DAVID Bowie was that rare kind of rock star: You didn't have to like his music to admire him. He was a business visionary like the ones in Silicon Valley who don't see the point of building companies: He was his own greatest product.

Bowie, born David Jones, died on Jan 10 at the age of 69, a bohemian who had amassed a fortune thanks in part to his many firsts. Cataloguing them would probably be a futile exercise, but some are worth recalling in the same spirit with which his fans now play his songs to remember him.

Bowie's decision to get into rock music was the result of a conscious search for a way to blend business and creativity. Here's how he described it in a BBC interview: "I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend. I didn't want to be a trend, I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new ideas and new perspectives. And so I had to govern everything around that. So I pulled myself in, and decided to use the easiest medium to start off with - which was rock and roll - and to add bits and pieces to it over the years, so that by the end of it, I was my own medium."