by 
I never thought David Bowie would die.
Oh, I know we all do eventually, but he carried with him such an aura of invincibility that if anyone could cheat the passage of time I assumed it would be The Thin White Duke.
This brilliantly talented, outrageously creative glittering chameleon of a man; a master of reinvention who smashed down so many barriers in music, fashion, film and art.
He remained so resolutely, absurdly cool right to the end.
Who else but Bowie could die in the very week he releases a new album, Blackstar, with a dominant theme of death?
This was no accident.
His long-time friend and producer Tony Visconti wrote on Facebook: ‘His death was no different from his life, a work of art. He made Blackstar for us, a parting gift.’
I felt the same palpable sense of shock and loss this morning that I felt when John Lennon died.
Bowie and Lennon were to me the greatest British rock stars of them all; a pair of uncompromising, ferociously charismatic and singularly individual characters who didn’t give a damn what people thought of them.
‘Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them,’ Bowie once opined.
For him, as with Lennon, the opposite was true.
Bowie became ever more fascinating through the years because he knew how to play the fame game better than anyone else.