Would it be androgynous David Bowie-style Duff, lead singer of Kush who drew 45,000 fans to a performance at the 1974 Sunbury pop festival?

Maybe it might be Quiet Domesticated Duff whose Twitter profile notes merely that he "Likes pineapple donuts" and whose mobile phone carries a photo of his beloved but deceased white pussycat, Ruby.

No, none of the above. The Jeff Duff who sashays into Melbourne's Pei Modern restaurant - stylishly clad in a Ruby White suit, shoes and wide-brimmed hat - is a 60-kilogram teetotalling vegetarian sportsman who has just won the "D Reserve captain's award" for bowling at Sydney's Northbridge Cricket Club. "The club texted me at interval during one of my Bowie shows," he says. "I was so proud I boasted about it to the audience."

Duff has the sporting genes. Turns out an uncle played a bit of footy for Collingwood.

"I play competition tennis, too," he says, not hindered by a metal rod and seven metal pins in his right arm.

"That arm was almost torn off my shoulder when I got beaten up in 1987," he says. "It was just after I got back to Australia after 10 years in London. I had just parked the car - it was the last time I drove, actually - when I heard voices say: 'There he is - let's get him!' I woke up in hospital with my arm re-attached. I was there for weeks and weeks but I got myself rehabilitated. Spent hours hitting a tennis ball against a wall. I've got this strong Scottish constitution from my father."

That is John Duff, who was in the business-equipment business and was baffled by his son's on-stage "tizzy tart" persona.

"Why do you have to wear a dress?" he would lament but a few years before he died, aged 90, he told his son: "You're the bravest man I've ever met."

Duff says that, socially, he swims against the tide.

"At 17, I was going out into uncharted areas, dressing up like a lunatic, getting beaten up. I was one of the first guys in Australia to wear pierced earrings. Now the people who beat me up are wearing pierced earrings."

He takes off his sunglasses to reveal blue eyeshadow on both eyelids.

"I put on make-up every day," he says. Has done since adolescence - loves women's clothing too. He won the gig as lead singer for Kush in 1971 after arriving for the audition in a black dress and stilettos. Sixteen years later he returned from London with 11 ear piercings and his hair dyed red.

"I looked like an alien," he says. "Sometimes I feel like Quentin Crisp's daughter. I think that's why I was beaten up. Everyone thinks I'm gay but I'm not. I've had the most beautiful girlfriends."

Duff, who has never married, relishes the gender confusion. It fits in with the rather wicked sense of humour that saw him call one of his songs Noses Run in My Family. "Melody Maker magazine called it the cleverest title ever."

Oh, did he mention the metal rod in this leg?

"I fell off the back of a No. 29 bus in London," he says. "I was skinny - like I am now - and hit the kerb."

Surgery and recuperation followed and, at a "stage age" of 59 (although Wikipedia has him a tad older), Duff says he is still one of the fleetest players at the tennis club.

Duff's willowy frame belies his powerful voice. A critic, after attending one of his shows, once marvelled: "How can such a soulful voice come out of such a skinny white guy?"

Perhaps the answer will be clearer when his autobiography is published next year. He is still hunting for a title. Molly Meldrum has been a help with such matters in the past.

"When I first met Molly I was wearing a wedding dress," Duff says. "Our band had just made an album but didn't have a title. Molly said we should call it Snow White and the Eight Straights. So we did."

Meldrum is writing a foreword to Duff's book but no title suggestion has been forthcoming yet.

Duff still performs three or four times a week. "I'll be singing till I fall off the perch, man," he says.

As well as performing his own music, Duff has several shows that pay tribute to David Bowie - Bowie Unzipped, Ziggy and Ground Control to Frank Sinatra, which is based on a transit mix-up - David Bowie and Frank Sinatra catch the wrong flights and end up in front of each other's audience.

He's a regular visitor to the Illawarra, performing his Bowie tributes at Thirroul's Beaches Hotel and also taking part in the Beaches annual two-day Beatles festival. He is bringing his Bowie Unzipped show to Wollongong's Centro CBD venue on July 19.

Duff lived next door to Bowie for some years when the English superstar was intermittently staying in Sydney.

"I didn't even know he was there until some of his musicians began coming along to hear me sing. The Bowie website has been very generous in reviewing my albums."

Financially, Bowie and Duff are opposite sides of the coin. While Bowie's wealth is estimated at $230 million, Duff says he would be lucky to have $230. "But my life is incredible, man," he says. And busy, too, with his cricket, tennis, book, stage shows and album No. 28 coming up.

He has also been landing some minor film roles, including a role as a space-age scientist in a sci-flick called Secta and another in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

"The reason I can do so much is because I have remained single," he says. "I have noticed, with all my tennis opponents, as soon as they get a partner the tennis falls by the wayside. It is so annoying."

Duff was raised in Melbourne, went to Canterbury Primary School, Box Hill Tech (where he was a prefect) then Swinburne. At home, his father played a lot of Sinatra and his mother, Marie, would play piano and sing.

"Mum died young of a lung disease," Duff says. "She was sick a long time. I remember a lot of oxygen tanks around the house. It was so sad. When I left to live in London, my brother drove me to the airport. Mum put her head in the side window and said, 'You'll never see me again'. She was right. She died before I got home."

There has been other sadness since, a fact revealed long after lunch is over when Duff emails a sample chapter of his as-yet-untitled book.

"Until now," he writes about a broken romance 14 years ago, "my psychoanalyst Wilfred was the only human being with first-hand information regarding my dismal attempt at suicide. Although I promised myself I would never mention this ugly incident again, if I didn't, I would be ignoring one of the most important but devastating periods in my life.

"Writing about it will be akin to self-analysis of sorts, a kind of rational retrospective therapy ... Although I find the entire episode highly embarrassing, it became an important benchmark for me.

"It has left me more vulnerable than I care to be and I have become more insular than anyone could possibly know, but I will never allow another matter of the heart to affect me like that again. I have ducked and weaved at any sign of romance since.

"Now more than ever my solitude has become a refuge for my wounded soul."

Thankfully, life rolls on more happily these days - although the ribald past is always bubbling under the surface.

Among Duff's early outrages was a performance in Ballarat in 1977 where he wore a costume incorporating the strategically positioned open-mouthed faces of two inflatable female dolls. Someone in the audience complained and Duff was taken to court and fined.

"One of my musicians reminded me of that the other day," Duff says. "He said, 'My father was a policeman in Ballarat. He's the one who arrested you'!"

■ Bowie Unzipped (bowieunzipped.com.au) is at Wollongong's Centro CBD on July 19.