Today’s English newspapers carry obituaries of photographer Brian Duffy. Most of them describe his principle achievement as having been to capture the swinging 60s. But for me Duffy was always primarily famous for the image of David Bowie that appeared on the 1973 Aladdin Sane album. Once, on the H1 bus (a then new and revolutionary single deck bus line that ran from Kenton to South Harrow – single decker to get under various railway bridges), on my way to see a band at the Tithe Farm, I saw a boy with a perfect Aladdin Sane haircut plus the Sane lightning flash in make up across his face. I admired him hugely. In the first place, it must have cost a fortune (by our standards), for they would have had to dye his hair before ‘perming’ and blow drying it. In the second place, though, he was quite deliberately running a gauntlet, for the merest hint of androgynous features was regarded as a provocative target by the local bully boys, of whom there were many. To this day, a flash of that spikey red hair or even a few notes of Aladdin Sane transport me instantly back to the H1 bus and that Aladdin Sane look-alike on a long ago Saturday evening. Duffy is surely better known for other iconic images, but that’s the one that I’ll always associate with his name.