Words are inadequate when the world loses someone like David Bowie. A visionary, icon, innovator and musical genius. is rock’s greatest chameleon. Never one to sit still, he’s pointed at a new musical direction on nearly every album he’s released in his career. However, not all of them have had the same artistic and/or commercial impact,

His earliest singles, which date back to the mid-’60s, found him, like so many other London-based musicians, trying his hand at copying American R&B sounds. But his 1967 debut saw him dabble in music hall and whimsical baroque pop. Neither had any chart impact, but it still showed his willingness to experiment. It wasn’t until the “Space Oddity” single in 1969 — when he started looking towards the future instead of the past

Bowie also has a reputation as one of music’s most imaginative conceptual artists. As a writer and musician, Bowie usually attempts to convey a larger story within an album. And while sometimes that involves a total change in persona (Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke), other times it requires a shift in musical perspective (“plastic soul,” “the Berlin trilogy”).

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David Bowie fans searching for answers in the days after his death might have their first clues regarding the battle with cancer that shadowed his final 18 months.

Coming mere days after his 69th birthday and the release of his new Blackstar album, and the announcement of his passing January 10th caught the world by surprise, but to those in Bowie’s inner circle, news of his condition was nothing new. The Independent quotes stage director Ivo van Hove, who’d been working with him on his new musical Lazarus musical, as saying he’d known of Bowie’s illness for “about a year.”

“We began collaborating on our show Lazarus, and at some point he took me to one side to say that he wouldn’t always be able to be there due to his illness. He told me he had cancer, liver cancer,” said Hove. “The cast didn’t know all that time, and I suspect that the musicians with whom he recorded Blackstar didn’t know either. He made every effort to complete those two projects on time, not to let his illness win. Bowie was still writing on his deathbed, you could say. He fought like a lion and kept working like a lion through it all. I had incredible respect for that.”

The NME, meanwhile, quotes Bowie biographer Wendy Leigh’s interview with the BBC, in which Leigh asserts that cancer was only one of multiple health woes that dogged him in recent years. “He didn’t just battle cancer,” said Leigh. “He had six heart attacks in recent years. I got this from somebody very close to him.”

Tucked away on compilations, hidden on B-sides or released decades after they were written, there are plenty of Bowie gems to seek out: here are 20 of the best

1. Buddha of Suburbia (from Buddha of Suburbia, 1993)

From the soundtrack to the Hanif Kureishi TV adaptation, the greatest lost Bowie song of all is a bravura remix of one confused suburban boy’s life story to accompany another’s. Is there anything more Bowie than the line “Englishman going insiiiiiiine?”

2. Sweet Head (on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars – 1990 Edition. Recorded 1971)

Balls-out single-entendre glam filth as Mr Stardust yelpingly narrates an everyday story of backstage fellatio. Lost for years and a surprise to even – ahem – hardened Bowiephiles, this is brilliantly, uniquely nasty.

3. Velvet Goldmine (on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars – 1990 Edition. Recorded 1971)

While we’re on no-holds-barred polymorphous perversion, the magnificently lascivious glam B-side to Changes was something of a lost and wandering child until given a home on Bowie’s rolling reissue programme. Ends, hilariously, with a choir of vulgar boatmen.

4. Who Can I Be Now? (from Young Americans, 1975; unreleased until 1991)

The plushest product of his white soul period, this gospelised slice of self-examination should have been a generational anthem. Ludicrously, it was binned in favour of a hammy and otiose version of the Beatles’ Across the Universe.

5. Bombers (on Hunky Dory CD version, recorded 1971, released 1990)

A supremely odd yet supremely singable piece of hippy whimsy about pilots literally bombing a lone old man on a piece of waste ground. (Why? Who knows.)Bowie’s now-instinctive melodic sense renders a ropey vocal beside the point.

6. Little Wonder (on Earthling, 1997)

We’re all supposed to hate drum’n’bass Bowie, but there is no denying the ridiculous charm and rattling, Firestarter energy of this nonsensical squib. Bowie is speaking the lingua franca of showbiz cockney again and it’s not dissimilar from …

7. London, Bye, Ta-Ta (on David Bowie, 1967)

… bright young Bowie swaggering in his Anthony Newley mod-about-town incarnation, a London boulevardier with the future in his pocket (“Don’t like your new face? That’s not nice …”). It’s all you can do not to yell Parklife! during the chorus. For the flipside of Bowie’s swinging London, see …

8. The London Boys (B-side 1966, on David Bowie, 1967, Deluxe Edition)

He was on the side of the outsiders long before Ziggy Stardust. This poignant, perceptive early song captures the milieu of Soho mods, runaways, pill victims and queer vagabonds with uncanny precision. A distant psychedelic motif prefigures his and their shared futures.

9. Baal’s Hymn (from David Bowie in Berthold Brecht’s Baal, 1982)

Forecasting the disturbing Mitteleuropean scarecrow Bowie of Blackstar and Lazarus, this hastily-recorded but quite entrancing take on Brecht’s paean to amoral pleasure is a singular delight: “Nothing could be harder than the quest for fun.”

10. I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday (from Black Tie White Noise, 1993)

This Morrissey song – produced in the original by Mick Ronson – essentially rewrites Bowie’s Rock’n’Roll Suicide. Bowie returns the favour with an impassioned, choir assisted version. “It’s me singing Morrissey singing me,” he explained, although the performance is more wind-tunnel Bowie than torchsong Moz.

11. Dodo (recorded circa Diamond Dogs 1974, on compilations including Changestwobowie, 1981)

An intriguing curio from Bowie’s stillborn musical of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with a bizarre, parping proto-funk accompaniment, and a single in the US and Japan. As with even Bowie’s dashed-off stuff during the 70s, once heard it’s a total earworm.

12. I Can’t Read by Tin Machine (from Tin Machine, 1989)

Yes, they were pretty dreadful but in this you can hear what Tin Machine done right might have sounded like – a desperate, histrionic lyric with a sprawling metal soundtrack. Fix the production and you’ve got a fit-for-purpose grunge band.

13. Holy Holy (Spiders Version, recorded 1971, on compilation Five Years 1969-1973)

Scuzzed-up re-recording of an anaemic early hippy-dippy single, revelling in Bowie’s fascination with Aleister Crowley and his occult sex magick. The spirit of Marc Bolan is banished and a fouler one installed.

14. I’m Afraid of Americans (V1) (Radio Edit) (from Earthling, 1997)

Bowie’s industrial rock and goatee period is not his best-loved but as ever there were pearls to be had. This broadside against US cultural imperialism is a little trite and very pre-9/11 but it rocks with more confidence than much of his 90s output.

15. Shadow Man (from unreleased album Toy, on 2014 compilation Nothing Has Changed )

Written in 1971, during Ziggy and recorded in a pillowy string arrangement 30 years later, this is senior Bowie singing young Bowie in quite the most affecting manner.

16. Time Will Crawl (MM Mix) (recorded 1987, remixed 2008, on 2014 compilation Nothing Has Changed)

An ugly, thwacking fiasco on Bowie’s 1987 nadir, Never Let Me Down, this Chernobyl jeremiad was a lovely song in need of restoration to its original features. Stripped back, it sounds enchantingly like the Smiths.

17. Alternative Candidate (recorded 1974, released on Diamond Dogs 30th Anniversary Edition, 2004)

“Inside every teenage girl there’s a fountain / Inside every young pair of pants there’s a mountain.” Sharing almost nothing with the Candidate on Diamond Dogs but slated for his Nineteen Eighty-Four musical, this raffish stream-of-consciousness plugs Bowie’s Orwell obsessions into his more carnal imaginings. No wonder Orwell’s widow knocked him back.

18. Bring Me the Disco King (from Reality, 2003)

Originally recorded in 1992 as a spangled-up disco pastiche, this sat in the cupboard for a decade before being reworked as a sparse piece of sinister lounge jazz. Atonal yet bewitching, it’s Bowie’s final collaboration with piano surrealist Mike Garson.

19. I’ll Take You There (from The Next Day – Deluxe Edition, 2013)

A screaming, Scary Monsters-style rock stampede telling the story of immigrants Lev and Sophie coming to the US – Franz Ferdinand and the Spiders from Mars. What the hell was this doing hidden away as an extra track?

20. Seven (from Hours, 1999)

If you want to bawl your eyes out, then consult this (and avoid the ugly Beck mixes). A simple, beautiful look back to his Hunky Dory moments, but also a defiant hymn to living without fear in the now, no matter what. Which is what he went on to do.