The latin phrase “nullius in verba” means “take no one’s word for it” and is the motto of the Royal Society.
It is important that we don’t take everything we read and hear as gospel and that we verify all information. This is more vital than ever today in the current “post truth” social media age in which we live. But it is not just within the realms of social media and the free for all ocean of misinformation. Whenever we are presented with or discover new information, it is always important that we do our own research.
In a way “nullius in verba” really means “find out for yourself” or “think for yourself”. It is an antidote to groupthink and encourages us to always draw our own conclusions on something regardless of how believable and credible it may seem to us.
The problem we often have as humans is that we are prone to cognitive biases. It is sometimes too much effort to always verify something and thus we sometimes fail to heed these words. Beyond the effort part, there is also a social stigma issue. That is why groupthink is often so popular. Many people don’t want to stand out and be seen as a tall poppy. They would prefer to fit in and not rock the boat.
But taking no one’s word for something and finding out for ourselves is worth the effort. It can be a rewarding path as we discover unique truths or even secrets. This is something I touched on in an earlier post of mine entitled Just Gimme Some Secrets. In this post I explore truths that very few people agree on, whilst simultaneously unpacking truths or statements that many people believe in yet contain lots of holes. However, I certainly do not advocate contrianism willy nilly. Contrarianism can also be a cognitive bias in itself if abused. Not all universal truths are untrue!
But this is something we have to find out for ourselves.
Nigeria in the 1970s was buzzing with music across different genres. In West Africa, specifically in Nigeria and Ghana, one of the principal genres of recorded music since the late 1950s was highlife. By the 1970s, highlife music was huge and a core genre of recorded music in both countries. During that decade, the music industry in Nigeria was one of the biggest in Africa. In addition to highlife music, afrobeat also became a dominant genre and there were many releases across other genres such as funk, soul, disco and psychedelic rock. Some of the psychedelic rock bands in Nigeria from that time include Blo, Ofege, Monomono, The Funkees and Ofo The Black Company. All fine bands. However, there is one band from that time that I want to focus on called The Hygrades.
The Hygrades were formed in the early 1970s in the eastern Nigerian city of Enugu by guitarist and producer Goddy Oku. Oku was also an engineer and considered something of a technical wizzkid. He had a reputation for fixing and constructing amplifiers, pedals and even guitars. Before forming The Hygrades, he was already a notable figure on the local music scene and was a member of a band called The Postmen in the mid 1960s when he was only in his teens. According to Charles Okosuns, the brother of Sunny Okosuns who was the band’s lead singer, The Postmen were seen as the first major pop group in eastern Nigeria and were also one of the first Nigerian pop bands to release records. They released a single called “Shillings and Pence” that was a local hit. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any of this band’s releases on Discogs and there is limited information on the internet. I am guessing that that particular single must be almost impossible to find hence the lack of info. The band’s career was cut short in 1967 by civil war that broke out in the country. Yet despite the war and break up of the band, Oku remained active and was a member of legendary highlife star Celestine Ukwu’s Philosophers National band. Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National for me were one of the best highlife groups from Nigeria and I highly recommend checking out their material. Oku features on their first album release, True Philosophy, which in my opinion is one of their strongest releases and a good place to start for those who want to explore Ukwu’s music.
When The Hygrades formed in the early 1970s, they only released four singles on the Nigerian branch of the HMV label from 1971-2. Those 45s are very hard to find and often when they do come on the market they are not in great condition. I am very lucky to have a copy of their first 45 release; the double sider Jumping Cat/Baby, from 1971. The track “Baby” on side B was a big hit in eastern Nigeria. It’s a good song, however, for me it pales next to “Jumping Cat”, an instrumental psych rock gem. Oku’s guitar playing is red hot on that song. Even though my “well used” copy suffers from chronic surface noise, Goddy’s nimble guitar playing still glows.
The Hygrades – “Jumping Cat” and “Baby”:
In 1971, the band released another 45 on HMV; the double sider Rough Rider/Keep On Moving. “Keep On Moving” has an obvious funky James Brown influence with some killer guitar and organ riffing. But the best is saved for the A side instrumental “Rough Rider”, which contains another round of blazing Goddy guitar fretwork a la “Jumping Cat”.
The Hygrades – “Rough Rider”:
The Hygrades – “Keep On Moving”:
The Hygrades released their third single in 1972, “In The Jungle”. On side A there is a “vocal” version of the song and on side B the “instrumental” version. For me, it is again the instrumental version of the song that stands out and is another sizzling slice of wild fuzz psych wah-wah guitar tones courtesy of the Goddymeister. And the repetitive but equally infectious hammond organ riffing makes that track extra special.
The Hygrades – “In The Jungle” (instrumental version):
The Hygrades – “In The Jungle” (vocal version):
The band released their fourth and final singer in 1972, Somebody’s Gonna Lose Or Win/Day Dreamer. For me, it’s the vocal track “Somebody’s Gonna Lose Or Win” that is the strongest track on the single and I would say is probably my favourite of the vocal tracks across their four singles. It is a potent cocktail of classic funk, dynamic vocals and of course Goddy’s unmistakable guitar playing.
The Hygrades – “Somebody’s Gonna Lose Or Win”:
The Hygrades – “Day Dreamer”:
Oku soon left the band after their forth single and would not make any music again until 1976. He built a recording studio in his home called Godiac Studio and produced and released a solo album called Jesus Is The One, which was released on his own record label, Godiac Records. Over the next few years he released and produced a number of religious gospel albums on his label including a further solo album entitled Love One Another.
He continued to run Godiac Studio recording many albums there over the years and decades until his death a few years ago in September 2023. Even though he continued to record and produce music over that time, he mostly avoided answering questions related to The Hygrades and I guess within the context of his entire music career, they represent a very brief moment in time. But during those two years from 1971-2 when they released these four singles, they burned very bright.
2024 Hygrades compilation released by Dig This Way Records and Sleeve Records
The following year since Goddy Oku passed away in 2024, an Italian record label called Dig This Way Records in partnership with Sleeve Records released a compilation album on vinyl containing all eight of those Hygrades songs released across their four singles. I am the proud owner of a copy of that record and it is a fantastic compilation; a true labour of love and a wonderful way of bringing their music to a wider audience and new generation of listeners such as myself. As an added special bonus, the compilation album also contains a four page insert of liner notes by Uchenna Ikonne. It is an excellent and thorough read of the history of the band and of Oku himself. Even though those Hygrades songs are featured also on other compilations of music from that time, there is very little information on the internet about the band and on Oku himself so Ikonne’s liner notes are much welcomed.
I’ve been going over some of my older articles that I wrote on new and emerging technologies. Some of these are now almost ten years old. Back in August 2017, I published an article entitled How 3D Printing Could Be The Biggest Thing To Affect Our Lives Since The Internet. In this article, I talk about the great potential that 3D Printing has in transforming different industries. I specifically talk about how it has the power to change the manufacturing, construction and medical industries. Back in 2013/14, there was a lot of excitement around 3D Printing, dare I say almost verging on hype, with all kinds of grand predictions being made regarding its future potential. It was easy to see why there was this fever around this new and innovative technology and all the solutions it could offer. It felt like one was witnessing the very early days of the internet. And I myself was very excited and could see the possibilities. Some people were even saying that by 2020, every household would have a 3D printer. That prediction has sadly not turned out to be true and to this day 3D Printing remains far from mainstream adoption. However, that is not to say this won’t ever happen. It is simply that far from being able to predict the future, there is a tendency to overestimate the speed of technology adoption.
There are people who underestimate new and emerging technologies. Just like there were many people who underestimated the future potential of the internet in its early days. However, it is also easy to fall into the trap of overestimating the speed and development of new and emerging technologies. I think that is what a lot of people got wrong (including myself) with 3D Printing. This is not to say that 3D Printing does not have a future. I think it absolutely does, but getting the timing right regarding when this technology will be adopted en masse is the tricky part. It may be that it happens at some point soon in the future and when it happens it happens very fast. Perhaps the rise and exponential evolution of AI (a topic I also focused on quite a lot during this time) may help speed up the development of 3D Printing and free it from many of the bottlenecks it’s currently facing. Who knows?
Back in 2016 I wrote an article where I focused on Virtual Reality (VR) technology entitled Virtual Reality: Further From The Source where I envisaged the possibilities and growth of this new technology. Similarly, a year later I wrote another article entitled How Virtual Reality And Augmented Reality Technologies Will Transform Education. In that article I foresaw a future of students wearing Augmented Reality (AR) glasses in the classroom to enhance their learning experience. As I write this article almost nine years later we are still not at that stage yet. And VR technology is still far from mainstream adoption even if it has been around for more than a decade now. Facebook (now Meta) acquired the VR company Oculus in 2014. And yet for the vast majority of users of its subsidiary platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the user experience still remains a 2D experience. That’s not to say that one day this could all change, but I guess in this case the speed of technology adoption for VR was overestimated.
Sometimes one can simply be too early. When Google launched their pioneering Google Glass, a set of smart eyeglasses, back in 2013, it was a flop. This was not because it wasn’t a good product. It was simply that people were not ready for it even if the developers of the product at Google X were perhaps expecting such a game changing product to be widely adopted. Yet it was far too early for mainstream adoption. People had legitimate concerns regarding privacy and safety and thus it was not a success despite its innovation. More recently, there has been controversy over Meta’s Ray Ban smartglasses. The backlash has been pretty strong with some labelling them as “pervert glasses”. What’s interesting is that those specific glasses don’t contain AR technology (although the Meta Orion ones do as well as the Ray Ban Meta Display glasses in a more limited capacity), but they do contain a built in camera with speakers and AI technology. Although these glasses do have many benefits, the privacy concerns continue to be a problem. And this is more than a decade after the launch of Google Glass.
However, just to be clear, this is not an article that does not believe in technological innovation. On the contrary, and as per my previous tech articles, I have often seen the potential with many new and emerging technologies. But what has proved tricky is trying to predict when some of these technologies would reach a tipping point where they become adopted en mass. It could be that with smart glasses, and perhaps more advanced ones with AR and VR technology, that tipping point could happen pretty soon despite all the challenges and setbacks so far.
The French artist Louis Cane once said to me when he was going through a catalogue of my paintings that I should “make a lot of noise”. However, he wasn’t very specific regarding what kind of “noise” I should be making. For me, there are two kinds of noise. There is “cheap noise” and then there is “expensive noise”. “Cheap noise” is of the vulgar shouty variety. Sometimes though it can work and it has worked for several artists, but it is a slippery slope. It reeks of desperation and shameless whoring. And it runs the risk of cheapening good work. The focus ceases to be on the work. “Expensive noise”, on the other hand, is more august. This is a fine and subtle noise where stealth rather than shouting reigns supreme. In this case, you create something so powerful and profound that people naturally gravitate towards it and sometimes in a furious stampede-like way. And the artist hasn’t muttered a word.
The entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel in his book Zero To One states that competition is for losers. I sometimes thought that competition was a corrosive thing and that I was above it. After all, with my art I create my own world and that world is nobody else’s but my own. I am not competing with anyone.
But what is competition and is it a bad thing?
Within the realm of art and the art world, one could objectively and in a plain vanilla black and white way come to the not unreasonable conclusion that it is a highly competitive space. And along those lines I guess one could look at competition in two different ways;
To view competition as a healthy and positive thing. Dare I say, as something inspirational. That it is used as fuel to be not just a better and more driven and committed artist. But also to be a better person; a less self absorbed and narcissistic person who better understands other artists and what they are trying to convey rather than to just be stuck, entangled and rutted in their own world.
To view competition as a threat resulting in chronic envy whenever an artist, especially an artist you may know, becomes very successful while you find that success is always eluding you. You begin to develop negative and destructive thoughts along the lines of believing that you deserve success just as much simply because you believe yourself to be a unique artist and that “mediocre or bad art should not be rewarded”. This mindset is a one way ticket to terminal misery. It is a veritable road to perdition.
I think that being too fixated on the morality/fairness aspect of the art world is deadly; it is like drinking from a cup of slow acting poison. What is “bad/good art” anyway? As I said, getting into the shoes and mind of an artist you do not rate and whose work you think “doesn’t cut it” is far healthier than explicitly condemning them and lamenting “how unfair” and “how full of sh*t” the art world is.
We all have insecurities and having some insecurities can be good. It keeps you on your toes and ignites a fire in the soul. Too much comfort often leads to lethargy and inertia. However, being submerged in insecurities to the point where it is toxic and unhealthy, instilling bad vibes and negative energy, is not a good thing.
The art critic David Sylvester said that, “Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on.”
Sylvester said this all in 1969. Yet, I think today, in the age of social media, his words are more important then ever. Social media platforms like Instagram can be useful vehicles for making connections and sharing our artwork and processes. However, it can sometimes breed in us a rigid perfectionism; that we must showcase the best of what we have to offer and never be encouraged to fail and take risks. This duality of what is good and bard art is unnecessary and quite destructive. Similarly is being too precious to the point where it kind of functions as a straitjacket and we don’t realise the whole totality of everything that we have to offer.
The right to make “bad art” is almost paradoxically a very emancipating, inspiring and edifying thing. To the point where it renders perfectionism a cul-de-sac.
As an artist I’ve come to the realisation that I now care less regarding whether I and/or my work is “understood”. It is of little to no importance to me since I do not paint or create works with a primary overarching mission to “be understood”. In fact, there is nothing to understand in my paintings. I don’t have any “goal” nor am I trying to make any kind of statement. If I have to say anything in relation to my work it is what I’ve said many times in the past; “I paint my feelings”. Or, more broadly, I paint my inner invisible world. And my paintings are visible artefacts of this invisible world. Thus my paintings are meant to be “felt” more than “understood”.
There are artists I admire, but there is no single artist that really influences me since essentially my core root/source is my inner world. Take the artist Jackson Pollock, for example. His paintings are not meant to be understood and its a fool’s errand to attempt to understand them. For me, his paintings are 100% about feeling. The duality of him as a person and his processes of creating are for me all about energy and feeling. No other artist matches Pollock here. And its a very permanent, primordial and universal thing; transcending the parameters of space and time.
I like to call my painting technique Spiritual Coding. In the digital world in which we currently live the word coding is used a lot. This of course refers to computer programming. A language for this age. And when I look at my paintings I am also using my own language. A language created through interacting with my ‘inner being’ and this I call Spiritual Coding. My paintings are in many ways remnants of this. Tangible photographs almost of my eternal spirit. Although they don’t capture the processes of my work they are residue formations of intense spiritual journeying and internal searching.
Making The Invisible Visible
I would like to expand further on this by saying that in my paintings I make the fleeting invisible world visible. My eternal shadow is the eternal unconscious ocean of my being. When I paint or create, I dive straight into this quarter. I hesitate to call it a vast empty quarter such as a desert, although a desert landscape can stir inside of me strong almost monolithically primordial visions and by no designs of my own. In my essay from ten years, I compared my paintings to deserts that only become alive as one becomes more connected spiritually with themselves. However, I like the metaphor of the ocean. When one dives into it it is akin to diving into the vast invisible unconscious space of our being. Roughly 70% of our planet’s surface is covered by oceans. The dry land portion of our planet is what is noticeably visible. There are hidden elements but the ocean is the true hidden portion of our world. All we see is just the skin and we are denied easy exploration. Most of the low hanging fruit is on land. When I paint I am taking a dive into this invisible and unknown unconscious world. I don’t know what I’ll discover or find and when I am painting, especially in the deeper more meditative stages of my painting process, it can feel like it isn’t me consciously painting.
Painting From The Eternal Source
Any recurring symbols or motifs in my paintings are from that same place. Like those created by prehistoric cave painters, for example. Some people say that all art is political, but I give the pollution and toxicity of politics and even culture a wide birth. It is all an anathema to the eternal source. These are ephemeral things that burn bright for just a very brief interval in the grander passage of time.
I paint at varying, alternating degrees of tempo. I don’t paint at one consistent speed. At times I attack the canvas whereas at other times I am more restrained like a cautious diligent heart surgeon carrying out a complex operation. In this moment when I decide to apply the next brush stroke is of great importance to me since by applying the stroke in the wrong place or too prematurely can alter the entire composition and metamorphization of it. Some artists say that there are no mistakes and I guess that is generally true. However, in these moments I do not have the luxury to make mistakes.
When explaining my painting process in the past I may have placed a big emphasis on spontaneity and that is a core part of my painting process. Part of “Spiritual Coding” is that direct connection to the eternal source with no external fleeting elements standing in the way. However, there are times when I have to look and observe at the totality of the composition so far before I can continue any further. Mark Rothko, for example, would spend a great deal of time observing his paintings, of what he had created so far, before continuing and making his next move. Whereas an artist like Jackson Pollock had that perpetual spontaneous carnal ferocity. I have both; painting in different tempos and time signatures. Often spontaneous, but also more controlled. However, the eternal source always guides me. When I paint, I very seldom reference any external material like any preliminary sketches for example. And that is what Spiritual Coding is; letting the eternal source be my guide.
By Nicholas Peart
9th August 2026
(c)All Rights Reserved
Image: “Deep Forest Spirits (1/3)” (2020) by Nicholas Peart
Leopold Aschenbrenner is a young German AI researcher and investor only in his mid 20s. From 2023 to 2024 he worked for Open AI. During his tenure at the company he was part of their “Superalignment” team that made technological breakthroughs with AI systems more complex and intelligent than humans. The team was eventually wound down and Aschenbrenner was fired from the company over an alleged information leak. Not long after his dismissal from the company he authored a 165 page essay entitled “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”, which was published in June 2024. In his essay he outlines the future trajectory and evolution of AI and the risks along the way. His essay received an enormous amount of global attention and raised his profile substantially.
After publishing his essay, he established a hedge fund called Situational Awareness LP (named after his essay and focused on AI), which received backing and funding from a bunch of heavyweight tech entrepreneurs and investors such as Patrick and John Collison (the co-founders of the fintech company Stripe), Daniel Goss and Nat Friedman.
Since the launch of the fund in July 2024 until just a couple of months ago, the fund made gains in excess of 1000%. That is a more than impressive gain in such a relatively short time span. This only cemented observers and investors’ views that the kid was a genius with the midas touch and a unique prescience. Until just last month when the fund collapsed from $45bn of assets to just $10bn. Now you may be thinking how could the value of the fund have collapsed so spectacularly in such a short space of time? Yet you could also ask the opposite question, how could the fund have racked up such spectacular gains in just two years? The answer of course is the L word; leverage. Whilst many investors and observers were drunk on the halo effect and would naturally attribute the past success of the fund to Leopold’s genius, a few actually cared to properly scrutinise the fund. And those that bothered to do any diligence were shocked by what they discovered. Their own research revealed that the company used as much as 400% leverage and thus they were not at all that surprised when the fund crashed hard.
This is not the first time something like this has happened nor I suspect will it be the last. Back in the mid to late 1990s, during the heating up of the dot-com bubble, there was an American hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management. LTCM was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether who had previously been the vice chairman and head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers. The fund’s board of directors included some very distinguished individuals such as Myron Scholes and Robert C Merton who both jointly won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1997 for their development of the Black-Scholes model; a mathematical model commonly used in derivatives trading. LTCM was initially successful with healthy double digit percentage annual returns. However, in 1998 things started to go badly wrong for the fund. In that year it lost $4.6bn in under four months due to taking on leverage (that L word again!) and exposure to both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 1998 Russian financial crisis. The fund was on the cusp of collapse that year and was only saved by a $3.6bn bailout from a group of 14 banks to prevent further contagion. LTCM was eventually dissolved two years later in 2000.
When I reflect on what happened with both Situational Awareness LP and Long Term Capital Management, my key takeaway is that the market doesn’t care how smart you are. It can often be a mistake to automatically conflate intelligence or genius with making good investment decisions. This is where that aforementioned cognitive bias, the halo effect, can be particularly devastating. I think as human beings we can be strongly swayed by narratives and sometimes a strong narrative alone in something is enough to give us conviction in our investment decisions. Yet narratives, especially powerful and red hot ones, can be dangerous. There is no substitute to doing your own research. It can be gruelling and unsexy, but it can also save you.
Today marks the 10th anniversary since David Bowie passed away. I still remember that day clearly. I was in South Africa watching the news on the TV and seeing the wealth of tributes. It was a shock. He kept everything very private. In fact, I was thinking of him just a few months before he died and I was wondering when he would, if ever, decide to go on tour again? His last world tour was more than a decade before that point and I foolishly turned down the chance to see him play at Wembley Arena back in 2003. 2003-4 would be the last time he properly toured and save for a few sporadic and brief live appearances, he would never tour again.
Just a couple of days after he died on January 12th 2016, I wrote a piece entitled, “The Death Of David Bowie, The Future And 3D Printing”. This would also be my very first blog post for my newly established blog website that was originally called The Slider. In this post I not only reflect just on David himself, but also the wider context of the future and new and emerging technological developments. For example, I talk about the concept of The Singularity and the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that in 2045 artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. Back then the topic of AI was not on everybody’s lips like it is today.
And what has all this got to do with David Bowie, you may ask? For me, it is all very relevant when I think of him. Aside from being a great artist who changed the face of pop music and expanded the parameters regarding the possibilities of what being a mainstream pop artist can be, he also had remarkable prescience. As well as embracing and harassing change (as opposed to fighting it), he had a unique ability to see far into the future and had a pioneering spirit. A great example of this is his interview with Jeremy Paxman from 1999. Back then we were still in its early days of the evolution of the internet. There was a lot of excitement and hype over the internet. Naturally, there were believers and sceptics. The doubting Thomases saw the internet as just a fad whereas the believers saw the net’s huge potential. Bowie was definitely in the latter camp, but he wasn’t a blind and blinkered believer. He was one of the first artists to release his own music online and he saw the great possibilities of the internet and how it would shape our lives. Yet he could also foresee the negative impacts it would have on humanity. In the interview, Paxman remarks that the internet is “just a tool”, although I suspect he may have been playing devil’s advocate and trying to gauge Bowie’s response.
It is a popular theory to say that Bowie planned his death all along and that he checked out at the perfect time before the whole world turned to custard. It is a compelling theory, but I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it, because I firmly believe that Bowie loved life for all its ups and downs. Yes, he may have been highly secretive about his illness and meticulously planned his final album, but if he had the chance he would have given anything to live longer on this planet. In fact, I recall reading somewhere after he died that one of the things that made him the most sad about knowing that he was going to go so soon was knowing that he wouldn’t be around to see his young daughter grow. Moreover, I also seem to remember reading a tweet by his son Duncan, a few years after his death, where he said that if only David had not smoked so much throughout most of his life there would have been a good chance he would still be around. So no, I am not one of those folk who thinks that he “died at the right time”.
On the day he passed away and the days after his death, I watched people who grew up with Bowie as far back as those Ziggy Stardust days being absolutely heartbroken; as if they had lost a beloved soulmate. I was very shocked and saddened when he died. I love his music and spent a lot of time listening to his records. However, I did not grow up with his music from the early days of his career. It was the Ziggy Stardust period that was the tipping point and that finally turned him into a star after several years of struggling and false dawns. Those veteran fans remember when Bowie appeared on Top Of The Pops in the early 70s playing his song Starman with a blue guitar. For them, it was like witnessing some exotic and androgynous extra-terrestrial being. In those days long before the internet, social media and hyperconnectivity, witnessing this on the TV was exciting and a blast of colour in a colourless world. Throughout most of the 70s Bowie was firing on all cylinders creatively and almost every album he released during this period was excellent. He took risks and never rested on his laurels like some of his glam rock contemporaries and he knew when the time was right to wrap up the Ziggy phase of his music career.
Sometimes I ask myself, if Bowie were starting out today would he strive to make it as a pop star or even go into the arts full stop? Personally, I feel that he was more than just a pop star and he didn’t have all his huevos in one basket. I think one of the most important things to deduce about him, as I already explained earlier, is that he had a pioneering spirit. He embraced change and new and emerging landscapes. He was terminally curious and open minded. When Bowie’s career first really took off in the early 70s, the music industry was still growing and there was still a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of creative musical experimentation and what could be achieved. Even though there were wild and unconventional musicians that existed before Bowie first emerged, one could argue that Bowie was the first mainstream pop star who created the template for all future popstars regarding what they could be. Thus in the same way that The Beatles were probably the most influential band of all time, it would not be unreasonable to argue that David Bowie was the most influential pop star of all time.
