For Fans of David Bowie

When Bowie moved to Berlin in 1976 and started working with Brian Eno, both were trying to escape something: he was escaping cocaine and Los Angeles, Eno was exploring the far edge of ambient music. 'Low', 'Heroes', and 'Lodger' are the result. The first side of 'Low' sounds like pop songs halfway through being dissolved in acid. The second side is pure texture, no vocals for stretches, Eno's synthesizers doing what orchestras hadn't done before. 'Heroes', the title track, is one of the greatest recordings of the 20th century: a love song recorded by two people standing forty feet apart in a studio, the guitar feedback controlled by placing microphones at different distances from the amp. Nobody called it ambient pop or art rock at the time because nobody had a box to put it in.

Jim Henson directed it, George Lucas produced it, and Bowie wrote four original songs for it including 'Magic Dance' and 'As the World Falls Down'. On paper that sounds like committee fantasy, but in practice the film is strange and sincere in equal measure. Jareth the Goblin King is one of the few roles that required Bowie's particular brand of menace: elegant, slightly terrifying, androgynous in a way that the character genuinely needed to be. Jennifer Connelly holds the whole thing together as a teenager learning that the story she told herself about the world wasn't quite right. Decades later it reads as a film about adolescence made by people who actually remembered adolescence clearly.

Bowie recorded 'Blackstar' knowing he was dying of liver cancer. His longtime producer Tony Visconti has said that the album was a parting gift, deliberately enigmatic so that fans would spend years inside it. The title track runs ten minutes and shifts time signatures like breathing. 'Lazarus', the single released two days before his death, has a video of Bowie in a hospital bed rising to float and then retreating backward into a wardrobe: not morbid, but mythic. The album won five Grammy Awards posthumously. As last statements go, it is almost unreasonably good.

Nicolas Roeg's 1976 adaptation of Walter Tevis's novel cast Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who arrives on Earth to save his dying planet and slowly loses his purpose in a fog of television and loneliness. Bowie said he didn't have to act much: he was so depleted and dissociated during filming that Newton's alienation came naturally. The film is not conventionally satisfying (no third-act resolution, no escape) but it is haunting in a way that few science-fiction films have been before or since. The novel is equally good and equally bleak.