entire congregation returned to the Villa Massa hotel and David and Iman retired to their room - now both together - to rest and change for the reception that evening.

    Their drive back to the hotel, in a dark blue Mercedes Benz, had been like their arrival at the church - with a police escort and speeding throughout the traffic lights in a flurry of sirens as crowds of onlookers clapped, waved and called out their names, and bemused tourists wondered what was going on.

    In the evening the newlyweds appeared downstairs for a picture session for their photo albums, which took place in one of the halls in the Villa Massima, and at 8.30 they adjourned next door for the formal dinner. There, David introduced Joe as his "handsome son", and in a short speech, Joe stood up to say, "I wish David and Iman as much happiness as I'm sure all their friends out there do." Then the guests - the same ones who had attended the service - got on with their wining and dining.

    The guests were seated at eight tables. David's mother Margaret, who sat at the groom's table was clearly delighted at her son's happiness. During the dinner she revealed that her favourite singer - after her son! - was Nat King Cole, and also that she was a fan of U2. She had earlier insisted on having her photograph taken with Bono!

    Dinner was followed by a splendid fireworks display over the Arno which was viewed from the hotel's terrace, and the night ended with a disco.

    David and Iman left the party at around 1am. The next day, Sunday, they drove off to Rome from where they flew off on their honeymoon - a full month at an exotic, secret destination in the Far East.

David: "I never really 'met' Iman. I saw her about three or four times at different social functions. Once was in the theatre when we leaned over several people and shook hands. I then saw her briefly at a gig in Los Angeles, and so on. Both of us had just, in the last few months, ended previous relationships. For my part, I felt that was it, for me - I didn't want, need or desire any more permanent relationships. Then, by chance, a mutual friend invited us both for a dinner on October 14, 1990 - so that's when we actually met and talked."

Iman: "I was a big fan of David's ever since I moved from Africa to New York. I was always sent VIP tickets to see his shows and invited to go backstage to meet the rock god and go partying. Being a big fan, I always saw the shows, but never went backstage to meet him or go to parties.

    "I always played hard to get and that's how I made him fall in love with me!"

What was your first impression of Iman, David?

    "I guess what everyone's is - that she's terribly elegant, very dignified and has a great sense of self. I mean that she's her own person and not swayed by other's opinions.

    "For about a week or two, I was a bit cautious because I have a silly sense of humour and I was scared it might put her off me. But when she started laughing at some of my antics, I realised she was a real fun-loving person. And I think humour has become one of our strongest bonds.

    "Now one of the things we try do to nurture our relationship is, on every 14th - the date we met - we always have an anniversary dinner. If we're not together, we send flowers to each other, or a note or card. It's just another building block in our relationship to show it is alive and well and a real thing. It is terribly important to help a relationship along."

Why did you choose to get married in Italy?

David: "We both have very strong ties with Italy. I have always been a huge fan of Italian art, especially of the Renaissance period. And there is a quality of life here that you rarely find in another country - life itself, how you spend every second of your time, is more important than your career. And because of the really hectic careers we both have, this is a very important change for us."

Iman: "Italy and Italians are fun. And Italian was my first foreign language. I speak Italian better than English - Somalia was an Italian colony, and I was taught the language by Italians.

    "I have done a lot of modelling in Italy and often visited the country, and one of my favourite places was Florence. And it was in Florence that David and I spent our first summer holiday together. We had a wonderful time. For beauty, art and the people - and for good capucchino - Florence is really it."

How was that first holiday?

David: "We took a six-week boat trip up and down the Italian coast. Under those circumstances, in such a claustrophobic situation as being on a boat, you really get to know somebody. By the the end of those six weeks, you are either passionately in love or you can't stand the sight of each other. But for us, it just worked out.

    "We fell more and more in love as the trip went along, and we ended up in Florence and said this is our own little Shangri-La - the place we adore more than anywhere else we have been so far."

Has the fact that both you and Iman are of different religions created any problems with the wedding?

David: "No problems. I'm not a religious person - I'm a spiritual person. God plays a very important part in my life - I look to him a lot and He is the cornerstone of my existence - even more as I get older. But it is a one-to-one relationship with God. I believe man develops a relationship with his own God. I tend to judge a man or a woman by their actions - the way they are with me and the way they are with their friends."

Iman: "We don't have any problems. I don't think there is anything that can come between my and David's unity. Getting married did not convert me from a Muslim into a Christian. I am not a religious person - but I do come from a religious family and the most important thing to me is that I have their blessing. And I have their total blessing. What matters to them is that we are happy and have faith in each other and in God."

David what made you compose the music for the ceremony?

    "We both loathed Here Comes The Bride, which is one of the least likable bits of music that I have ever heard in my life. So for the entrance of the bride we choose a tranquil piece of music called Evening Gathering, by a Bulgarian group.

    "And I wanted it to be a personalised service, so Iman allowed me to take the lead and write music for the rest of the service - which I did. So I wrote several pieces of instrumental music that I felt were in keeping with the kind of service we wanted."

Who designed your dress, Iman?

    "The French designer Herve Leger. I met him years ago when he was starting out and working for other designers. Then I met him again when he began working on his own two years ago, and I've been very impressed with his clothes. I wanted something very simple, elegant, no frills, no fashion, no gimmicks. Something that would outlast anything."

Who designed your suit, David?

    "I asked my good friend Thierry Mugler, who has been designing my suits for a good few years now, to do a variation on traditional tails. He has done a delightful job. I think it looks quite dashing. I know Mugler likes it, but Mugler likes everything he designs and nine times out of ten, so do I."

Which friends were at the wedding? Surprisingly, there weren't too many famous faces at your wedding.

David: "We just went through the celebrity book of LA and picked out the most famous people we had never met and sent them all off to Mustique! Seriously, the people who actually attended nobody would ever have heard of, because they are literally our friends. Both Iman and I, believe it or not, have very few friends who are actually in our professions. There are the odd exceptions - Thierry came, and Herve, and on my side Yoko, Bono and Brian Eno. But the rest have been people from our past who have meant a lot to us. And, of course, our immediate family."

You went through a civil ceremony in April, so in fact you already were married when you had your church wedding.

David: "We did all the bureaucracy and all the paper signing but we didn't really feel married. I know the forms were signed, but at the back of our minds our real marriage, sanctified by God, had to happen in a church in Florence. The civil wedding was just Iman and myself and two witnesses."

Both your families were present here in Florence.

David: "They had never met before and it was nice to see they got on with each other. It was lovely to have everyone there. It was a real family thing."

Iman: "When I called my parents to tell them I was getting married and the wedding was going to be in Florence, they said there was no way they were going to miss it.

    "Because I've lived away from Somalia so long, I thought it was just going to be my mother and father who came. But it was also my two brothers, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin...

    "So it was a big African family gathering. And as you know, everyone in the Western world wears tuxes and subdued short dresses for church weddings. But with them being from Somalia, there was ceremonial color, African magenta red. I was happy to see the juxtaposition of cultures.

    "And it was fun because my parents speak Italian very well. My father told me he went to school in Florence. So there you go - Florence again."

David: "I was absolutely privileged and honoured to have my son Joe ask if he could be my best man, which I think was probably a first. He was absolutely terrific and he didn't lose any of the rings!"

David, where will you live now that you are married?

    "I promised that after we got married I would provide Iman with a fine home. Several, actually. The main house, what we really consider our main home, is a lovely chateau in Switzerland. We also have a delightfully whimsy exotic Indonesian-style house in the Caribbean and, I guess you could call it more of a work apartment, in Los Angeles, which we occasionally use. But I think primarily we will be living within each other's affections."

How will marriage affect your careers?

    "Having now been with each other close on two years, I can't see any great difference in the future. We have decided, basically, that if one of us is working, then the one who isn't will join the other. And if we are both working at the same time, then we will both work through it.

    "It is a very difficult situation for most couples, and I don't think it will be any less difficult for us. The difficulty is in being apart - only because we love being with each other so much. But we seem to make up for that by being on the phone to each other at least ten times a day. I think our greatest expense in life is phone calls. And of course Iman's jewellery, which goes without saying! And my clothes.

    "Iman has taught me how to dress very sophisticatedly, in a very simple fashion, and terribly expensively, which is a whole new approach to fashion for me. I used to go gawdy and cheap, so this is quite a turn-around for me!"

What about children?

Iman: "It has been proven that parenthood and career can be done, but one of the parents always makes sacrifices because the child cannot just be left with a nanny. I think the priorities change because I will never be able to say I will leave my career to be David Bowie's wife - because this is not a career, it is a full time job. But for my own fulfilment, as a person and for my own interest as a human being, I don't want to feel that I am not independent any more just because I have children. But priorities do change. When I do have my children hopefully, God willing, they will be the priorities. It is as simple as that."

David: "I think we have both made different kinds of commitments in terms of career. For me it is relatively easy to continue my work which, as a writer, can be done almost anywhere. So, say Iman was filming in Africa, it causes me no problem to be able to go over there and continue writing and still be with her. I don't like touring for more than a maximum of four months a year. The days of touring for ten to 12 months are over and, stamina wise, I don't think I could do that any more. Interest-wise, I have never been enamoured with tours."

Where are you going for your honeymoon?

David: "We want to go to somewhere we both have a heavy hankering for. The Far East. We are going to take an extensive honeymoon, and we are going to explore many wonderful lands while we are out there. And bring back lots of fabulous clothes - at least I will!

    "I've never met a woman who shops as little as Iman does. She can be in and out of a shop in three minutes. It's rather refreshing actually."

You have both been married before - how did that experience influence you?

David: "For my part I got married when I was very young. It was an unfortunate marriage and it didn't work out even remotely. The most glorious thing that came out of my last marriage was my wonderful son Joe whom I love dearly. And, fortunately, all through my indiscretions, obsessions, addictions and whatever else went wrong in my life, we have been able to form a mutual tie.

    "As he gets older - he has just become 21 - our relationship grows daily. We are father and son in the best and nicest possible way. I don't want to slip into the cliché of saying that we are friends. We are father and son and that's how it should be and it works well.

    "As for marriage, I don't think I ever really had what we could call a proper marriage. This for me is so exciting and so invigorating. I have such great expectations of our future together. I have never been so happy."

Iman: "I didn't expect to be married again because I didn't want to. I have a daughter Zuleika, who is 13 years old, and I love her very, very dearly. I leave the past to the past. I had a very happy marriage while it lasted.

    "This relationship with David is taking me totally by surprise, a wonderful surprise. I have found my soulmate in him, my friend. In him I have found my lover, my companion. The person I was looking for - my other half. I hope everyone in this world finds their other half as I did mine."

I met him once before, four years ago, in LA, crazed sun blazing. So I've come, personally, to associate the David Bowie I interview, impersonally - as opposed to what David Bowie signifies to me - with rude health, cars, sumptuous hotel lobbies, pools, Sunset Boulevard. It feels great but it doesn't feel apposite. I tell him this, after a fashion.

    David Bowie lights a cigarette, which is something he does well and often, making love with his ego, always crashing in the same car. The face that launched two-decades-and-counting of imitators cracks, in its own time, into a famous English grin. "I have moved since then," he says. "I haven't just sat here since you left."

    White Duke, he speak the truth. Music, films, paintings and ideas in general are flying out of 49-year old David Bowie at an alarming, charming, disarming rate. I try really hard not to use the phrase 'renaissance man', and then I use it.

    "God I'm scared of that word! Let's just say I'm taking the bull by the horns and expressing myself - by any means necessary. I can do it, so I'm gonna flaunt it. I'm really not very self-judgmental anymore. I feel, psychologically, in a safe place. It's publish and be damned, it really is."

    The king, the very king, of artifice and appropriation, David Bowie was Ziggy, then Aladdin, then a better soul singer than any real one, then kind of German and frosty and depressed and coked-out, then a cheery skippy Live Aid person, and then fell, finally, out of vogue. Then he did the Tin Machine thing at precisely the wrong time in precisely the wrong suits. While all this was going on he was in films ranging from sublime (The Man Who Fell To Earth) to The Linguini Incident. Now he's releasing an album, Outside, which is, naturally, nothing like his last (the ambient The Buddha Of Suburbia), or even the one before that (the sensible poppy, Black Tie White Noise). While Suede have come and - some might say - gone, Bowie's undertaken yet another wild mutation. Outside is provocative, creepy, nasty, irritating, and, eventually, addictive. The first in a planned series of collaborations with Brian Eno, it documents, albeit abstractly, the fictional diaries of 'art detective' Nathan Adler. Bowie's also working with Nine Inch Nails soon, and if he will design wallpaper for Laura Ashley we sure as hell can't stop him.

    Early 1996 will see Build A Fort, Set It On Fire, a film by painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel about the late African-American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, in which Bowie plays Pop Art guru Andy Warhol. I'm crediting you with intelligence to keep up here. Also this year Bowie exhibited his own work (watercolours, sculptures, computer-generated prints) at the Kate Chertavian Gallery in Cork Street. I went to look at it one lunchtime with the girl who played the alien in the Loving The Alien video. A mad woman with teary eyes started shrieking at us for no reason whatsoever that we'd be sorry, very sorry, when David came along to sweep her away and make everything alright. We ran off, confused, but the mad woman chased us down the street. The best thing in the show was a picture of a star, called Star.

    "I'm not content," Bowie said in 1972, "to be a rock 'n' roll star all my life." In 1995 he is almost absurdly energetic. You have to interrupt him to get a word in edgeways. We talk about art, cinema, literature, music, computers, South Africa, ageing, religion, and Boys From The Blackstuff. He's very keen to discuss his friendships with Damien Hirst and Julian Schnabel, less keen to mull over the past. Without breaking sweat, and even while wearing a peculiar snakeskin shirt, he'll say things like: "When you've developed an art form that questions its own existence you're left only with philosophy. Heh heh heh! Or so my son tells me!"

    You have healthy debates with him (Joe, formerly Zowie, now 23 and a philosophy graduate) on such topics?

    "Oh boy, you try and stop us. We can shoot the breeze; we can talk so much crap all night long. But that's one of the joys of parenthood, I've found."

    Joe (The Lion) has influenced his groovy dad "in an obtuse fashion, I think. "Watching him" getting into Cream and Dylan and Hendrix", Bowie Senior realised there was no eighties music of interest. "Apart from maybe the beginnings of rap, it was all rubbish. Paula Abdul had no bearing on his life. He'd had to go back to find something with musical depth to it. It kind of gives validity to what Lennon used to say - what were his exact words?" Bowie shifts into faultless Scouse accent. "Say what you wanna say, make it rhyme, and put a backbeat to it".

    As regards your new album then, one out of three ain't bad.

    Bowie laughs uproariously. "Accessibility is not its keynote!" I am somewhat relieved.

    "Pose the same question NOW to the younger generation and they I'll say YES, there's a lot of music we'll take with us. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, NIN, Smashing Pumpkins.

    "And in Britain, Tricky is wonderful, PJ Harvey is extraordinary. The context and atmosphere of it all is tremendous. I think rock music's got strong legs at the moment. It's really bloody exciting."

    Here is what I think David Bowie's new album is about: WHAT IS ART? To someone like Bowie, or rather to someone who is Bowie, you can actually say that, say those three words with a question mark at the end, without being laughed at. He loves a lot of things but most of all he loves being taken seriously. Nobody expends this much effort on creativity, not when they've already scored as many been-there-done-that points as he has, without some unquenchable desire for acclaim, to defeat mortality.

    How is your ego these days?

    "Well, you know, I have enough vanity to be convinced that what comes out of one of my cut-up lyrics is only as good as the stuff that was put in in the beginning."

    And so when you say WHAT IS ART? to Bowie, plain as that, he'll say, "It's either art or murder, ha ha! The strength in MY work is when there's as much room for multi-interpretation as possible. I've always had an orientation toward combining contradictory information. And just seeing what happens. Messing about with structures, taking them apart. Dismantling toys and putting the wrong bits back together. I would've been great in Japan making those Godzilla-type things that become tanks, I'm sure. I treat music in the same way; what happens if you put that note with that word, what effect do you get? Because of that, it has its own informational output, that's sometimes more, sometimes less than the two components. That's one of the fascinations of writing for me."

    I ask if he seeks to confuse as much as to enlighten, and am given possibly the longest and most articulate answer in 'rock interview' history.

    "I don't think so. I think that we as a culture embrace confusion. We're happy to recombine information, we take event horizons incredibly fast. The generations - and I CAN use that plurally now - underneath me have an ability to scan information much quicker than my lot, and don't necessarily look for the depth that maybe we would. They take what they need for their survival, and their means to adapt to this new society.

    "It IS the inheritance of the Sixties, not only of what happened with the breakdown of the American Dream and the conflicts of that period, and the emerging pluralistic attitude towards society, but also of a spiritual loss. A realisation that absolutes weren't the law, weren't the thing that one could abide by. There's no absolute religion, no absolute political system, no absolute art form, no absolute this no absolute that. Things weren't black and white like we'd always been told (especially during the great stiff Fifties).

    "There are so many contradictions and conflicts that when you accept them for what they are, when you accept that this IS a manifestation of the chaos theory that's been put forward, that it really is a deconstructed society, then contradiction almost ceases to exist. Every piece of information is equally as unimportant as the next."

    Bowie glances at the TV for a second and I have to stop myself thinking I'm Nicolas Roeg.

    "An OJ Simpson trial, one week's buzzword is 'the gloves didn't fit', those few words were the news on it - and, say, something from a Middle East crisis, it could be the 'mother of all wars' - those two pieces have EQUAL WEIGHT. There seems to be no disparity between them, it's all relevant and all irrelevant. When you get the lack of stress upon what's important and what isn't, the moral high ground seems to disappear as well. You're left with this incredibly complex network of fragments that is our existence.

    "Rather than running away from it, I think the younger generation is learning to adapt to it. I'm very wary of calling them out for being - and this is so often thrown at them - indifferent or ignorant or lazy or all that. That's bullshit, I think that actually they're in their own nurturing stage. It's not going to get any more clarified; it can only get more impetuously complex. There's no point in pretending: well, if we wait long enough everything will return to what it used to be and it'll all be saner again and we'll understand everything and it'll be obvious what's wrong and what's right. It's NOT gonna be like that."

    Sorry what was the question?

    "So. The album deals with all that to an extent. That kind of... surfing on chaos."

    Bowie gets a coffee and another Marlboro Light going, sprawls across his armchair like a confident woman or a happy cat. Some of his prints are on the wall. We're at the Chateau Marmont, where every ten minutes someone tells you "this is where John Belushi died." Keanu Reeves was in the lobby earlier. Later, Bowie will tell me something funny about actors, but right now the sometime editor of Modern Painters, who last year interviewed Balthus, is on paintings...

    "...on the other hand, I can revel in a Romantic or Renaissance piece. I can just fall away into a sort of euphoria over a beautiful-painted landscape or a wonderfully-executed sculpture. I have needs for all those things. I don't think one thing REPLACES the other. Consider the more positive aspects of post-modernism. I hope we get bored with the ironic stance it continually takes, because one of the better things about it is that it seems so willing to embrace ALL styles and attitudes..."

    Do you feel like an elder statesman of sorts? Your hilarious press release says portentously: 'It is only now, when he has reached his own mid-life, that Bowie can make music encompassing the point of young, middle-aged, and old.'

    He creases up, for the only time today, shaking his head, speechless.

    Do you feel you've acquired significant wisdom?

    "The old sage, har har har! Ah but you see I was playing 130 at 38, or something, in The Hunger. It comes easily to me now!

    "I am now old enough - hurray! - to have a body of work, which is great. It means that I can dip in and pull out symbols and atmospheres and even processes and techniques that I've utilise before, and re-apply them in new situations. It's the basic maxim that if you take something out of one context and put it in another, it takes on a whole different set of meanings.

    "So with Outside, placing the eerie environment of Diamond Dogs city now in the Nineties gives it an entirely different spin. It was important for this town, this locale, to have a populous, a number of characters. I tried to diversify these really eccentric types as much as possible. Overall, a long-term ambition is to make it a series of albums extending to 1999 - to try to capture, using this device, what the last five years of this millennium feel like. It's a diary within a diary. The narrative and the stories are not the content - the content is the spaces in between the linear bits. The queasy, strange, textures."

    Bowie wants to stage all this as a piece of "epic theatre", hopefully with Einstein on the Beach director Robert Wilson, and with "a definite sensibility shift from when you went into the theatre. It'd probably be about five hours long, so you'd have to bring sandwiches".

    The work sounds paranoid and ominous, whereas you personally, or as personally as I'm ever going to get to know you, seem exuberant...

    "Oh, I've got the fondest hopes for the fin de siècle. I see it as a symbolic sacrificial rite. I see it as a deviance, a pagan wish to appease gods, so we can move on. There's a real spiritual starvation out there being filled by these mutations of what are barely-remembered rites and rituals. To take the place of the void left by a non-authoritative church. We have this panic button telling us it's gonna be a colossal madness at the end of this century. And it WON'T be. The biggest problem we'll have will be what to call it. Twenty-O-O? Twenty-O-Zero? Two Thousand? Well we lived through it; now what shall we call it?"

    David Bowie openly admits that after the success of Let's Dance gave him a mainstream audience in the early Eighties, he hit a quandary. "I succumbed, tried to make things more accessible, took away the very strength of what I do." The Tin Machine period he puts down to "Reeves Gabrels shaking me out of my doldrums, pointing me at some kind of light, saying: be ADVENTUROUS again." When it's interpreted like this, it nearly makes sense. But not quite. "It did break down all the contexts for me. By the time it was over, nobody could put the finger on what I was any more. It was: what the fuck is he DOING?! I've been finding my voice, and a certain authority, ever since."

    "The acting," chuckles Bowie, who has so much pop and so much art in his blood that it must be a riot in there, "is purely decorative. It's just fun, it really is. It's not something I seriously entertain as an ambition.

    "The few things I've made that were successful were because I homed in on the directors, as they had something I wanted to know about. And just... curiosity. I wonder what Scorsese's like - well you'll find out, he's offered you a role. Right! With somebody like that you don't even question the role. You say - Scorsese? Yeah, I'm doing it.

    "That's the impetus for me. Whenever I CHOOSE ROLES, it's usually a joke. I've now learned that my gut instinct is right - just go because you think the guy making it is interesting. And generally then I'll have a better time and be able to live with the end result.

    "I find it really boring, actually."

    Really?

    "Yeah."

    A lot of hanging around and waiting?

    "Yeah, I hate all that, y'know? I run out of film talk after a bit. People sitting around talking about what films they've just finished or are gonna be doing - the whole thing revolves around the INDUSTRY. People don't seem to have another life outside of it - you think: Christ, can't we talk about anything else except movies? Zzzzz..."

    Playing Warhol, who you once claimed not to be able to tell apart from a silver screen, must've been fun though.

    "Yeah, that was great 'cos it was just ten days. I only had 7000 words, and once I got them in the right order, it was a doddle. I mean, a most challenging role".

    Once he revs up however, he's full of praise for superstar painter Schnabel's directorial debut - "the first film about an American painter, and it's a BLACK painter. Not Pollock, or Johns or de Kooning - although John Malkovich as Pollock would've been stunning."

    This leads to anecdotes about a recent visit to Johannesburg ("accompanying my wife on a modelling gig") and the "fucking sensational" exhibition Africa 95, which comes to Britain soon. "I got very evangelical about it. It has no pretensions of grappling with philosophical problems. It's: can I eat? Can I stay in this house?

    "They look on Basquiat as THEIR Picasso, who made it in a white world. I'm not sure even Julian realises the reverberations of his movie. It's an informal, poignant story of a tragic life. How by tacit agreement an artist and society endeavour to demolish the artist himself. His own addictions are so much a part of his downfall. But then that's one of the great occurrences of the day.

    "If the film cocks up in the editing, I'll be so angry at him 'cos it's going so well. The performances are wonderful."

    There follows a rather darling list of how well David knew the rest of the cast. "I've known Hopper, Dennis, for close on 20 years. Through good times and bad! And Gary Oldman I've known for maybe the last eight years. Chris Walken I've known FOREVER. And Willem Dafoe I worked with in the Scorsese movie, when... when he was Christ! Ha! He was hung up at the time."

    You washed your hands of him.

    "I did! Ha ha! Got tired of him hanging about."

    In The Diary of Nathan Adler or the Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue, a text which accompanies the new album, Bowie writes: "He didn't do much after that. I guess he read a lot. Maybe wrote a whole bunch, I suppose. You never can tell what an artist will do once he's peaked."

    "I tend to steal from high art and demean it to street level," he smiles, apropos of nothing. "Brian [Eno] is the professor, and hasn't changed a bit in 20 years - he's STILL bald. Me, I'm the old limey queen."

    We've done everything bar scuba-diving, so we may as well discuss books.

    "I've always been drawn to stream-of-consciousness. Ever since I was a kid. I felt more familiar, had more empathy, with people like Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg and Farlinghetti, and then Burroughs of course in the late Sixties. There's a resonance in people like Thomas Hardy, that I appreciate, but I still find it hard work."

    Plodding?

    "Yeah, y'know, I understand that it's of its times, and that there are nuances in there I should ponder over. I'm just not sure I have the time!"

    Yeah, there's a lot of trees.

    "I can read a LOT, mind you. On a good week I'll get through three or four books. We are by tradition a literary nation. As can be seen by the way we revile all visual arts! And I've inherited that great love of literature, I love being told a story, being shown new ideas.

    "But what I like about the stream-of-consciousness writers is - it's the same reason why I would HOPE my audience likes MY work - that they belong to me more. There's more room for interpretation. In a Hardy book the parameters of the narrative and its sensibility are dictated by the author. You have to follow his plan and get into his world the way he wants you to. I prefer to be allowed more latitude; something I can USE.

    "I don't know why I'm picking on Hardy. Jane Austen then. Alright, even later... who've we got at the moment? Oh, Amis, I can - well, he's just funny. Peter Ackroyd is great. There's a great mysticism in his work. Now who's somebody who's really stiff and hard work?"

    You mean, like a Booker Prize winner?

    "Oh! Yeah! Of course! Oh dear. Anita Brook... Brook."

    Um, Brookner? Hotel du Lac?

    "Yeah, I mean something like that I have a real problem with. It really takes the aesthetic high ground and its all up there in the rarefied stratosphere. I'm sure it's great art, but I can't USE it, it doesn't apply. It just shows me that woman has a very well-honed sensibilities, and I'm very pleased for her. But I need art that actually enriches my life in a very personal way. Something that I can USE. Something that's FUNCTIONAL. And in its own way, interpretation is a function, it's a function of the psyche. And I kind of hope that's what my audience finds as one of the main things they can do with my... stuff. Ha ha ha!"

    Fleetingly, when you're talking to him, or more likely listening, the shafts of sunlight shimmy a little and the eyes do something or his profile does something and you're thrown, your breath goes: wow, it's David Bowie, who redirected the finest minds of my generation. He's still recommending books about Mapplethorpe and revelling as a raconteur as hints are being dropped that it's time for him to go make videos, and records, and films, and paintings, and CD ROMs, and things happen, and whoopee.

    "Or", he adds enigmatically, "they could bury it under dust."

    We'll interpret that David Bowie line as we wish. We always do.

FROM A SMALL HOTEL bedroom in the heart of Paris I can hear the voice of DAVID BOWIE. Not on the radio, not on the stereo, not on the television, but in real life. David Bowie. He's exchanging pleasantries with a gentleman from the Italian press, who emerges flushed with excitement from the room in a bright green David Bowie suit, circa 1986. Later, during my allotted 30 minutes or so with the man, the green suit will re-emerge to have its photo taken next to David and his musical chums. This is me and David, he'll tell his friends. And, damn it all, they'll be impressed.

MADONNA, JAGGER, JACKSON, Bowie; there aren't that many musicians on the planet left to meet that you can impress your friends with. And I mean seriously impress. And not just your friends; there's girlfriends, aunties, uncles - christ, even mums and dads want to know what he's like.

So what is he like? As I'm escorted into the room, David (I think we can call him that) is strewn casually across an elegant yet comfortable sofa, with REEVES GABRELS, his right hand man, positioned appropriately on an armchair to his right. The familiar nicotine-enhanced voice bids a cheery hello, and his handshake is firm and long. Looking relaxed in a casually undone silk shirt and smart (yet casual) trousers, he's smaller than you'd imagine, tanned, healthy looking, friendly and has an almost permanent smile on his face. As he talks he gets more animated as the subjects drift closer to his heart, hands waving and face contorting as he searches his mind for the answers, and Reeves is his perfect foil - easy in his company, understanding of his asides.

David Bowie isn't known for his technical prowess, but as any good musician knows, technique should never be mistaken for talent. Bowie's talent isn't the result of hours spent studying nodal chord structures and mixing desk manuals, but as both a songwriter and producer he has naturally excelled. His personal musical history is almost the history of all things musical, with Bowie out front shaping change itself.

It's been a long journey for Bowie, and the changes he's seen in recording technology have been immense. It's just a little under 30 years since the young David Jones got his first taste for what he could accomplish with a tape machine, and he remembers it like it was yesterday.

    "It was upstairs in my bedroom in 4 Plaistow Grove, Bromley, on an Elizabethan tape recorder," he says cheerfully. "Stereo? It was indeed a stereo tape recorder. I don't know if I could get it stereo because it only had a mono speaker in it, but you could get an extension speaker. That was the first time, just voice and acoustic guitar."

Bowie being Bowie, of course, he wasn't content with just a voice and guitar. Even in 1963 in a back bedroom, overdubbing was the order of the day.

    "I borrowed somebody else's tape recorder. I was 15 or 16, and I'd just record a basic track on one tape machine, then play that back through the speaker, sing to it and play guitar parts over it onto the other tape recorder, backwards and forwards until there was nothing left but tape hiss, with the idea of a melody for a song way in the background. God, things haven't really changed very much now - except you don't get the tape hiss any more."

It wasn't long before young Jones was mixing with the big boys, and taking his first tentative steps into a professional recording studio.

    "It was a studio that BILL WYMAN used to use out in Cricklewood. I did demos there because it was very, very cheap; stuff like London Boys. It was a four-track, I think - no tape hiss for ages. I was intrigued by the fact that you could keep going backwards and forwards. I do remember that mathematically we tried working out how many times you could go until it started hissing badly, and how, with pre-planning, you can reduce the amount of tracks you've got to do.

    "But the most absurd situation I encountered when I was recording was the first time I worked with IGGY POP. He wanted me to mix Raw Power, so he brought the 24-track tape in, and he put it up. He had the band on one track, lead guitar on another and him on a third. Out of 24 tracks there were just three tracks that were used. He said 'see what you can do with this'. I said, 'Jim, there's nothing to mix'. So we just pushed the vocal up and down a lot. On at least four or five songs that was the situation, including Search and Destroy. That's got such a peculiar sound because all we did was occasionally bring the lead guitar up and take it out."

Even though Bowie has assumed the role of producer on a number of occasions, the technology itself still passes him by.

    "I'm absolutely hopeless. I know what I want when I'm doing my own solo things, and we (TIN MACHINE) know what we want when we're working as a band. I think that's probably half the battle. It's like musicianship itself: it's 0K to be a virtuoso, but unless you've got any ideas, being a virtuoso serves you no purpose at all. All you can do is paraphrase everything else you've heard before, or play very conservative, melodic lines. Just scales."

So how good a player is David Bowie?

    Gabrels: "He doesn't have the bias of technique to hold him back. He comes up with these great parts that I would never have thought of, and that I really wish I did, which really pisses me off. He does that consistently."

    Bowie: "It's 0K for me to break rules on instruments because I have no embarrassment - I don't know if I've done anything wrong. Until it's pointed out."

    Gabrels: "That's the hardest thing with recording and playing. If you've acquired any sort of technique, it means breaking the rules that you've made yourself - forgetting the technique, thwarting the knowledge you've acquired, trying to forget what you know. That's a cliché in itself, but it's definitely true."

Perhaps it was Bowie's uninhibited approach to the studio that made a lot of his earlier recordings sound so experimental. To Bowie himself, he was just having fun.

    "Funnily enough, I didn't really think any of them were that experimental. I was always thwarted by the presumption that THE BEATLES had done everything anyway, so you might as well just get into the fun of it. It wasn't until later that it became apparent that some of things we'd done were actually quite innovative in their own way, even the choice of musicians. That was essentially eclectic, to say the least, like bringing somebody like MIKE GARSON into THE SPIDERS. You wouldn't think of bringing a fringe avant garde pianist into the context of a straight ahead rock and roll band, but it worked out well. It brought some really interesting textural qualities to the album that wouldn't have had quite the same feel on it if Mike hadn't been there. The track Aladdin Sane, for instance - I think that's a really exciting track still."

The innovation of early albums like Hunky Dory - and Aladdin Sane Bowie puts down mainly to the songwriting, but it was in 1974 with the recording of Diamond Dogs that the actual process of recording started to become more important.

    "I don't think I really got into messing about with recording technique until then, where it was virtually just myself doing everything. I played a great percentage of everything on Diamond Dogs, apart from the odd lead guitar, and the bass and drums. But most of the other lead guitars and the rhythm guitars and the keyboards, and saxophones, were just me. That was real playhouse stuff I just had a ball, with the late KEITH HARWOOD, who was the producer and engineer on that and who was a great buddy. I remember we were running backwards and forwards with ENO, who was in the studio next door doing Here Come The Warm Jets, and we were dashing in and out of each other's studios. We hadn't worked together then, but little did we know..."

It wasn't long before Bowie and Eno formed their classic partnership, with a common aim.

    "We both had the same ideas - that everything was shit, and we should fuck it up some more. The main thing was to make rock and roll absurd. It was to take anything that was serious and mock it. Diamond Dogs, as I remember it at the time, was trying to accomplish some great mockery of rock 'n' roll. It seemed to be part of my manifesto at the time, I don't know why.

    "One of the great strengths of the early '70s was its sense of irony; MARC BOLAN was an extremely funny, witty man. There was a very strong sense of humour that ran throughout the early British bands; myself, ROXY MUSIC, Marc; we really thought a lot of it was a jest, and I think that hadn't happened for a few years in rock. Whatever came out of early '70s music that had any longevity to it generally had a sense of humour underlying it. Like THE SWEET were everything we loathed; they dressed themselves up as early '70s, but there was no sense of humour there. They were humorous - we felt they were funny - but there was a real sense of irony about what we were doing."

So were Bowie's early characters merely a joke?

    "Oh yeah, definitely."

You mean Ziggy was just a joke?

    "Well, not just a joke, but it was definitely a reaction to late '60s seriousness, and the real murky quality that rock was falling into. I think a bunch of us adopted the opposite stance. I remember at the time saying that rock must prostitute itself. And I'll stand by that. If you're going to work in a whorehouse, you'd better be the best whore in it."

It's just possible, I suppose, that if you too had a video of yourself wearing thigh-length woollen leg warmers and a thunder stripe on your face, 15 years later you might wish to point out the subtle 'irony' of the situation, but the effect that Bowie had on the development of music was no joke at all. It was Bowie, in fact, who was one of the first commercially successful artists to embrace synthesizers.

    "Yes, and not just to do classical reproductions. The idea was to fuck the sound up - give it some 'woah, what's that?'. 1973 was the first time I used synthesizers, on Let's Spend The Night Together."

The wobbly noise in the break?

    "Yeah, that's it, the wobbly noise in the break. It was an ARP 2600, and it had patch wires, but by the time I went onstage they'd already brought out the MiniMoog, and that's what we adopted for live work; it was much more convenient to cart around the country."

For a man known for embracing technology, it's odd to find him in 1991 fronting Tin Machine, whose token nod to technology seems to stop at the brandishing of headless guitars. Why resist what technology has to offer when it's getting so exciting?

    "Well, it's so strange, because it's not a part of my character at all, technology. It's not in my life."

But it was always used to enhance your sound, so why the total abandonment?

    "It's their choice," he says pointing to Reeves, now assuming the role of all three Tin Machine members that aren't David Bowie. "It's the way they play."

Gabrels: "I've found, from a guitar player's point of view, that I'm still convinced the guitar has got a world of sounds in it. The art for me lies in imposing a limitation, in sticking with this electric guitar."

It's true that, in Bowie's music, the guitar has remained centre stage, and his choice of guitar players central to the development of his sound. In Gabrels, Bowie's convinced he's hit the jackpot.

    "Not to embarrass him, but of any of the guitar players I've ever worked with, without doubt Reeves is musically the most accomplished. He's an extraordinary musician, but he hides it very well, fortunately. Probably the nearest in those terms was FRIPP. In musicianship, Fripp and Reeves are probably on a par."

It was Fripp, of course, who was responsible for the soaring guitar that underpinned Heroes. Rumours about the making of the track included the story that Bowie told Fripp it was to be an instrumental, thus ensuring carefree playing from beginning to end. Alas, the story isn't true.

    "The only premise that I gave him was to play with total abandonment, and in a way that he would never consider playing on his own albums. I said play like ALBERT KING, and he would look puzzled for a few moments, and then he'd go in and try his damnest to get somewhere near it, but it would come out his way. So things like Joe The Lion were him really having a bash at the Blues. He was great like that - he really got into the swing of it. He really liked the idea of me giving him an image or a guideline; it was his way of breaking what he normally does. If he went in with his own set of methods it would turn out recognizably like Fripp, but because I would throw this spanner in the works and give him two more signposts as to where to go, he would go 'ah, right, I see what you mean,' and he'd do something.

    "The problem with Fripp is that he doesn't have a way of abandoning his own style. I've got to be terribly careful about this because I have an incredible respect for him as a player, but that's the difference between him and Reeves. Eno is the bridge between the whole thing in that way. Eno knows how to stop his flow in a certain direction and create new channels, whereas very few musicians know how to do that. Once they've got a link with their abilities it's all over in a way; they have a style. It's a style that they'll mature with, but it will keep re-presenting itself. Other than Eno, Reeves is one of the few people who knows how to change his streams of thought. He'll present himself with his own obstacles - he doesn't need me to give him obstacles."

Whereas most solo artists would find the context of working in a band creatively stifling, Bowie actually finds the exact opposite. He talks of Tin Machine coming along at exactly the right time to give him the artistic freedom he needed.

    "The band became my obstacle," he explains. "They re-present me with ideas and also problems that I wouldn't encounter working on my own, telling people what to do. You start to learn how to tell people how to do things, and that becomes a system. And once you've got a system you're really fucked up. When you develop a system, that's the time that you have to break it - and I needed to break it! Fortuitously, this band has done that for me. My system has been broken."

    Gabrels: "Within this band, there's a total mistrust of a comfortable thing. As soon as it starts to feel like it's our mode of operation, then we have to change the parameters."

    Bowie: "Everyone in this band has something they want to say musically. Somebody will do something in rehearsals, and rather than do the obvious, which is to say 'no no, that's not what we should be doing', we say, 'let's go with that'. HUNT may suddenly turn the beat around or something, and your instinct is to say that's not how it goes, and so rather than do that you tend to sit on your opinions. Suddenly you find that the band has turned around on itself and is doing something it wouldn't have been doing ten minutes before.

    "When that kind of flow stops, that's when the band will stop."

Until then, Tin Machine remains in full operation. And maybe, like the rest of Bowie's career, it'll all make a lot more sense in a few years' time.

    On Friday night David Bowie played a surprise concert at the rock venue to try out his new songs on a live audience. And it is reported that he will play another 'secret' gig tomorrow night.

    The Sunday Tribune managed to get past the 15 security guards enforcing the no-cameras rule at the Baggot Inn on Friday to get these exclusive pictures.

    "We've got some material, we're just here to try it out on you," Bowie told the applauding audience of 400.

    They had queued for an hour and a half and paid £5 to get into the concert, and seemed more than happy to act as David Bowie's 'trial audience'.

    The 1990s Bowie is clean cut, fit and into hard rock. Tanned with cropped highlighted blonde hair, he wore a Hawaiian shirt over a white T-shirt and trousers. His band crashed out heavy metal guitar solos and riotous drum rolls over Bowie's thin, nasal vocals.

    Half an hour later the gig was over, Bowie said goodnight - no encore - and disappeared back to the Hotel Conrad, where he and the band are staying.

    They have been in Dublin for the last two weeks rehearsing songs from the forthcoming album Tin Machine in the Factory studios in Barrow Street, before embarking on a world tour. On Tuesday they return to Los Angeles.

    The Baggot's owner Charlie McGettigan got word on Thursday that Bowie was to play the gig. He was under strict instructions not to tell anyone, even his staff.

    At 3pm on Friday word got out and press and fans began to stream into the venue. By 7.30pm the queue of 1,000 stretched all the way down Merrion Row.

    Six English dedicated fans got news of the secret gig on Thursday night in Brighton from a "musical source". They travelled by ferry and plane on Friday to their hero at this unique gig. They had no idea when they arrived in Dublin that a second Bowie spectacular might be in store for them.

    Word has it that the rock star will play another "top-secret" farewell gig at Dublin's Waterfront Rock Cafe tomorrow night.

Jarvis Cocker: I asked Damien why he wanted me to talk to you about smoking, and it seemed to be that you'd given up every other vice in your life, but you hadn't given up smoking and he wondered why that was?

David Bowie: Oh, I see. Well I think I still do a lot of drugs, you know: caffeine and smoking, and I'm probably addicted to television and certain kinds of newspapers and art. Addiction comes in all sorts of forms, but the ones that were physically damaging, not so much to me but to the people around me, they had to go firstly. Then there's cigarettes. Once Iman and I start having children I think they will have to go too. Do you really stand by the idea of living for a long time or do you instead want to fill a shorter life with maybe more interesting things? One makes a compromise between the two actually.

JC: I remember when I was growing up and my mother smoked and she used to say to me: "Go to the corner shop and buy me some cigs."

DB: Yeah, I had exactly the same.

JC: And I used to say: "You know Mum, you're killing yourself". I really was against it, so it's quite ironic that I've ended up smoking.

DB: Mine was a house of smokers as well, both parents a considerable number of cigarettes. I think it was Senior Service and then when my father had a better job it became Weights. And I'd steal his. I think it was the rite of passage through to adulthood that appealed to me, that was the thing about it.

JC: I'd like to ask you some specific questions about cigarettes. So I came up with 20.

DB: Oh my God...

JC: Well, I thought that was appropriate - there's 20 cigarettes in a packet.

DB: Oh that's very good - that's a very nice way to conduct this. Are you smoking at the moment, by the way?

JC: No, but I've got a packet just in case I feel the urge.

DB: Well, I've got one on so...

JC: OK, I'll join you then. So, can you remember the first brand, would that be Weights?

DB: Yes it was, but my father realised I was stealing his so I moved on to Dominos, I think they were called. You could buy them in one's or two's from the newsagents just down the road from the school and we all went down there to buy them. I also specifically remember trying the first menthol cigarettes, which was dread - I've never touched them again - on top of the number 410 green bus going to school one day. I did half a packet of them real fast. It was a long ride, about 20 or 30 minutes to get to school, and they made me sick as a dog. I was throwing up all morning. I've never touched them again.

JC: That's quite weird, the first cigarette I ever had was a Consulate menthol cigarette. Maybe it's because I thought they weren't a real cigarette because they had a minty taste, so it was almost like a sweet or something.

DB: So what did you hope to get from it though? What do you really expect to get from cigarettes before you smoke?

JC: Well, this is it. You know, I never thought I'd end up smoking. I used to really give my mother a hard time about it and then it wasn't until I got to the age of 20, 21.

DB: It was that late? Wow.

JC: Oh yeah, I was going out with a girl. We were out one night and we'd got to that stage that we were a bit bored of each other and so we were kind of wandering the streets wondering what to do. I suddenly thought it would be a really inappropriate thing to do to start smoking. So I went into a shop and bought a packet of Consulate and that's it, that's what started it.

DB: Smoking just to be boring. Well that's interesting because I guess that's one of the hundreds of reasons why one does smoke. You get the idea that it dulls anxiety if you're going through anxious periods. You can also do it to stave off hunger and I think you also do them if you think it's relaxing. You kind of think that you'll become relaxed once you smoke it or that you're in such a great kind of lazy mood that a cigarette would be just right now with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or whatever.

JC: Yeah, the hardest one to stop having is the one after you've just eaten.

DB: When you're a kid it's really a kind of perverse need to try something that's risky, because it's frowned upon by older people. Also because you know it's inherently bad for you.

JC: I remember when I first started that I couldn't believe it made me go dizzy and really light-headed.

DB: Yeah - I never understood why you just grit your teeth and carry on smoking just so you can get it right because it makes you so sick and feel so awful. It has to be what it symbolises and what it gives you of that "I'm old enough to have attitude". With you it was different 'cos you were 21, but I was still very gawky and awkward and wanting to find my attitude. Cigarettes sort of supplied it quite easily.

JC: So it was like a social movement?

DB: Yeah, very much. A fair amount of peer pressure. The guys that I hung around with and liked all smoked and I wanted to be in there.

JC: So, when you wake up in the morning, are you one of these people that reaches straight for the bedside table and lights up, or do you try to stave it off for as long as possible?

DB: I'll stave it off until breakfast. At the end of breakfast when I'm having a cup of coffee I'll have a cigarette. So it's from pretty early on in the morning. In a general day I get through about 40 Marlboro Lights - which is a cut down from what I used to smoke, believe me. When I'm on the road I tend to drop down to about 20.

JC: I was going to ask you that - do they affect your voice?

DB: I think probably that I'd sing much better if I didn't smoke. I'm sure of that actually. I've lost loads of notes from the top register with the years of smoking, but then someone suggested that smoking will often help people presume that they could be greater if they didn't smoke. Which I kinda like - "well you know if I didn't smoke of course I could get those top C's".

JC: I'll quote some lyrics to you. "Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth" - am I getting this right? - "You pull on your finger and then a cigarette."

DB: That was a sort of plagiarised line from Baudelaire which was something to the effect of life is a cigarette, smoke it in a hurry or savour it.

JC: I've heard Damien say that every time he has a cigarette he thinks about death. Do you go along with that?

DB: I can't think of a time that I didn't think about death. There again, I've been smoking all my life so it's hard to not equate the two together. You know, I'm fairly easy-going about the length of life in a way - it'll sort of happen when it happens. It sounds good anyway. But will Damien still smoke around his child?

JC: Eh, I don't know actually. I'll have to ask.

DB: That's an interesting thing because that's the area that worries me. That's the area where I get a little righteous and moral about it because, over the past at least 10 or 15 years, it's really come home to me what impact one's own vices can have on other people and that really determines how I mistreat my own body. I try not to smoke around Iman that much but I'm not very good at that.

JC: Have you read 'Smoking Is Sublime'? I've got a few quotes here: "They are sublime because they involve a confrontation with mortality."

DB: Ah, that's the thinking-of-death-as-you-smoke number.

JC: Mmm, that's it, isn't it? What about this one - Oscar Wilde: "A cigarette is the perfect type of the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied, what more can one want? Each cigarette is an absolute failure, never providing the imagined fulfilment."

DB: But I think you can apply that to nearly any of life's pleasures. They all leave you unsatisfied because you try to reach that high every time. You always have to go back.

JC: You have to keep trying.

DB: You have to keep trying. You keep going for it. Not just to get the high but you're hoping in desperation that one day the high that you do achieve will stay with you. But of course it never does, so in its own way it's an avenue to insanity. It produces a rat syndrome, you know, where you just go round and round and round. Circularity.

JC: No one can ever accept the fact that life consists of a series of highlights and you can never really keep those highlights going.

DB: It's plate-spinning.

JC: That's the thing that makes them a pleasure.

DB: It's wise not to get too euphoric or too melancholic. A balance in-between for me has always given me a much wider and easier passage through life. I find it's such a disillusionment to get incredibly excited and happy about things, and that will not maintain. Also it's quite psychotic to become like that. I mean it's really depressed schizophrenia, when you go from those incredible heights to lows. I've done all of those and it really serves one badly.

JC: It's like the Prozac argument, that the drug will level people out so they will never feel things very extremely at all.

DB: Right, but the other side of that is that it also reduces your ability to have emotional contact. People will not really pay quite such close attention to what their children are going through, or their wives or husbands, or whatever. They exist in a kind of Stepford Wife world, so there's two sides. There's two sides to everything, though, Jarvis. Don't you feel that honestly in your system?

JC: Yeah.

DB: Are we giving Damien what he wants, do you think?

JC: Oh God, I don't know, and I don't know what he wants. I don't think he knows what he wants. So these are the last two questions I've got here.

DB: OK.

JC: These are going back to a more basic level really. Which cigarette of the day would you say you enjoy most?

DB: Well, I have the workman-like habit of Marlboro Lights now, but in my past Gitanes were the ones that really I thought had it all. When I was working as an illustrator in advertising I went through four or five different kinds of exotic brands at that stage, trying to find the right brand to put me away from what other people smoked. But then when I went to France for the first time I found Gitanes and I liked them more than anything else because the illustrator was actually named on the packet. I think it was M Giout if I'm not mistaken, and that particular packet, the Gitanes packet, took me all through the Seventies. But they were so strong.

JC: Oh I know, I tried those and they're not good.

DB: Yeah I know, you really had to try to work at it to get to enjoy it, but they get to become really addictive and it took me a long time. But then I went from those to Marlboro Reds. I went through the Eighties on those and around the time I started Tin Machine, around 1988, I realised I wasn't getting the high notes at all, so I dropped down to Marlboro Lights. And I've stuck with them ever since actually. I should go even lighter, I suppose, because I know I'm going to have to give up sooner or later when the kid comes.

JC: You could try that Silk Cut white-packet stuff.

DB: Oh God, I've tried all that stuff and it just hasn't got the kick, you know.

JC: Well, the thing that you find with those is they've got perforations in the filter and you unconsciously start putting your fingers over the perforations to kind of block the holes so you just get a little bit more.

DB: There was a brand that I tried in Russia when I first went over there on the Trans-Siberia called Sputnik, and they had a wonderful illustration on the thing. Illustrations really move me into buying cigarettes more than anything else. That was before I went on to good old fundamental Marlboro.

JC: I was put off Marlboro when somebody once had a conspiracy theory that they were...

DB: Oh, the KKK thing. Well the very easy thing about Marlboro is that they are actually available everywhere. There's no way to avoid them, so once you are into a brand when you travel like we do, you kind of want one that you can get anywhere from Russia back to America to England, you know. Even though they're made by the individual countries that package them, you just feel comfortable if you've got that one. You develop a certain kind of brand loyalty.

JC: In America, there are loads of no-smoking buildings and no-smoking bars and you often stand shivering outside on the streets in the middle of winter.

DB: Well yes - we think of ourselves as sometimes approaching a nanny state but I think it's far more prevalent in the States. It's been part of their history since prohibition onwards - the idea of telling people what they should be doing. Their assumption is that they know best. Within a rational, straightforward way they're probably right, but I think you must have the choice to screw yourself. On the other hand, I do appreciate it is quite nice sometimes to have a meal without people smoking around you.

JC: But it's going to make it more attractive to people.

DB: Oh yeah, absolutely. It will become a right little renegade thing to do. Although I must say at the moment smoking in LA I feel positively grimy, I no longer feel rebellious because I know it's just outright hostility to me when I light up a cigarette. Especially when I'm in a house with people I know and respect and I light up a cigarette and they look at me as though I'm dirt. You think, God, it really has come home, this thing about not smoking, I feel like the lowest of the low with this damn thing.

JC: But do you resent that you're made to feel that way?

DB: Yeah, I resent that my freedoms have been inhibited in that way, but on the other hand I am aware that it's bad for other people.

JC: It seems to be a kind of contentious point about secondary smoking or passive smoking.

DB: Yeah, and I do understand, but there again have you ever tried to conduct a relationship on cocaine? I mean, what you do to the person is absolutely foul. It really is beyond tolerance, it's dreadful. So few drugs don't have an effect on the other person. Coffee so far seems to be OK.

JC: Yeah, you can still keep a relationship together then?

DB: I think you can get a bit irritable if you've had too much, but I think the sort of by-product of it isn't ruined lives. I've not heard of many couples that were split apart by one's addiction to coffee.

JC: It probably will happen if cigarettes get ground out of the way. So, my final question is: do you light your cigarettes with matches or a lighter?

DB: Wow. I used to light them with matches because it had a more theatrical effect, I think. But as my awareness that the cigarette doesn't represent any particular attitude any more, it doesn't have the potency of a symbol it used to have. I saw it once as a prop on stage, now I smoke on stage just because I need one. So now I'm quite happy with a Bic, which is pretty sort of fundamental. But I was aware of ritual and routine and theatricality with a cigarette when I was younger. I knew exactly what I was doing around the stage and the cigarette became symbolic of a certain kind of removed identity kind of thing, you know - that I don't have to be singing these songs, I'm just doing you a favour. I think the symbolic cigarette has dropped way behind now. It's just another bloody thing that I do.

JC: Well, you know, don't worry about it.

DB: No, I must say I don't. I'm not losing sleep.

JC: Right, well, that's it.

DB: Well it's really nice to talk with you, Jarvis.

JC: You know it's for this Big Issue thing, don't you?

DB: Yeah.

JC: Thank you very much.

DB: And I hope I bump into you when I come back to England again.

JC: I'm sure we will do.

DB: Alrighty.

JC: Alright then.

DB: Ta-ra.

JC: Bye bye.

DB: Bye bye.