WHO CAN I BE NOW?

NINETEEN-SEVENTY-FOUR FOUND IN TRANSITION: FROM GLAM LEPER MESSIAH TO PLASTIC SOUL MAN. HERE, AND BOWIE'S SCHOOLFRIEND AND 70S COMPANION LRHUM TELL THE STORY OF BOWIE'S 74 AS HE MAKES THE CH-CH-CH-CHCHANGE FROM THE QUEASY FUTURE-SCHLOCK CONCEPT ROCK OF DIAMOND DOGS TO THE PHILLY-FIED NEO-DISCO OF YOUNG AMERICANS. EYES WRITE: NICK HASTED

- NICK HASTED

"A lady said, 'I don't know if I want to meet him, I have a feeling he's into black magic,"" the urbanely hip US talk show host, Dick Cavett, tells his guest, David Bowie, on November 1974. "And other people just see you as a very skilful performer who changes from time to time, from one thing to another."

The white-suited Cavett leans back with almost horizontal ease in his chair, a picture of post-hippie cool, but the Englishman's body language now offers a crazed contrast. Maybe it's the mention of black magic, maybe some inner synaptic frenzy, but Bowie almost jumps out of his tautly drawn skin, biting on his nervously flying fingers, eyes and mouth bouncing through multiple startled expressions in a manic split-second, as if all his recent personae - Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, the Diamond Dog - are bubbling through his system, like John Carpenter's Thing bulging through assumed human forms. Settling into a still more disturbing impression of friendliness, unnaturally bright, tired eyes sunk deep in his skull and teeth too big for his mouth instead essay a rictus, Joker grin.

More so even than the gaunt spectre glugging 2 per cent milk for sustenance as his limo glides through the desert in the BBC's Cracked Actor, filmed that autumn and viewed with horror on 26 January 1975, The Dick Cavett Show is the defining document of cocaine's vampiric consumption of Bowie in 1974. Snorting loudly as Cavett goes to an ad break, he fires a phantom hit to his brain.