I can’t believe that we lost Prince and Bowie in the same year. So many other greats gone too soon recently as well.  2016 will surely be remembered as the year of the celebrity grim-reaper and we’re not even through April yet.

I’m very grateful to have seen Prince perform live and to have had great musicians like Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson etc be part of the soundtrack of my life growing up. Looking around now, perhaps we took the greats a little for granted?

I don’t currently see anyone close to stepping into those shoes or filling that void. Is it that the same level of talent isn’t out there or that the circumstances/ systems that support its growth and global reach have changed? It feels like the end of an era.

Somewhere there is an almighty party going on with the best musicians, comedians and writers ever to grace the earth, while we are all left reeling.

Once we move past shock and mourning, there will be a time to celebrate that they existed in the first place and for all the genius they gifted us before they left. The world would feel a very different place had they never visited at all.

The legacy of our musical royalty is phenomenal. The Kings, Queens, Dukes, and Princes that have influenced so much of popular western culture as we know it seem almost superhuman in their abilities to create and inspire.

They have created a legacy that will far outlive them and the greatest respect we can pay them is to truly let that inspire us, raise our game, our standards, work harder to chase our dreams, be our unique selves and occasionally ask – what would Bowie or Prince do?

In that way they live on, not only on our sound systems and hearts, but in our spirits too.