IT SHOULD not be surprising that David Bowie turns 60 this week. After all, David Jones has been David Bowie for 42 years now. In the 1970s, Bowie and his collaborator at that time, Mick Ronson, blew rock 'n' roll apart and remade it in more bitter tones. In the 1970s, Bowie made three albums in the still-divided Berlin. David Bowie is history now.

Nevertheless, it is amazing how long David Bowie's reach has proved, not least on the careers of other musicians.

He produced Iggy Pop's solo albums and once joined Iggy's backing band, humbly playing keyboards and doing some backing vocals. He and Ronson produced Lou Reed's breakthrough solo album, Transformer; Mick Ronson played piano on 'Perfect Day'.

Lulu revived her career for the first time with a version of his song 'The Man Who Sold The World'. It is said that Bowie has sold more than 100 million albums.

He has appeared in 26 films (many of them lousy; he was in The Prestige, released last year).

Bowie has put his success down to the work ethic he absorbed from his working-class childhood. In an interview a couple of years ago with Jeremy Paxman, it was alarming to see that Paxman, younger and much more respectable, looked middle aged and bloated with wine, while Bowie looked like a slim and youthful testament to the preservative powers of cigarettes and decades of drug abuse. Even allowing for the power of tastefully applied plastic surgery . . . and Bowie's taste has always been impeccable . . . he looks great.

Perhaps his good skin is down to all the make-up he used in his youth.

So many of Britain's stand-up comedians had Catholic upbringings that someone made a radio programme about it.

Bowie too was Catholic. When those boys go off the doctrinal rails, there is no stopping them.

Bowie was remarkable for his sexual ambivalence even in the days of glam rock. He gave an interview in which he said he was bisexual (and so did his first wife Angie; Bowie later retracted his statement ), wore a dress and did outrageous things to Mick Ronson's guitar. Anything further from the macho world of Elvis Presley was pretty hard to imagine. But Elvis is dead and David Bowie is alive, seemingly happy and appallingly rich.

In 2002, he even gave up smoking, around the time of his heart bypass.

Nowadays, pop has begun to eat itself, in an orgy of cover versions and sampling. But for 20 years, Bowie was doing new things, making it up as he and it went along. The range of his influences was always impressive. He had been an art student (his art collection is extensive). He had studied with the dance master Lindsay Kemp, with whom he both toured and, allegedly, had an affair. (Kemp claims the relationship broke up "for sentimental reasons": Bowie was sleeping with a female dancer at the same time. ) He was interested in Japanese theatre. He once played the Elephant Man on Broadway. Not everyone who appeared on Top of the Pops could say these things.

Of course, too, he was bonkers, as he has acknowledged, when his mind was fried by drugs. According to one website, in 1976, during a live television broadcast in Spain, Bowie was so paranoid that he refused to surrender his space on the satellite when the Spanish government wanted it back in order to announce that the old dictator, Franco, had died.

Bowie was smart about choosing his collaborators. Brian Eno was one of them. Tony Visconti, according to Bowie, never got sufficient credit for producing Low, Heroes and Lodger, the three Berlin albums. However, Ian Hunter of Mott The Hoople, who worked with Mick Ronson after Bowie and was his friend, claims that Bowie has never given Ronson enough credit. Ronson was a remarkable character, from Hull, a musician to his fingertips. It was Ronson's '70s guitar, raw and thin, which gave Bowie's most important albums such energy. It has been said that if Ziggy played guitar then Ronson was Ziggy. Bowie killed Ziggy and moved on to the US, where he horrified his cooler fans by duetting on a Christmas number with Bing Crosby. Crosby had no idea who Bowie was; it was his children who had encouraged him to get Bowie on the TV show. Bowie, allegedly, had been a closet Crosby fan for years. Now that was shocking.

It is a strange thing to say of such a successful and varied life but Bowie's childhood is almost the most interesting part of it; the childhood, and the connections that run from it.

His parents met in a cinema where Margaret Mary Burns was working as a waitress. They married, presumably after their son's birth, in 1947, when John Jones's divorce came through. John Jones had no children with his first wife but he did have a daughter, Annette, with another woman. Annette eventually married an Egyptian man and converted to Islam.

Her Islamic name is, coincidentally, Iman, also the name of Bowie's second wife.

Margaret Mary Burns already had a son, Terence Burns, born 10 years before David, who committed suicide in 1985.

She had a daughter too, Myra Ann, who was put into foster care and then adopted.

The young David had a choice of going to grammar school or to the local technical college in Bromley, Kent, where the family had moved from Brixton. John wanted David to go to the grammar school, David wanted to go to the tech, because it taught art. Having viewed both, John Jones agreed that the tech was preferable, as he didn't like the atmosphere at the grammar school and thought the tech more modern.

David's art teacher there was Owen Frampton, father of musician Peter, another artist Bowie would later work with.

It was his father who arranged for the young David to have saxophone lessons . . .

it was David's ambition to be the sax player in Little Richard's band. The boy took a job as a butcher's delivery boy to pay for his lessons with Ronnie Ross. Years later, it was Ronnie Ross who played the saxophone on 'Walk On The Wild Side' on Lou Reed's Transformer.

For all that Bowie looked permanently detached, or was permanently detached, he seems to have maintained strong links to his childhood. In a fight over a girl when he was 14, his friend, George Underwood, punched David and injured his eye, leaving one pupil permanently dilated.

Although he says he can see out of it, Bowie says the damaged eye sees in sepia tones. Whatever, George Underwood was in Bowie's early bands and later worked on some of his earliest and best album covers.

Recently Bowie has not done anything interesting musically. But with such a history, who cares? We must all wish him a happy birthday.

C.V.

Name: David Robert Jones. Changed in 1965 to David Bowie
Born: 8 January, 1947, Brixton, London
Profession: Musician
Married: Firstly, Mary Angela Barnett, 1970. Secondly, Iman Abdul Majid, in 1992
Children: Duncan Zowie Heywood Jones; Alexandria Zahra Jones; one stepdaughter
Education: O level in Art
In the news because: He turns 60 tomorrow