A flat cap, ordinary clothes and a Greek newspaper under his arm – how the most photographed man in rock walked Manhattan unrecognised for twenty years, and what the disappearing act bought him.

Shot alone on a freezing January night because the band stayed indoors, beneath a furrier’s sign fans read as ‘quest’ – the story of 23 Heddon Street and London’s only plaque to a fictional alien.

In 1972 the hottest new star in Britain gave away a hit to save Mott the Hoople and produced Transformer for a written-off Lou Reed – then rebuilt Iggy Pop in 1977. Bowie as rock’s great mechanic.

She walked out of a Dallas hotel with 36 cents and a fuel card, kept only her name in the divorce, and spent eight years rebuilding to Private Dancer. The exact arithmetic of rock’s greatest comeback.

They met backstage in Shreveport in August 1980 and married eight months later. What the Van Halen-Bertinelli marriage survived, what it couldn’t, and why it never really ended.