As I never tire of telling people, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was the first album I ever owned. Not long after seeing his seminal Top of the Pops performance — his other-worldly persona, draped over guitarist Mick Ronson, managing to awaken a generation (and to horrify many of their parents) — I’d bought the album and put it on the “radiogram” and got blown away. I also remember my mum’s utter shock at “that noise” I’d brought into the house!

Bowie has continued to be part of my music for the next 40+ years. Indeed, I have spent much of the weekend absorbing Blackstar, bought on its release date just three days ago, enjoying his one consistent characteristic — being able to surprise with his musical direction.

Unlike with some artists, the notion of a favourite album is particularly hard to identify with Bowie, for me. Rather, there are some seminal phases. Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs are probably my favourite era. But then play Station to Station, Low, and Heroes and here is another set of albums that outshine the output of most artists. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) brought Bowie’s capacity of visualisation through the medium of video to the fore — I remember the excited anticipation of just what we might get from him next — followed by Let’s Dance. And I hitch-hiked from Hull to Edinburgh in 1983 to see Bowie’s Serious Moonlight stadium tour. Captured on a four-album, multi-coloured vinyl, boxed bootleg of a live radio broadcast from two Montreal gigs, the live musicianship was astounding.

Bowie’s heavy guitar-based Tin Machine project was an interesting sideline, him working with a group of lesser-known musicians and insisting he was “just the singer” (and convincing no-one).

Personally, the decade from 1993’s Black Tie White Noise to 2003’s Reality reached me less, though I own all the albums and do listen to them. Even when the music he was doing didn’t move me, I always knew it was a good, challenging contribution to that genre.

2013’s The Next Day was a revelation — he was still producing music, and good music at that, and managed, in an era of such universal access to information and rumour, to keep its recording and production a secret until hours before he released its first single, Where Are We Now? And 2016’s Blackstar is another wonderful Bowie soundscape.

A commentator this morning reflected that Bowie wasn’t a chameleon as such: he didn’t change his image to match the background, but rather, he changed the very landscape itself. This seems apposite to me. He expanded the artistic canvas of the world, showing again and again how perceived limitations could be shattered.

What a loss.