UNTIL then it had all been about jumpers. The Spinners. Val Doonican. Gilbert O'Sullivan with the big G. How warm, how safe.

Then there was Starman, on Top Of The Pops, when Top Of The Pops really became Top Of The Pops. Who's that man? What's that man? That was the kind of question your parents were supposed to ask. Not a boy of all of 11 in 1972. It was David Bowie, of course, Mr David Jones, and keeping up with the many Joneses that followed was to fixate young Hutch like so many others.

Being born in 1961 meant you rather missed the Sixties, especially in a house where The Spinners, Val's rocking chair and The Seekers' Georgy Girl passed as musical entertainment. But the Seventies were different, as different as Bowie's eye colours, and musical education was led by Mr Bowie in his myriad incarnations that came along as regularly as exams.

Ziggy Stardust had indeed seemed from another planet, but it started the fascination, later aided by the re-release of Space Oddity and that curio he disowned, The Laughing Gnome. He gladly gave All The Young Dudes to Mott The Hoople to make Ian Hunter the star he deserved to be.

You grew to understand the power of the whole package: the clothes; the hair; the album sleeves; the films; the Ziggy farewell; the rise of the Thin White Duke; Young Americans; goodbye America; the Berlin trilogy, Low, Heroes and Lodger; always more than one step ahead. Working with Brian Eno, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop. He even came up with a silly name for a son, Zowie, before it became the celebrity norm.

Image has always been part of pop, from Presley to Malcolm McLaren's media manipulation with The Sex Pistols and ZTT's savvy exploitation of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but Bowie could surprise like no-one else, full of mystery and mystique. Ashes To Ashes found him riffing on his Major Tom past while leaving the New Romantics in their wake, and Let's Dance and Absolute Beginners were so sure-footed.

Not every re-invention worked, however. Tin Machine was the Clive Sinclair C5 of his career; 'Bowie does drum and bass' on Earthling in 1997 was more science experiment than art.

Then came the silent decade, broken without warning by The Next Day in 2013. By contrast, much fanfare and saturation media coverage trailed the arrival of Blackstar, his new excursion into melancholic jazz, on his 69th birthday.

Two days later, the star had fizzled out, and his videos for Lazarus and Blackstar were being viewed anew as valedictory notes, a final statement as poignant as Johnny Cash's Hurt. Where The Next Day's artwork played on his past, Blackstar had projected The End, a secret to the last.

David Bowie had the swagger of The Rolling Stones; the innovative, inventive powers of The Beatles; he was the prettiest star bar Elvis, with whom he shared his birthday.

His Spiders From Mars all came from Yorkshire; his voice from London and beyond the rainbow. He wrote Rebel Rebel, Heroes, Changes. He was the man who fell to Earth, the alien from Brixton, now back with the stars once more.