If each man's death diminishes us, we're all about a foot shorter today. When Elvis Presley died, his manager Colonel Tom Parker said "this won't change anything!", and he promptly set about ensuring his client's immortality by turning him into a production line of merchandise and memorabilia. This won't happen to David Bowie, because he had already seized control of his own myth. It will continue to be felt indefinitely in his influence on music, video, art and the the nature of stardom itself.

He knew.

18 months of dealing with cancer, and rather than withdraw and rest – as he'd done before – David Bowie knuckled down made a record as intense and disturbing as anything he's done before. The Next Day was a worthy return to the fray but Blackstar... Even before we heard the terrible news, just taken on its own merits, Blackstar was something else. And now, knowing that he knew, it's absolutely fearsome in its confrontation with death.

The 100 Club is dark. Really dark. People are shrouded in the ink-light. I think it’s to save their embarrassment as they order a drink and realise they’ll have to either apply for a loan or sell a child in order to get drunk. In any case, the indoor gloaming provides the perfect setting for the opening act of the evening, Demian Castellanos. The creative helm of psych-rock act The Oscillation, he's on his own tonight with a wordless solo set showcasing new material.

In the arts there is never a best of anything. There is good, great and glorious. But best? There is, however, Stop Making Sense. Talking Heads invited the director Jonathan Demme to film them in performance over three nights in December 1983 at Pantages Theater in Hollywood. The result is (arguably) the greatest concert movie ever made.

Normally, if an album as good as The Man Who Sold the World had itself sold the sum total of sod all on release, it would have been lost, then found, before becoming a fêted rarity, exchanging hands for hundreds while bootleggers had a field day. The fact that it was a David Bowie album meant that, despite the initial indifferent shrug from the buying public, it’s shifted more than a million and a half copies. It remains, however, overlooked and underrated by many.

It was almost exactly a year ago (January 8, 2013, to be precise) that we awoke to the news that David Bowie, far from dying, retiring, or living the half-life of a rock and roll renunciant in his Riverside apartment, had blindsided us all by sneak-releasing his first new work in a decade on the morning of his 66th birthday.

The weary reflection of "Where Are We Now?” was so perfectly measured, and its nil-by-mouth marketing strategem – in which absence, to paraphrase James Joyce, became the most potent form of presence – so perfect that one wondered whether Bowie shouldn’t just quit while he was ahead: to return with one last sigh of a single and then simply disappear again would have been a deliciously dramatic exit. But there was news of an album, too, and I rather feared it might be a damp squib by comparison.

Even if were possible to unstitch the music on 'The Next Day' from its extraordinary context, who would want to?

When The Next Day duly arrived in March, however, it was far, far better than anyone had any right to expect. Here was a Bowie who made a mockery of the hand-wringing rumours of terminal decay; a Bowie brimful of purpose and direction, unafraid to confront past glories. Musically the album pinched from and pecked at his past, most obviously - and to greatest effect on the title track and the delightfully cracked “Dirty Boys” - the skew-whiff art-rock of Lodger and Scary Monsters, but also revisited the desiccated Fifties rock'n'roll of Aladdin Sane, glossy mid-Eighties blues-pop, and, on "If You Can See Me", even his much-maligned jungle phase.

The Next Day sounded both familiar and fresh. Even better, everywhere you looked there were simply brilliant songs. Best of the bunch was “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die”, a beautiful ballad of dreadful retribution that touched on Bowie's own "Rock and Roll Suicide" and Dylan’s “Trying to Get to Heaven” en route to a dark and deeply personal final reckoning, in which we were warned that "some night on a thriller street / Will come the silent gun." The words on The Next Day were superb: racked, wry, bloodied, furious, reflective, with so much to say it was almost daunting.

I was instantly smitten, and remain so, enough to make sweeping allowances without apology. Objectively, there were two or three tracks (you want names? OK, “Boss of Me” and “Set the World on Fire”) that could have been left on the subs’ bench (although, as it happens, the subsequent Deluxe and Extra editions of the album confirmed that the B-team was hardly lacking in talent: the peppy “So She” and grandiose “The Informer” were two of several heavyweight contenders).

It's not perfect, but it's still the album I cherish most from 2013. Even if were possible to unstitch the music on The Next Day from its extraordinary context, who would want to? It became a better album by virtue of being such an unexpected gift, and also - take note, binge interviewees - for being left by its creator to speak up entirely for itself. After 10 years of nothing I would have happily embraced a patchy, creakily well-meaning return. That what we got instead was a very, very good David Bowie album, full of blood and beauty and heart and angry vigour, was joyous indeed. Frankly, I'm still pinching myself.

• David Bowie: The Last Five Years reviewed on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for "Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix)"

Various Artists: Oh Yes We Can Love – A History of Glam Rock

Forty four years ago David Bowie was living in the spare room of the suburban flat I shared with my two young children. He was broke and I was only occasionally employed – so we started a Sunday night folk club in the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street – for fun and so he could pay me some rent.

Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour?

How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense.