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|title=The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s

|sort=Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s

|publisher=Vintage

|date=October 2012

|website=http://www.peterdoggett.org/

|summary=A study of the life and work of the British singer, focusing largely on his career in the 1970s, with a detailed examination on every track he recorded up to 1980.

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With hindsight, it’s difficult to argue with the oft-expressed opinion that David Bowie was the single most important rock musician of the 1970s. Having been a perpetual ‘one to watch’ from around 1966 onwards but with only one hit during that decade, ‘Space Oddity’, from 1972 onwards he went through several remarkable self-reinventions in musical style, with an uncanny knack of being able to pre-empt the next big trend. In examining his whole career but focusing largely on his work throughout that particular decade, Peter Doggett looks specifically at every song he recorded, including cover versions. There are also boxed-out features on each album, and articles on related topics such as ‘The Art of Minimalism’ and ‘The Heart of Plastic Soul’. He concludes that by 1979 the man’s extraordinary creativity was more or less spent and his subsequent output, successful though it may have been, was in effect treading water up to his ‘elegant, unannounced retirement’ in 2007.