“Beware the savage jaw of 1974…” David Bowie once almost sang, on Diamond Dogs cut 1984. A line taken and mistaken – on purpose, naturally – by Simon Goddard for the latest instalment in his Bowie Odyssey series, which chronicles the events of Bowie’s life year-by-year. Opening with an account of David and Angie Bowie viewing a home in Holland Park and closing with a coked-up David alone in a hotel room in New York, Goddard weaves a vivid picture of 1974 and Bowie’s role within it.

There’s not just Bowie here, though: a rotating cast of characters help anchor the year, from David Essex and Marc Bolan to Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Liz Taylor and many more. This is the year of the Diamond Dogs, it seems, with the release of the album and its almost-eponymous promo tour being the headline news – yet Goddard dives into Bowie’s move from rock to soul without hesitation. Inspired while watching a Three Degrees gig in Amsterdam, before assembling a band to record the beginnings of what would become Young Americans, this is chronicled alongside everything else sufficiently Bowie-related that happened a half-century ago.

This principle is taken a little too far at times. Goddard’s account of the death of Bernadette Whelan, a teen who died during a David Cassidy show at London’s now long-gone White City Stadium, perhaps takes it too far in his descriptions of the event. As lurid detail goes, Goddard does not shy away from the effects of Bowie’s cocaine addiction, nor from mythologising Bowie’s affairs – including the allegations that he and Mick Jagger were once caught in bed together. It amounts to a solid read for any Bowie fan, particularly for those interested in that remarkably swift transition from rock’n’roll icon to sharply-dressed soul singer.