Rock legend David Bowie was consumed by his sex addiction which drove him to sleep with 13-year-old girls, engage in wild orgies, and declare his bisexuality with a 'permanent erection,' a new book reveals. 

The British rock star's reputation of rampant sexual consumption inspired an offering of a warm dead body to sleep with when he was on tour in Philadelphia - an offer he later declined. 

He was fixated on Hitler and watched Nazi movies while high on cocaine - a vice that nearly killed him. 

Bowie snorted so much coke for years he had to have cartilage removed from his body and put in his nose. He never had a cigarette out of his hand and he weighed 95lbs. 

'David Bowie was his very own creation, his very own work of art. This was the boy from postwar Brixton [a district of south London with his sights set on the world,' writes author and British GQ editor Dylan Jones in his exhaustive and fascinating new biography, David Bowie a life to be published by Crown Archetype on September 7.

'His entire professional career was one of myth, legend and invention. Behind the curve in the 60s, the 70s clicked for the singer musically and 'he exploited what he had in a way that was all-consuming,' writes the author.

The son of a cinema usherette and a promotions officer for Bernardo's, a children's charity, Bowie, born David Jones, stated it was a happy childhood but also a lonely one. 

'I saw people deprived around me and kids going to school with their shoes falling apart and kids looking like urchins. It left an impression on me that I never ever wanted to be hungry, or at the wrong end of society', he once told the author.

The impression was strong enough to inspire him to be a star rather than a great musician or artist.

But there was a dark cloud over his mother's side of the family that was riddled with mental instability.

Two or three of his aunts committed suicide; three of his mother's sisters were described as nuts, and one even had a lobotomy because of 'bad nerves.