[Bowie] has preferred throughout his recording career to immerse himself in carefully contrived roles and personae through which he has sought to elaborate his various concepts and futuristic visions. He has established a reluctance to adopt any kind of intimate, confessional stance and a determination to assimilate a multiplicity of styles and techniques which has led his detractors to conclude that he has no real or substantial identity of his own.

That argument has, however, become less persuasive and has lost much of its credibility since Bowie made public his confusion and desperation with the audaciously conceived "David Live", an album of documentary intensity. Bowie, it seemed, had become less concerned with the manipulation of fantasy and, on that album, was approaching his work with an hitherto unexpressed directness. With "Young Americans", released early last year, Bowie established a mode of expression which made it possible for him...