The gift of sound and vision

My feelings are, of course, of sadness and awe at this genius to the end, but also of a personal, selfish relief. I feel like an errant relative fully reconciled to a loved one before they passed.

After loving 'Where Are We Now' when it first popped out almost exactly 3 years ago, I wasn't quite so enamoured of the album 'The Next Day', and wasn't sure I liked the sound of 'Blackstar' from initial descriptions. I'm so glad, therefore, that I didn't leave it a few days to give it a spin, but that I was listening to, and loving, the music of David Bowie in the days before he died, just as he planned.

'Blackstar' is a beautiful and dark album - 'Lazarus' and the last two song 'Dollar Days' and 'I Can't Give Everything Away' are powerfully emotive in the way that sometimes people said Bowie couldn't be.

Of course people were wrong about that. He wrote honestly about himself, about his displacement and alienation, it was just filtered through ideas and characters.

Yes, he was a soul singer, amongst the thousand other things he was.

I've listened to other people more than Bowie in the last 10 years or so, but he's always cropped up on my playlists or in my mind, thankfully.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a little drunk on the train home to Kent, I suddenly thought "I haven't listened to Young Americans properly for years". What a song! One of my early favourites, its relentless stream is even more up-my-street now than then.

What's my favourite Bowie? Freaky Bowie? Space Bowie? Electro Bowie? Berlin Bowie? Funky Bowie? No, I must admit, I'm a sucker for ballad Bowie. Absolute Beginners has never been cool but it's always been a beautiful song, like Heroes, Under Pressure and Lady Grinning Soul and Thursday's Child and Strangers When We Meet. And, of course, Life on Mars?

I still hold a certain moment of my life in the highest regard, a moment on a coach aged 17 descending from Delphi in Greece, listening to Life on Mars? on my walkman, a transcendent multimedia flood of beauty I'd never known before. That's what that song means to me.

I used to sing along in my room as a teenager to the Greatest Hits collection, Ziggy Stardust and Drive-in Saturday and Changes (though I avoided the octave leap in Starman). Such great tunes and glorious words.

I read two biographies - mesmerised by his intelligence. I think I've written before that it's him and Dylan who are the great minds - could have been or done anything with those minds, anything.

I'm wondering today if I bet on the wrong horse for posterity. Will Dylan's death mean so much to so many? Will his life cross into so many strata? Were his songs actually better? Bowie was clearly more than I understood him to be, more to more people, to more worlds. So many colours.

He did countless hilarious things - Peter and the Wolf, The Snowman, Little Drummer Boy, Twin Peaks, gave a song to this or that, a word to this or that. He was everywhere.

You know, we laugh sometimes at the cesspit of modern emotional splurge, but I truly believe all the tributes that came his way today, that's the most amazing thing. Madonna, Kanye West, McCartney, even David Cameron, You can't begrudge or disbelieve anyone's right to have been touched by him.

Anyway, one song, one picture at the bottom. Tricky choices ...

And, I think ...

Five Years