This distinction is key.

The only authentic Bowie is the man himself, who died in 2016. Anyone trying to step out on stage and become him will inevitably come up short. You have to find another way in.

“It's an interpretation of Bowie rather than an impersonation,” Laurence says. “I try to be the vehicle for the cargo, rather than the cargo itself.

“Every single incarnation that he mustered was a story with a central character. I view it very much like an actor: someone's written a story, someone's written a main character; I'm an actor, and I will play that character.”

This speaks to something rarely acknowledged: that tribute can be a space where creativity and artistic intent can be both valid and achievable.

On the surface, tribute seems as creatively satisfying as karaoke in fancy dress.

There are clear limitations: a back catalogue of songs, only a selection of which a paying audience will actually want to hear. You have to sound like the artist sounds, and make a decent fist of looking like the artist looks.

But the best art comes out of limitations. How many great artists, when given as much time and money as they want, truly produce their best work? “In a world without limits, you end up doing pretty much nothing,” Laurence agrees.

David Bowie had many phases, many characters, constantly reinventing himself to reflect the changing of the times and his own life.

During the show, Laurence and his band take the audience through a rough chronology of Bowie’s eras. Instead of singing songs from each cycle of his career, Laurence tries to bring some of Bowie’s own life into the performance.

In the mid ‘70s, for example, Bowie adopted the Thin White Duke persona. A fascistic, Aryan aristocrat, described by the singer as “a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion at all”, it was during this period that Bowie was using the most extreme amounts of cocaine.

After a costume change, Laurence returns to the stage in the white shirt and black waistcoat of the Duke. He holds himself differently, his hands poised awkwardly. His body jitters along with the music, or just slightly ahead, as though he’s trying to anticipate the passage of time.

Or, as though he has inhaled a significant amount of the finest Colombian.

During 'Where Are We Now?', the surprise single that announced Bowie’s return to music in 2013, Laurence’s voice is cracked, tinged with frailty, as Bowie’s was - an old man, coming to the end of his days.

Were David Bowie still alive, these sombre, reflective song likely would not have made it into a set otherwise stuffed with toe-tappers and rousing choruses.

But David Bowie is not alive.