Best band of all time? The Beatles. Greatest solo artist? That’ll be David Bowie: Event music critic on the showman he saw live ten times over 20 years

To reach that summit you have to make a series of outstanding albums in different styles, while remaining fiercely yourself. Your music has to be both entertainment and art 

No singer was better at turning a pop song into a drama and no showman better at shaking the status quo than David Bowie (pictured on stage in Winnipeg, Canada, during his 1983 Serious Moonlight tour)

On stage, he was strikingly still. I saw David Bowie perform ten times over 20 years, starting with the Serious Moonlight tour, in the slanting sunshine of a midsummer night at Milton Keynes in 1983. 

That first glimpse was riveting: the slight figure, the pastel suit, the immense presence, the voice hanging back behind the beat. 

The whole package, bar the suit, was still there when he played Low in all its bleak beauty at the Royal Festival Hall in 2002, a gig as thrilling as any I’ve witnessed. 

Sixty years after Elvis Presley recorded his first hit, there are now thousands of pop stars. And many are much of a muchness. 

Given the constraints of the popular song, it ought to be hard to separate them; but, at the very top, it’s remarkably straightforward. 

The greatest band of all is The Beatles, and the greatest solo artist is David Bowie. 

To reach that summit you have to make a series of outstanding albums in different styles, while remaining fiercely yourself. 

You have to blaze trails through the stratosphere while writing tunes for people to sing in the car. 

Your music has to be both entertainment and art, to capture the moment and far outlast it. Bowie achieved all this and more. 

No singer was better at turning a pop song into a drama, no showman better at shaking the status quo, no lyricist better at putting the right line in the right place. 

Bowie has been called pop’s Picasso, and he certainly had the range. But in his vision, his prescience, he was closer to Andy Warhol, with one massive difference: his work had a heart

Bowie has been called pop’s Picasso, and he certainly had the range. But in his vision, his prescience, he was closer to Andy Warhol, with one massive difference: his work had a heart. Bowie defined the Seventies as The Beatles did the Sixties. 

Lennon and McCartney raced from Love Me Do to Let It Be in seven years flat; Bowie released Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Young Americans, Station To Station, Low and Heroes in six. 

Folk, rock, glam, soul and Krautrock, all made his own: Golden Years, indeed. He was sufficiently arty to study mime under Lindsay Kemp, to apply William Burroughs’ cut-up technique to lyrics, and to pay punning homage to Jean Genet with The Jean Genie. 

But he was also a populist who headlined at Glastonbury and recorded a Christmas song with Bing Crosby. His hits pass the acid test for pop: they appeal to children. 

There are plenty of music-lovers whose first brush with Bowie came when Changes was played in Shrek 2 or when he starred in the movie Labyrinth. 

Yet he also introduced two vital adult themes into pop: alienation and androgyny. At a time when mental illness was criminally neglected, Bowie tackled it with piercing empathy. 

At a time when rock was still stuck in the mud of machismo, he wore a dress on Top Of The Pops. 

Whereas it often takes seven songwriters to forge a piece of pap for Katy Perry, Bowie wrote nearly all his classics by himself. 

He managed it by finding wise sounding boards – Tony Visconti to supply bubbling enthusiasm, Brian Eno for lucid analysis – and borrowing artfully. 

Rebel Rebel was the greatest Stones song that wasn’t by the Stones, and that’s a crowded field. 

As a bandleader Bowie attracted everyone from Rick Wakeman, who played the piano on Life On Mars?, to Nile Rodgers, who put the fizz into Let’s Dance. Eno once made a list of all the things the music consisted of, apart from the music. 

One of them was image. The early masters of this dark art had been managers like Brian Epstein or moguls like Berry Gordy. Bowie was the first superstar to supervise his own iconography. 

He was a postmodern superstar whose main theme was stardom itself. Yet for all his detachment, Bowie knew that music exists to move us

Every album sleeve was a statement, from Aladdin Sane (a look as beloved and memorable as Abbey Road) to Blackstar (the first of the 25 studio albums not to feature his face, as if he had already left the stage). 

Every year there was a new hairstyle; Bowie’s career would have been very different if he’d gone bald. 

And so would that of a man who nicked this trick when they shared a publicist: David Beckham. Bowie should have an airport named after him (how about it, Gatwick?), because he launched things. He was the godfather of art-pop. 

‘No Shadows,’ George Harrison once said, ‘no Beatles.’ 

Well, no Bowie, no Talking Heads, no Eurythmics, no Smiths, no Radiohead, no Blur, no Arcade Fire. His influence has even been acknowledged by Kanye West, who usually assumes that all great things originated with himself. 

The Stones’ forthcoming exhibition is a clear nod to 2013’s David Bowie Is at the V&A. 

That show demonstrated an enduring trait: self-awareness. He could stand back from his work even while performing it. 

After three years as a one-hit wonder, he became a star only by creating one, Ziggy Stardust. When he shed that mask there were several more underneath. 

He was a postmodern superstar whose main theme was stardom itself. Yet for all his detachment, Bowie knew that music exists to move us. In his own oeuvre lurks a seam of deep feeling, running from Wild Is The Wind to Where Are We Now? 

And now we can add Lazarus, widely quoted on Tuesday’s front pages and circulated as a video: famous last chords. In person, Bowie was chatty, jokey, almost too polite; to meet him was to wonder if this was yet another mask. 

In a 50-year career, he never lost his hunger. A veteran promoter told me that of all the stars he’d worked with, two ‘wanted it’ more than the rest: Mick Jagger and David Bowie. What he wanted in the end was dignity. 

His final years were supremely stage-managed. When everyone thought he was dying, he was fine; when nobody thought he was dying, he was slipping away. 

During that long silence he became a kind of living god. 

The cool, calm comeback that followed sharpens the sorrow now, but, however much we mourn him, we’ll still have the music. 

His strengths will live on, in his children and his countless heirs. Kate Bush has the fearless autonomy, Damon Albarn the restless creativity, Tilda Swinton the protean charisma. 

But there is nobody, dead or alive, who has the lot.