David Bowie's five unparalleled decades as a musical visionary

David Bowie, who has died aged 69, enjoyed an unrivalled five-decade career that saw him reinvent pop music almost as often as he reinvented himself.

He made 25 studio albums – the most recent of which, Blackstar, was released just three days before his death – and pushed the boundaries of rock music with every new release, leaving critics and fans astounded, confused, awed and even sometimes angry.

Like Lazarus, who lends his name to a track on Blackstar, he has been resurrected again and again, vanishing quietly at the end of one era only to reappear months or years later, evolving and yet unchanged, in another part of the musical continuum.

His iconic costumes and music videos have influenced generations of pop stars, and he has sold hundreds of millions of albums across the world.

Bowie’s love of travelling and losing himself in unfamiliar musical worlds is evident from the enormous variety of music he released during the 1970s alone. His wanderlust drove him to make concept glam rock albums, opaque Kraut-influenced song cycles, lengthy art-rock instrumentals, jazz, torch songs, frothy radio hits and more or less everything in between.

He worked with legends such as John Lennon, Brian Eno, Bing Crosby and Iggy Pop – and later Mick Jagger, Queen, Nile Rodgers and the Pet Shop Boys – but Bowie’s malleability was as much his trademark as his brilliance, which meant his collaborations never sounded forced or desperate, even when their results were unpalatable to FM radio.

As if to hammer the point home, he never looked the same from year to year, presenting himself as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke and Thomas Newton, the latter of which was a character from his celebrated concept film The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Among his most influential bodies of work was the monumental Berlin trilogy, recorded with ambient music’s godfather Eno and long-time collaborator Tony Visconti in the shadow of the wall dividing the east and west of that fractured city during the late 1970s.

The records, released after his challenging and transitional Station to Station LP, represented a fresh start – ‘A New Career in a New Town’, as the song of the same title put it, after a near-total drug-influenced breakdown.

Fearlessly experimental and hungrily soaking up influences from the dark, electronic German and eastern European musicians around him, Bowie and Eno plastered long, abstract instrumentals across the triptych.

But he never lost his love of a good melody, and the albums saw outbursts of atonal saxophone and bizarre tape loops rubbing shoulders with immortal pop singles like “Heroes” and “Sound and Vision”.

Twenty years later, those twin engines – experimentation and the art of the tune – drove him to make an electronica record, Earthling, and a conceptual art rock LP about a fictitious set of murders in a dystopian near future, both of which produced UK top 20 singles.