Ten years since his previous material, and with the rumour mill grinding ever louder about his apparent reclusiveness and state of health – and then suddenly, wonderfully, David Bowie returns with a new single – on his sixty-sixth birthday.

It's the melancholic but beautiful Where Are We Now?, the first single from a new album, coming in March. And there's a video too, by the multimedia artist Tony Oursler. And of course as Bowie's first new visual statement in a decade it's almost as important as the music in suggesting an answer to that question: where is David Bowie now? The answer, in terms of the video, is somewhere low-key, lo-fi, reflective and looking at the world with a dry, self-deprecating humour. But there are numerous ways to interpret Bowie having his face projected onto the head of a teddy bear-sized dummy in (presumably) Oursler's studio in New York, together with an unknown young lady. And that's going on right now elsewhere...

But it seems pretty much pitch perfect to me, even down to Bowie's one real concession to the truly modern in the video, the presence of the lyrics...

Happy birthday David - thanks for the present.