Poised, lithe, on the edge of the stage, swathed in billowing white fabric, he glares out at his audience with glittering intensity: it’s no wonder every ’lectric eye in the Hammersmith Odeon clings to David Bowie. I’m only watching a YouTube clip of this 1973 ‘Moonage Daydream’ performance, but I’m spellbound too. Ten years after his death, his magic hasn’t worn off. As he declaims lyrics that slip innuendo into sci-fi gibberish, and waltzes in strange synergy with silky-haired guitarist Mick Ronson, you feel you’re watching something extraordinary. Someone beyond human.

“He was both complement and antidote to the macho space race obsession of his era, populating the stars with a colourful, kooky cast”

The word ‘alien’ orbits Bowie, a constant association. His first hit, ‘Space Oddity’, which coincided almost to the day with Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon, entwined him with space in the cultural imagination. He was both complement and antidote to the macho space race obsession of his era, populating the stars with a colourful, kooky cast: a Starman, a Spaceboy, a Martian rocker and his arachnid entourage. Bowie’s inventions boogied beyond flag-planting American and Soviet forces. And, shifting among personas and from folk to rock to soul to experimental soundscape to pop, all in one absurdly productive decade (the 1970s), his creative capacity seemed superhuman, too.

Many of Bowie’s seminal tracks – ‘Sweet Thing’, ‘Station to Station’, ‘Blackstar’ – are kaleidoscopes that flash with cryptic meanings, as though he’s speaking otherworldly tongues. It’s his look, too: his vivid makeup, angularity, and asymmetric gaze. No wonder he made such a convincing extra-terrestrial in The Man Who Fell to Earth: he’d rehearsed the role for his whole career.

“Mundane human heartache is the constant undercurrent of Bowie’s music”

Even though your eyes insist he must be more than human, your ears suggest he’s more human than anyone. Mundane human heartache is the constant undercurrent of Bowie’s music: running from the tortured fraternal tenderness of ‘Bewlay Brothers’ in 1971 to the nostalgia of 2013’s ‘Where Are We Now? ’ In ‘I Would Be Your Slave’, a tense beat and simmering strings flow over a tumult of feeling, as religious doubt pours out in the lexicon of a spurned lover. Who knows if it’s introspection or ventriloquism? Bowie inhabited ordinary people, as well as aliens: take ‘God Knows I’m Good’, which exposes the pained conscience of an older, female shoplifter as she “hot with worry, slyly slips a tin of a stewing steak” from the supermarket shelf. The full weight of her panic and indignity trembles in Bowie’s 22-year-old voice.

It would be easy to frame this as two clashing sides of Bowie’s artistry: the alien aura, disguising the human soul. But I think the link is more intimate.

Every year on the anniversary of Bowie’s death, one interview clip circulates again: an interviewer asks if his shoes are men’s shoes or women’s. “They’re shoe-shoes silly,” Bowie giggles in reply. It’s almost like watching one of the Time Lords in Doctor Who, for whom gender is a more trifling matter than it feels to our silly species.

In a time like the 1970s, Bowie’s androgyny was part of his alienness. Coolly transcending the rules, he mocks their rigidity: some of his laddiest titles, ‘All the Young Dudes’ and ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, belie cheeky winks at crossdressing and bisexuality. But on a song like ‘Rebel Rebel’, when Bowie flings his anything-goes attitude outwards, into a love song, warmth sweeps irony aside. Not everyone can transcend expectations as loftily as Bowie seems to. But by announcing his affection for messy, androgynous outsiders, Bowie – in Alex Petridis’ words – throws “a metaphorical arm around the shoulder of every teenage misfit”.

“You don’t have to be an astronaut to identify with ’Space Oddity’s mood of helpless drift”

After all, to become alien is to align oneself with alienated people – those on the social margins or disconnected form their own lives. You don’t have to be an astronaut to identify the mood of helpless drift of ‘Space Oddity’. Indeed, after an 11-year interval, the song got its self-scrutinising sequel. In sardonic acknowledgement of the coke dependence that fuelled Bowie’s youth, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ endorses a popular reading that Major Tom is a drug-addict: his trip to space is a trip that goes wrong, leaving him “Strung out in heavens high, hitting an all-time low”. Major Tom the astronaut isn’t cancelled out by Major Tom the junkie: Bowie’s artistry makes room for two realities, the Tom in space and the Tom on the ground. Bowie himself is both. He can descend on a dime from the partying Martian to the lonely girl wondering if there really could be “Life On Mars?”

Just over a decade ago now, and mere days before he died, Bowie released Blackstar: his apotheosis. Experimental till the last, Bowie overlays a dark, pulsing, jazz-rock sound with lyrics proclaiming his godlike ascension to the stars. At the same time, grappling with mortality, he is at his most confessional, most vulnerable, most frail. The final lyric of his final song – in a way, the last words of Bowie, the musical artist – is “I can’t give everything away”. His voice reverberates, shatteringly human, even as, behind them, a spacey guitar melody seems to float up to a better place.

“I Can’t Give Everything Away”. Oh, David, we can’t give you away either. And maybe we don’t have to – at least, not all of you. On the ten-year anniversary of Bowie’s death, at my favourite pub in Camden, a Bowie tribute band played to a gleeful reception. I will never see him live, or experience a venue electrified by his alien presence. But shouting the words to ‘Changes’ in tandem with a jubilant, multi-generational crowd softened my jealousy for that rapturous audience in the Hammersmith Odeon, just a bit. The alien in Bowie set him apart. The human in Bowie still brings us together.