I’m sure the internet is still rammed with takes and tributes and thinkpieces and all the other stuff, and on one level I feel lousy about adding to them. But I grew up with David Bowie’s work, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about his work, and eventually I’m going to have to get it all out on a screen somewhere. It’s still too much to process, this impossibly full and magnificently concluded working life. It humbles me. I grew up with his sound and words, and its levels were revealed to me as I got older - bear in mind that when “Life On Mars” was released as a single I was five years old, so forgive me for not getting all the references. I just need to write down, for myself as much as anything else, how he always seemed so far ahead of everyone and everything else, and how even his perceived failures were instructive and rammed with new thoughts and experiments. Everybody is going to be picking over his bones over the months and years to come - the hagiographies and the clickbait takedowns and all the other things. I, personally, need to balance my desire to explicate my fascination with the man’s work with the sure knowledge that that pile doesn’t need to be added to.

Perhaps it boils down to just needing to say this: for me, David Bowie was always waiting in the sky, one flight ahead of me, showing that it could all be done. And if I could ever have spoken to him, I like to think that I would simply have said thanks for everything, and left him to get on with the art of his next spacelaunch.

Thanks for everything.

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