We keep on reading Paul Morley, even though every instinct shouts “stop!”, because behind all the self-regarding blather there is a hard core of resonant perception, and this makes him valuable. With The Age of Bowie, it takes 206 pages, which still isn’t halfway. Morley proposes this: “He could be read in so many different ways, because he was so hypersensitive to his own singular reality, it took him beyond the particular to a near universal view of his time.” This is more useful than, say, the observation “David Bowie is where we start from”, which even Morley must now regret.

There’s lots more in the more positive mode, as when Morley identifies a great pop song as “the future that already sounds like the past; a kind of instant heaven on earth”. Who didn’t feel a little of that the first time they heard “Let’s Dance” or “Ashes to Ashes”? Likewise when he refers, almost as an aside, to the “intolerance” – doesn’t that just hit the spot? – of the punk movement, which signally failed to topple Bowie.
Morley’s version of him is based on what’s becoming a consensus position, that Bowie was a conceptual artist who used pop as his medium and his own shifting self as the ground.